Project Chronicle

So the E46 got a bit of quarantine maintenance on Saturday that included installation of Stop Tech Sport pads, new caliper slider pins and caliper guides all around, and a bedding-in session.  The pads feel great and stop hard, but the harder to believe element is how grungy they brembo pads that I removed were. The brembo pads have been on the car for just over a year and were not driven in the winter, so the weathering has only been done by car washes and the occasional rain drive.  They are rusty with the backing plates falling off, and I can’t say that I would recommend them at all.

So here is my new project.  The site will be a great place to track what happens with it, but initially I will drive it to replace my aging VW Eurovan, while fixing a bunch of deferred maintenance and neglect.  The guy I bought it off of was nice enough, but he had zero receipts and didn't know a socket from a screwdriver, so I'm going into this one planning on learning a few things.

Right off the bat, there is oil leaking from the valve cover (big surprise) all over the exhaust manifold and making a lot of bad smell, the LF wheel appears to be bent at the outer lip causing a chassis shake, LF front sway bar end link is broken (connected methinks), tires are mis-matched between front and rear (one of my cardinal rules to avoid at all costs, but this does have staggered wheels so I let it slide), and the car is totally filthy.  All of this helped with my negotiating, and this 115k mile ugly ducking is now mine.  On the bright side the car is a nice color combo, doesn't rattle or do anything weird, has no dash lights, seems to run great and is faster than I'd expect, and has a clean CarFax.  It checks all the right boxes for what I was looking for, and will be a good project. 

I'm excited to dig in, and to log the project on the site.

Glass out respray and associated bodywork to perform cosmetic refresh of this E9. 

Nearing the end of the cosmetic refresh and final communications between shop and owner.

Correspondence around the spring of 1996 regarding ongoing cosmetic work.

Ongoing correspondence between owner and restoration shop

This captures the initial communications between the owner and the body shop facility. 

These documents show that the car was previously restored in the late 1980s, with rust repair and refinishing the primary drivers of the refresh. 

This provides an overview of the car before it entered into its first cosmetic overhaul with a mechanical inspection and overall condition assessment.