dang

When I do search for 2002's for sale they all come back really expensive.  I think something isn't working right!

On 9/9/2022 at 4:17 PM, Gh356 said:

Another big factor for a lot of shops is space and time.  If the vintage car is down for parts, it can take many hours of phone calls, emails and internet sleuthing just to track down the needed parts and thats IF they are in stock.  Then, its a waiting game before everything arrives from who knows where.  Prey they send the right part the first time. Believe it or not, some parts suppliers initially claim to have what you need in stock, only to realize later that its on back order.   In the meantime, the vintage car is taking up valuable real estate that could accommodate a plug and play repair or two. Thankfully, vintage BMW owners are patient, reasonable and not at all picky about having their cars sitting around at the shop for long periods of time.  Wish it wasn't so, but thats the reality that we get to deal with.  Lucky you have alternatives.  

This is typically the deciding factor.  My day job is buying salvage vehicles for our auto recycler, more than half of those cars are "Repairable" and sold as projects.  We buy a lot of cars with suspension damage and do enough repairs to make the vehicles run and drive so customers have a better idea of their condition.  We have the space, we order all the parts we THINK we need and put the car on the rack when all the parts are in.  There's a pretty high percentage of parts that are either wrong or we miss one part that we need.  Any additional time waiting for parts cuts into our profit.

If you use that same process for classic cars you'd have cars sitting all over the place, plus the fact that you may find something else that the customer wants done, so the car sits again.

Or an easier way to say it is.... if they don't need to work on classics to pay the bills, why bother.

I think you can do a pretty decent job by just removing everything but the long block.  Once you take off all the ancillary parts off the engine and all the parts attached to the sheet metal you can get down into most of the places you need fairly easily.  I used a brush to paint around brackets and places that are hard to paint regardless of space, like boxed areas where the air keeps the paint from applying well, then sprayed.  You can paint the bottom and inside of the frame rails with a brush from underneath.  Works a lot better than you think.

My E3... (I did have the head off of it at the time which helps)

Driving around with the stock wheels/tires to play with settings.  So far I haven't been able to find the ride I want.  The Style 5's will require spacers and longer studs so I have them on order..

Homemade camber plates.  Lousy photos taken from a video but you get the idea.

Well that sucks!  I got the car on the road to start testing the pressures and it "screeched" going down the road.  WTF!  I got out and looked at the front wheels and at stock height they were REALLY positive camber and the wheels were toed in quite a bit.  At about 2" lower they were still slightly positive.  Turns out the guy who fabricated them measured the angles on the bench by hand instead of making a jig and the camber and caster was off.  The toe is an easy fix.

So my new project was fixing the struts.  I still had the OEM struts off the car so I built a simple jig that aligned the strut tube with the flange for the calipers on the spindle.  I cut the tubes off and was able to leave the short sleeve that he added under the tube, clamped the spindle and tube to the jig and re-welded it.  They look very close to the OEM struts as far as the angles go but after that driving experience I decided to modify my adapter plates to be camber plates to give me that extra adjustment.

Here's the jig and struts.  I'll post the camber plates when I'm done with them.  They're a lot of work since I'm modifying my home made plates to begin with.

System is in and working after some issues with firmware and bluetooth but I still need to clean up all the air line mounting and check wheel/bag clearances.

I've been bouncing back and forth between messing with the struts and figuring out what I want to do with the compressor/tank/manifold assembly.  I'm not planning on showing it off so I built a metal frame on a piece of plywood to mount the compressor and tank to and hung the manifold from a bracket above.  You want to keep the manifold higher than any condensation that can form in the lines and tank.  The area between the shock towers has two thin metal plugs on the bottom covered with sealer so I removed one to run the air and power lines through.  I also used the frame to mount an insulated corrugated board to the front, leaving the top and sides open for air flow.  It ended up looking like a speaker box.

Here's some photos of test fitting...

Got the modified front struts back from the fabricator last weekend.  They look awesome!  He sleeved the bottom for strength and help with alignment and still need to weld the brackets on for the backing plate and brake lines but other than that I'm good to go with the rest of the install.

On 4/8/2022 at 8:05 PM, RichenFamous said:

Flippin’ sikko! Doing some suspension work myself. Not quite as labor intense, but knuckle busting none the less. 
Nice work! 

Nice!  Stop by when you get it on the road...

Front struts are at the fabricator getting modified so I started working on the compressor/tank/manifold assembly in the trunk and the rear struts. The rear air struts are very close to the OEM E3 struts in size and length, plus the bottom mounting sleeve is the same diameter so all I had to do was shorten the sleeve a little bit for it to fit. I made a simple adapter plate with welded bolts on the bottom plate (ignore the lousy welds) and a top plate as a washer. I mounted the air strut and everything looks great and should have plenty of clearance for the wheel and tire.

New tube to be welded onto BMW strut/spindle.  Threaded tube will fit inside tube with a threaded collar on top.

Collar will be cut off old strut and welded onto top of new strut tube.

Started the air suspension build on my '69 2800 E3 (Bavaria).

The front BMW struts will need to be modified to hold the air strut so I needed to figure out how long the tube needed to be.  There will be a collar on top of the tube that the air strut will thread into and the tube size will be for clearance.

Air system is off of a 2008 Lexus IS250.  Air Lift Performance P3.  (OEM BMW rear strut on the right of photo)

BMW strut will be modified to hold top of air strut.

