Tweet
So I'm playing Grand Theft Auto V with my good friends Ryan Sermonet and Josh Dahlstrom. And probably Khalil and Andrew Sylvia too. We're all driving around in our Karin Futo (clearly modeled after the AE86 Levin) cars. Ryan had found this "rally stage" area in the mid east of the map. It's an all dirt course with changing elevations, jumps and obstacles, and the opportunity to actually "drift" the little cars around. We all go equip the "rally" front bumper with the four little circular fog lights and offroad tires of some kind and proceed to kill hours of our afternoons.
I think it goes without saying that it's a fun game, but it also serves as a forum to just sit there and talk among your friends who live too far away to actually hang out with every day. Josh is in Miami, Ryan in Atlanta, and everyone else from states in the north which I cannot name or place on a map because who really cares about what's going on above the Mason/Dixon anyways... but I digress. We spend hours just talking about how fun it would be to actually build rally cars and slide around in the dirt. We reminisced about a weekend about a year ago when Ryan and Josh had been in Tennessee just to hang out. We cruised around on back roads in the country and came across a fantastic example of a rally stage: a well-kept, two-lane gravel road with lots of twists and turns cutting around between farm properties. This was after I painted the E21 but before I lowered it to its current height. Josh sat shotgun while I just tore through every corner sideways at redline. We stayed on this topic for a while, batting around the idea of going through with it and getting some kind of rear wheel drive car to rip around in offroad, but by the end of the night I had sort of shrugged it off as one of those things that would be awesome, but isn't really feasible. Student loans, other projects, no time...
The next day I got a message on Facebook from Ryan. In it was a simple "dude, here's your rally car." and a link to a craigslist ad out of Atlanta where someone was selling an E30. The original engine had blown and who knows who had sourced some E34 5 series engine from who knows where, sat it in the bay, and dropped the project entirely. It looked fairly straight, if entirely disassembled, in photos and it was 750 bucks firm. I contacted the seller and Rodney and I headed down to Georgia that weekend to take a look.
Ryan stole his mom's Toyota Sequoia and a 20' utility trailer and we drove about 30 minutes from his place to where the car was located. Walking up on it was less than confidence inspiring. It sat in an open carport full of leaves. Both passenger tires had clearly been flat for some time, cracked from dry rot and age. The interior had been needlessly disassembled and strewn about inside the car, which was completely coated with a solid layer of mold and mildew. There were two gigantic rubbermaid tubs filled to the brim with spare parts near the car. The only front bodywork still attached was the front fenders and passenger headlight buckets. The hood, valance, bumper, grilles, kidneys, and other miscellaneous parts were laying against posts and the wall of the garage, and the engine itself sat in the bay with no wires or hoses connected to it. It was a shitmess.
I looked to Rodney and Ryan for some persuasion. "So guys... what do you think?" Rodney was for it, and Ryan offered free reign of his parts car and his garage to make a running vehicle out of the little car. He even said I could keep it at his barn until I could make another trip down to work on it. I looked to the seller and said "hell why not... I'll take it."
We spend the next hour or two trying to maneuver a non-running car with two flats uphill on a wet driveway covered with leaves.
It sucked.
But with just the right amount of effort and luck, we had it loaded and dropped it off at the barn just as it got dark. It was an alpineweiss 1984 325e 5 speed coupe with blue cloth houndstooth sport interior and an M20B25 out of an 89 525i sitting in it... and lots of potential, and it was mine.
Fast forward a few weeks and I was making plans and taking vacation days to go make the pile of parts an actual vehicle. Ryan would be on winter break from school, Josh was going to fly up from Miami for the weekend, and Luke Johnson drove me down one Friday after we got off work. The plan was to get the car from the barn to Ryan's garage and bust ass on it. I had the following Monday off of work, but Luke would have to be back, so we would monitor our progress and if things were going well by Sunday afternoon, Luke would leave me there to finish my only ride back to Tennessee and I would have to make the 4 hour drive back home in a car that hadn't run in over a year with an engine that didn't belong in it, and the car was in about a million pieces.
Once we had all arrived, exchanged hugs and greetings and had a bite to eat, we got to work. we started sorting through the ETA parts which had been removed and boxed up and the newer 525 parts that had yet to be installed. There was a good bit of wiring to finish, the shifter didn't work, there was no cooling system, the body needed to be assembled, the exhaust needed to be hooked up... At first, I became overwhelmed and instantly regretted my purchase. After some encouragement from Ryan (who has been in and out of E30's enough to swap engines within an afternoon), we just took it one step at a time.
I wanted to address the shifter issue pretty early on in the project, because if the trans was locked up, I certainly wouldn't be getting home in the car. After some inspection above and below the transmission tunnel, we determined that since the car now had an E34 trans, the shift rod was too long. I pulled it out, guestimated an amount to remove, cut it and Ryan tacked it together. It worked perfectly first try, and just like that I had 5 forward gears and reverse in the gates just as they were supposed to be.
