'89 lachssilber 318i touring.. beginning build

[SSE30]

For being a Polish market car, that rust seems fairly light and should be relatively easy to remedy. It's always so sick to see a fresh touring import. Can't wait to see what you do with it.

[KI4UJO]

Now I realize where I've seen this car - I met you at cars & coffee last weekend (I took several photos of your touring for an instagram page).

[KI4UJO]

A few of the ones I shot.
IMG_5090 by Jonathan Martin, on Flickr

IMG_5091 by Jonathan Martin, on Flickr

IMG_5092 by Jonathan Martin, on Flickr

[Heitzke]

Now I realize where I've seen this car - I met you at cars & coffee last weekend (I took several photos of your touring for an instagram page).

Haha hey man! I completely forgot to ask who all there was on r3v. Thanks for posting the pics, lookin' good. The engine bay somehow looks cleaner in the pics than in real life.

[KI4UJO]

Glad you liked them. Don't think I'll be at this weekend's event, I need to put my interior back in.

[Heitzke]

Yeah i'm in that same boat. I got a little card underneath my wiper offering their console bits for sale... which means I probably need to get this interior back together

[Heitzke]

Little quiet on updates, been spending a little time checking on structure.

Good news/bad news. Found the source of moisture in the right rear hatch compartment



That triggered me to start poking around further. Front passenger floorboard (and a pretty wet floor) -

Passenger outside rail -

Ran out of light pretty quickly, but that's enough for me to realize I need to go ahead and strip the interior down bare and see what I really have going on.

The front passenger corner spot is pretty mushy, so I assume moisture is heading in there, but at the same time, I don't know what's along the trans tunnel or inside corner.

[roguetoaster]

Woah, I never would've expected two great holes in the storage compartment! Any idea what might have caused them?

I suppose I'm not too surprised at the front floor pan rust at the corner. But along the seam, weird.

Now I feel bad that I never pulled the carpet up. At the least this will serve as new (to me) information on where to look for rust on tourings. Hope you get it fixed quickly and inexpensively!

[Heitzke]

Gosh, well I guess it's been a while now. Let's see what all has happened:

Timing belt fun! Learned that the M40 wasn't timed correctly at all, was advanced... like a lot. A whole lot. The plugs definitely showed it too. Good news is that the car runs a lot better afterwards.





Learned how small the M40 radiator was, lol:




Did some yardwork -

Pulled/reset the front bumper with new bumper trim, repainted the grills and black eBay kidneys:



Down at DasGerman E30 shop in Franklin:

Blower motor was toast when I got the car, so ordered a used one from Ireland ha:

Non-a/c blower motor is on the left next to the incorrect a/c motor I bought locally.




A few months later, I set out to finally get the e-fan, M42 radiator and some other garbage all setup. Pulled the driver fender to check things out and to run the fan wiring harness through there:





Sad car




M40 radiator is ridiculous




Definitely need to get the M42 radiator mounts for the swap, the M40 ones are huge and hilarious:




SO MUCH ROOM FOR ACTIVITIES



I wired up my harness a little differently than most I see here, but it's all together and works. I'm basically using a rocker toggle switch and/or the 2-prong temp sensor to be the ground for the circuit. I just didn't see the purpose of getting additional power from the fuse box.

FWIW, I didn't end up running any power to the rocker switch, i just didn't really care about having power for the rocker light to work. Rest of this diagram is accurate for what I built though



Required a lot less overall wire, and made more sense to me, so

[Heitzke]

Woah, I never would've expected two great holes in the storage compartment! Any idea what might have caused them?

I suppose I'm not too surprised at the front floor pan rust at the corner. But along the seam, weird.

Now I feel bad that I never pulled the carpet up. At the least this will serve as new (to me) information on where to look for rust on tourings. Hope you get it fixed quickly and inexpensively!

Really not sure about the rear rust spots honestly. There's rust in the neighborhood there, but not immediately adjacent.

I'll post some more progress later, but I did get the carpets all stripped out and the floors of the whole car aren't that bad. The passenger floor is pretty sad, but I think it'll only take a 2-3 reasonable sized patches to be cut/welded. The driver's side rail also shows the beginnings of the same bad rust as the passenger. It's reasonably deep but still superficial damage. I can't punch a screwdriver through anyway, so that's a good leg up from the passenger hah

Driver's side has been repaired somewhat in the the front toe-box, but only partially. May need to cut that one too and see what exactly they did.

[NJBiddle]

Subbing - howdy heitzke :wave:

[Heitzke]

Subbing - howdy heitzke :wave:

;D hey! What are you doing here? You're supposed to be out finishing that lovely vinyl wrap

[Heitzke]

So, the passenger floor is very soft



This is right before I pushed my finger through the front toe box area:

So, go ahead and call me Barney Rubble.


Anyways, continuing on. Carpet all out:




Sound-deadening all going the way of the dodo. Heat gun works wonders on this crap, although I probably took a decade off my life from cooking it all.



Glad I did though, cause underneath the driver it had been a little wet at times -

Driver's toe -

I thought it had been patched, but it's was just the bottom of that front jack box that I could see through the floor. All that shit has to go now.


This is where I'm confused though, what do people do with these sorts of things?

They're naturally not sealing very well, so replace them and POR15 over the top? What's the course of action for the seals?

Also interesting to see the different sealants, I guess someone has been back through these and resealed them?

Passenger -

Driver -

Firewall -

What is all this grey shit?


Also, I have problems:

[NJBiddle]

;D hey! What are you doing here? You're supposed to be out finishing that lovely vinyl wrap

heh hopefully it'll be done soon. looking like it'll be less work than the rust repair you're in for here :(

[Heitzke]

heh hopefully it'll be done soon. looking like it'll be less work than the rust repair you're in for here :(

Hah, learn by doing right? I'll be a genuine half-assed garbage level welder by the end of this