2,002 things to fix on this car (BMW content)

[MommysLittleMonster]

Holy shit, dude. You have way, way more patients than I do. I would have sent that shell to the crusher after getting it back from media blasting.

You're a saint for continuing to work on it.

[cwspellowe]

I would love to go balls deep on a total rebuild like you are, I don't have either the space or the money though. I have a total soft spot for these cars too so i'll be keeping an eye on this!

[fackinsteve]

Dude, being from New England and fully understanding how bad some of these cars can be, fuuuuuckkk that. However, I cannot wait to see this transform!

[imschwaggy]

dope

[readfrost]

Long time no update, I figured I'd throw some stuff up here to pass the time while parts arrive. I'm on summer break, but working 6-7 days a week to keep myself busy and get some money for this pile of rust. Luckily, I've been able to allocate some time to the suspension, and continue its rehabilitation:

I went at the rear end after I finished with the front (). The teardown was straight forward, except for the castellated 'jesus nut'. But a pneumatic impact wrong at work made quick work of that. A quick side note: those things are torqued down to 250 lb/ft from the factory, and that combined with a generous amount of rust, made them very difficult to remove.My rear subframe was toast, so I picked up one from a '74 off of craigslist in CT, and will use that one instead.

How did I tell it was a '74, you ask? Easy, it said it on the side..






.. and heres the issue with the one that came off the car...



I pulled out my subframes and trailing arms, and spent a few days power washing and degreasing them before I sent them out to powder coat. After all the washing they still looked like hell, but hey at least my hands didn't instantly turn black when I touched them anymore









You can still see the frame rail fragment on the front subframe, which I have since removed. I sent just the rear stuff out for powder coating so I could pace myself and my budget.

No great pictures of them after they came back, so y'all will have to make due with some from my iPotatoe (but actually these phone cameras are getting pretty good, the sensor on my 6S has the same amount of megapixels as my D90)... Anyway, the parts looked much better than before, and hopefully will not rust over any time soon



By this point I had ordered a few parts from IE, so I was killing time by tearing down my CV joints.





No pictures of them rebuilt yet, as the actual joints are soaking in gasoline to get the moly grease off of them (its wicked nasty stuff). The shafts came off of the splines on the joint super easily, which either means I'm lucky, or the joints are shot. If the condition of everything on this car is any indication of their condition, it is probably the second one, but my fingers are crossed. These joints are supposed to be incredibly robust anyway, you really only need to re-grease them and replace the boots to keep them going forever.

I then got a rather large box in the mail, and in it was the following:
- 22mm front and 22mm rear sway bars with mounting hardware
- Rear urethane bushings
- Rear OEM (Rubber) subframe mounts
- x2 Wheel bearing replacement kits







(Not pictured: Sway bars and subframe mounts)

I decided to go with urethane on all the bushings besides the ones on the mounts in order to maintain suspension geometry during hard cornering. Does is make a huge difference? Yes and no. Probably not 99% of the time, but that 1% makes me feel better about myself.

Next up is brakes and finishing up the CV joints, and then on to the front.

Meanwhile this poor guy waits patiently:



Thanks for looking!

[Grime]

Keep up the good work, glad to see you're still working on the 2002.