Then there were a few wiring issues to take care of. The car originally used Bosch Motronic 1.1, but the newer engine uses 1.3. A slight difference, but the E34 engine harness and ECU had to be used. This meant that the power connector that supplies the engine harness needed to be changed to match the E30 fuse box and body harness. Someone had already done that, so all I had to do was extend a few things and bolt down the ground wires. A little solder and a little heat shrink and we were in business.
Nick Orangio and Ryan took to cleaning the mildew out of the interior with some kind of citrus stuff and Simple Green while I wrapped up the wiring and stroked my beard. Luke and Josh were plotting babes' digits on the gold Databank, but were at the ready with any helpful calculations I may have needed along the way
I reached a stopping point and threw the body together the next morning. It had been in a light front end impact at some point, so there was a bit of tweaking to be done getting things to line up, but everything was there.
After tracing our steps and double-checking a few connections, I nervously attached the terminals to the battery. The garage was silent as everyone looked at their assigned sections of harness, watching for any sign of smoke or heat. Ever since Rusty's harness went up that night before H2Oi 2011, events like this make me supremely nervous. Nothing caught fire though, so I hopped in the driver's seat and turned the key to the on position. More silence. More watching for fire. Still no disaster. I cranked the engine over for about 10 seconds, but it didn't fire. I never expect it to run first try, and it sounded like it was cranking healthily, but we couldn't hear the fuel pumps coming on. After tracing down a faulty fuel relay, I hit the starter again and the engine roared to life for the first time ever in that chassis. The garage quickly filled with smoke from the oil, coolant and debris in the exhaust, but the engine ran.
It's always such a great feeling of accomplishment to get something to work. There were high-fives all around as the garage door raised to release the cloud of victory. We hooked up the cooling system, checked the fluids one more time, and within about 5 minutes of the car's first drive, I had stopped in the middle of the road to do a burnout, drifted 2 intersections, and slid around in the mud at a closed construction site.
I wound up making the drive home without any major incidents. The idle surges pretty severely, but the o2 sensor isn't hooked up and I suspect the coolant temp sensor is bad as well. At one stop, a battery terminal had come loose and wouldn't allow the car to start, and a few miles later I pulled over for a concern over a slamming noise that I could feel in the floorboard... only to find a bolt had come out of the bottom of the driver's front fender and was causing it to smack the side of the car as it caught wind at speed. Overall, however, it did very well.
Huge shoutout to Ryan, as none of this would have happened without him and his awesome family. Also big ups to Luke, Josh, Rodney and Nick for all the help, driving, comedic relief and general good times that were had. With that, I'll bring the opening chapter to a close, with the next post documenting the progress I've made so far since getting it home and my plans for this little car.
I think it goes without saying that it's a fun game, but it also serves as a forum to just sit there and talk among your friends who live too far away to actually hang out with every day. Josh is in Miami, Ryan in Atlanta, and everyone else from states in the north which I cannot name or place on a map because who really cares about what's going on above the Mason/Dixon anyways... but I digress. We spend hours just talking about how fun it would be to actually build rally cars and slide around in the dirt. We reminisced about a weekend about a year ago when Ryan and Josh had been in Tennessee just to hang out. We cruised around on back roads in the country and came across a fantastic example of a rally stage: a well-kept, two-lane gravel road with lots of twists and turns cutting around between farm properties. This was after I painted the E21 but before I lowered it to its current height. Josh sat shotgun while I just tore through every corner sideways at redline. We stayed on this topic for a while, batting around the idea of going through with it and getting some kind of rear wheel drive car to rip around in offroad, but by the end of the night I had sort of shrugged it off as one of those things that would be awesome, but isn't really feasible. Student loans, other projects, no time...
The next day I got a message on Facebook from Ryan. In it was a simple "dude, here's your rally car." and a link to a craigslist ad out of Atlanta where someone was selling an E30. The original engine had blown and who knows who had sourced some E34 5 series engine from who knows where, sat it in the bay, and dropped the project entirely. It looked fairly straight, if entirely disassembled, in photos and it was 750 bucks firm. I contacted the seller and Rodney and I headed down to Georgia that weekend to take a look.
Ryan stole his mom's Toyota Sequoia and a 20' utility trailer and we drove about 30 minutes from his place to where the car was located. Walking up on it was less than confidence inspiring. It sat in an open carport full of leaves. Both passenger tires had clearly been flat for some time, cracked from dry rot and age. The interior had been needlessly disassembled and strewn about inside the car, which was completely coated with a solid layer of mold and mildew. There were two gigantic rubbermaid tubs filled to the brim with spare parts near the car. The only front bodywork still attached was the front fenders and passenger headlight buckets. The hood, valance, bumper, grilles, kidneys, and other miscellaneous parts were laying against posts and the wall of the garage, and the engine itself sat in the bay with no wires or hoses connected to it. It was a shitmess.