I measured the stock strut height while installed on the car along with ground clearance to frame and rockers for reference.  I decided a 2" drop should be a good starting point and would expect to go slightly up or down from there for my final ride height.  I used the mid point of the bag travel to determine bag height, allowed for at least two inches of adjustment on the threaded tube in both directions and ended up with the new strut clearance tube at approx. 12".

G-wagon registered and on the road!  Paint work done and worked through some other problems and now we're driving it, which I'm sure will create a new list of things to do.  E3 now in the garage for the air suspension.  I'll post more about that as I go..

I've been down the swap path before too and all I can say is there's WAY more choices nowadays.  IE: A stock late model Chevy V6 puts out almost 300hp naturally aspirated and there are a ton of 2.0L turbo motors to choose from.  I've always liked the idea of a bigger basically stock motor for a swap than a smaller motor with lots of mods.  I guess I go for less maintenance.  8-)

9 minutes ago, worzella said:

If I manually close the butterfly on the carb, the idle raises and it runs smoother, 
but letting butterfly back to its natural level, motor misses, stumbles and stalls.

I think this is the biggest clue.  Air/fuel mixture wrong at idle.  I'd follow up with your vacuum leak and jets/mixture theory.

3 hours ago, Mike Self said:

Interesting that the picture shows an NK sedan in the foreground--I didn't realize the factory mixed two and four door cars together on the assembly line.  

 

mike

I think that's an E3.  Still a four door though...

If it were me, okay I've done this before too, I would only mask off non-painted stuff.  Bright work, glass, whatever is kinda close that you don't want over spray on then spray your matched paint on the areas and leave the edges "blended".  It's not the greatest but your eye will catch straight lines before blended lines so it might make it look slightly better.  Of course, you could go for your version of an art car...

The place where I work bought over 1500 vehicles last year so we're very familiar with the CA DMV.  Most of the issues we have are from someone at the DMV checking the wrong box on a form.  They accidentally "Junked" 16 of our cars one time by checking the wrong box.  Took us months to get it corrected.  You'll also get a different answer from different counter people at the DMV so if something doesn't sound right ask for a supervisor to verify it.  I have a feeling someone made a  mistake, sometimes because they don't understand it.

Hood and flares are painted and now I'm cleaning up the paint... sanding and polishing.  For some reason I got a lot more debris in the paint and it's taking more time to clean up.  And my shoulders hurt from sanding.  LOL.  As expected since I'm just painting in a garage.  I'm happy with the paint so it will turn out fine.

Hoping to have the fenders, quarter panel and rocker ready for paint this weekend, which means it will probably be in three weeks.   8-/

Got the loose parts painted and now moving on to the quarter panel, fenders and B-pillar rust area.  The rust isn't as bad as I first thought and will only need a little patch work.

Base going on...

Rust under the doors...

I always look to the forums for inspiration when I'm feeling lazy about a project.  I've learned over the years to be "short sighted" when it comes to large projects.  A big project my take 300 hours for us amateurs so I only look at the next two or three hours of work needed.  It keeps me going.  Hours are hours, they add up the same whether you get overwhelmed by they whole project or just working on something for a few hours a week.

Just curious.  I visited Singapore a few times years ago on business and my friend that lives there said it cost more to own/operate a classic than it does a late model car.  Is this still the case?  I know when I was there the government was discouraging owning a vehicle.

Hood and flares first, then on to the sheet metal repair, fenders and quarter panel...

So I really was going to put the air suspension on the 2800 next but I came across another project that I had to get.  Let's just say, if my wife ever found out that I passed up this G-wagon I'd be sleeping in the shop.  It's been her dream car for years and years.

2000 Mercedes G500 Europa.  I knew nothing about these things.  Zero.  Never even sat in one and always thought they were kinda cool military-ish style but way too pretentious for my taste.  It's a basket case, has had virtually no maintenance over the years and had several issues that needed to be figured out before even being able to buy it.

Turns out the Europas, which I had never heard of, were sold by a company in NM named Europa who had the rights to sell them in the U.S.  They purchased a total of 220 European versions (ours is #33) and converted the emissions to U.S. standards and marketed them to the upper end market.  It worked, so Mercedes got the rights back in 2002 and sold them through Mercedes dealerships from that point on.  History lesson over.  I'm learning that the early G-wagons are WAY more reliable than the later ones and I'm liking the way they're put together.

To start with, the original owner sold it because it wouldn't shift and two shops had given up on it.  At least that's what he told us, plus they told him it was so rusty that it wasn't worth putting money into.  Luckily for me that wasn't the case.  I figured out the shifting problem, replaced both broken motor mounts and diagnosed and fixed the emission issues to get it to pass a CA smog test.  It's now roadworthy!  It has a frame and spent time back east, so at first glance it looked pretty bad underneath, but at some point it had been undercoated and when a layer of surface rust started coming off the undercoating made it look ten times worse.  It's cleaning up nicely and not a concern at all.  The coach works has some previous body work that needs attention and a small area of rust at the common place that will only need a small patch.  I'm in the middle of body and paint to clean it up.

BTW, I hate the wheels because it puts it in that "Beverly Hills" group.  I'm hoping when the tires wear out my wife will be okay with putting 32" off-road tires on the stock 18" wheels.  8-)