I looked to Rodney and Ryan for some persuasion. "So guys... what do you think?" Rodney was for it, and Ryan offered free reign of his parts car and his garage to make a running vehicle out of the little car. He even said I could keep it at his barn until I could make another trip down to work on it. I looked to the seller and said "hell why not... I'll take it."
We spend the next hour or two trying to maneuver a non-running car with two flats uphill on a wet driveway covered with leaves.
It sucked.
But with just the right amount of effort and luck, we had it loaded and dropped it off at the barn just as it got dark. It was an alpineweiss 1984 325e 5 speed coupe with blue cloth houndstooth sport interior and an M20B25 out of an 89 525i sitting in it... and lots of potential, and it was mine.
Fast forward a few weeks and I was making plans and taking vacation days to go make the pile of parts an actual vehicle. Ryan would be on winter break from school, Josh was going to fly up from Miami for the weekend, and Luke Johnson drove me down one Friday after we got off work. The plan was to get the car from the barn to Ryan's garage and bust ass on it. I had the following Monday off of work, but Luke would have to be back, so we would monitor our progress and if things were going well by Sunday afternoon, Luke would leave me there to finish my only ride back to Tennessee and I would have to make the 4 hour drive back home in a car that hadn't run in over a year with an engine that didn't belong in it, and the car was in about a million pieces.
Once we had all arrived, exchanged hugs and greetings and had a bite to eat, we got to work. we started sorting through the ETA parts which had been removed and boxed up and the newer 525 parts that had yet to be installed. There was a good bit of wiring to finish, the shifter didn't work, there was no cooling system, the body needed to be assembled, the exhaust needed to be hooked up... At first, I became overwhelmed and instantly regretted my purchase. After some encouragement from Ryan (who has been in and out of E30's enough to swap engines within an afternoon), we just took it one step at a time.
I wanted to address the shifter issue pretty early on in the project, because if the trans was locked up, I certainly wouldn't be getting home in the car. After some inspection above and below the transmission tunnel, we determined that since the car now had an E34 trans, the shift rod was too long. I pulled it out, guestimated an amount to remove, cut it and Ryan tacked it together. It worked perfectly first try, and just like that I had 5 forward gears and reverse in the gates just as they were supposed to be.
Then there were a few wiring issues to take care of. The car originally used Bosch Motronic 1.1, but the newer engine uses 1.3. A slight difference, but the E34 engine harness and ECU had to be used. This meant that the power connector that supplies the engine harness needed to be changed to match the E30 fuse box and body harness. Someone had already done that, so all I had to do was extend a few things and bolt down the ground wires. A little solder and a little heat shrink and we were in business.
Nick Orangio and Ryan took to cleaning the mildew out of the interior with some kind of citrus stuff and Simple Green while I wrapped up the wiring and stroked my beard. Luke and Josh were plotting babes' digits on the gold Databank, but were at the ready with any helpful calculations I may have needed along the way
I reached a stopping point and threw the body together the next morning. It had been in a light front end impact at some point, so there was a bit of tweaking to be done getting things to line up, but everything was there.
After tracing our steps and double-checking a few connections, I nervously attached the terminals to the battery. The garage was silent as everyone looked at their assigned sections of harness, watching for any sign of smoke or heat. Ever since Rusty's harness went up that night before H2Oi 2011, events like this make me supremely nervous. Nothing caught fire though, so I hopped in the driver's seat and turned the key to the on position. More silence. More watching for fire. Still no disaster. I cranked the engine over for about 10 seconds, but it didn't fire. I never expect it to run first try, and it sounded like it was cranking healthily, but we couldn't hear the fuel pumps coming on. After tracing down a faulty fuel relay, I hit the starter again and the engine roared to life for the first time ever in that chassis. The garage quickly filled with smoke from the oil, coolant and debris in the exhaust, but the engine ran.
It's always such a great feeling of accomplishment to get something to work. There were high-fives all around as the garage door raised to release the cloud of victory. We hooked up the cooling system, checked the fluids one more time, and within about 5 minutes of the car's first drive, I had stopped in the middle of the road to do a burnout, drifted 2 intersections, and slid around in the mud at a closed construction site.
I wound up making the drive home without any major incidents. The idle surges pretty severely, but the o2 sensor isn't hooked up and I suspect the coolant temp sensor is bad as well. At one stop, a battery terminal had come loose and wouldn't allow the car to start, and a few miles later I pulled over for a concern over a slamming noise that I could feel in the floorboard... only to find a bolt had come out of the bottom of the driver's front fender and was causing it to smack the side of the car as it caught wind at speed. Overall, however, it did very well.
Huge shoutout to Ryan, as none of this would have happened without him and his awesome family. Also big ups to Luke, Josh, Rodney and Nick for all the help, driving, comedic relief and general good times that were had. With that, I'll bring the opening chapter to a close, with the next post documenting the progress I've made so far since getting it home and my plans for this little car.
Comment