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thehackmechanic

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  1. thehackmechanic
    The two updates that the SCs need (I lied when I said they had all the bugs worked out of them) are the Carerra-style oil-fed timing chain tensioners, and the "pop" valve in the airbox. Regarding a/c, my car had a dead old-style piston compressor. I replaced it with a newer rotary-style Sanden compressor. Jim is correctly remembering the a/c hoses that run the length of the car, beneath the car. I assumed that I should replace every one, then looked at them carefully, how they passed through holes beneath the car, and how they attached to the condenser in the front, and realized that a) I'd have to undo 25-year-old threads that had never been removed, and I'd have to have them custom-fabricated and crimp the ends on, and elected to leave them alone. I top off the freon every two years, and it works fine.
  2. thehackmechanic
    I started off, like you, wanting a pre-74 Porsche with small chrome bumpers, but living in New England and owning a bunch of pre-74 small chrome-bumpered BMWs that had to be kept off the road in wet weather because they rot, reality got the better of me. I believe that 911 bodies were galvanized starting in 1975, so '75 and after don't have the automatic restoration-threatening rust that '74 and older ones have. But the 75 through 77 cars also have 2.7 liter engines that, like with BMWs, ran hot due to the first flush of emissions controls. These mid-70s cars (identifiable because they have the big bumpers but don't have the rear fender flares that are on the 911SCs and later cars) are probably the least desirable 911s. The cars that came after were the 911SCs, made, I believe, 78 through 83. They are basically 911s with the bugs worked out of them. Don't let the year fool you-- although they have CIS injection, by modern standards they are primitive cars, bereft of power steering, ABS, and air bag. I finally took the plunge about five years ago and bought one -- a metallic brown 1982 911SC with a targa top and a whale tail. I absolutely love it. If you've driven beetles or other air-cooled rear-engine VWs, the sounds and smells of the car are instantly familiar. The much-publicized "trailing throttle oversteer" issue with 911s (where, if you lift off the gas in a curve, the rear end comes around) was largely tamed by the time the SC was built; the fat tires and big sway bars do wonders. If you like mid-70s BMW, you will feel very much at home in a 911SC -- very connected to the road through the car, lots of steering feel. What is very different in a 911 than a BMW is, because the car has a lot of positive castor (like rake in a motorcycle), the steering wants to come back to center. When you start driving one and push it hard around an entrance ramp, initially it feels totally foreign as compared to BMWs, but it is addictive, and you begin to look forward to it. So, like an older BMW, it has a lot of steering feel, but the sensations that it transmits are very different because the geometry is very different. One of the few downsides of the SC is that the gearbox and linkage feel like you're driving a beetle; it's a bit clunky and notchy, not at all like the silky-smooth German jewel-type gearing we BMW guys are accustomed to. I can't remember the year that they changed the gearbox. Older chrome-bumpered 911s are expensive. SCs you can readily find for $10k and less (I paid $9950 for mine -- as I like to say, the cost of a used Honda Civic). The cars that came after the SC in 1984 was the 3.2 liter Carrera, which has Motronic ignition. Nothing explicitly wrong with these, but they're more money. If you have a hankering for an "older 911," I'd strongly encourage you to at least check out a 911SC. I don't think you'll regret it. --Rob
  3. thehackmechanic
    I finally got around to starting to install the 5-speed that's been sitting in the garage for eight months. This is 5-speed #2 in a series, after #1 that I bought on Craigslist turned out to be bad. #2 was also a Craigslist el cheap special of unknown origin. Yesterday I threw the trani in the back of the Suburban, took it down to the self-service car wash, soaked it in Gunk, wire-brushed it, and pressure-washed it off. When it was clean, I noticed that the right side of the back of the trani -- where the end cover bolts to the extension that in turn bolts to the main part of the case -- had a layer of some sort of RTV-like substance coating the seam. I scraped it all off, but made a mental note of it. Today, in preparation for installing the 5-speed, I filled the trani with Redline MTL and let it sit for an hour. Sure enough, it is weeping fluid through the seam on the right side of the back of the trani, right about where the U-shaped notch is for the rubber mount. If you're looking directly at the back of the trani, it's at about 4:00. I know that Mike Torres swears by Swepco 201, which is considerably more viscous than Redline MTL. Any feeling on whether it's worth trying, whether it may be less weepy? With regard to changing the end cover seal... I took one and only one trani apart, 25 years ago, and swore I would never do it again, and that was a four-speed. Am I correct in assuming that all hell breaks loose and the thing explodes if you pull off the output flange, unbolt the long case bolts, and try to draw the cover backward? Is it possible to pull it back just a little and dribble some RTV into the seam without risking disaster? --Rob Siegel
  4. thehackmechanic
    I hate to say it, but I had this happen recently with a 5-speed I'd bought as a runner (ie as a decent used trani) from a guy who parted out an '02 that the trani was in (I bought it, the driveshaft, all the 5-speed parts). It sort of worked -- at least at the level of shifting it when it was out of the car and verifying that turning the input shaft caused the output shaft to turn (except in neutral), but once it was in the car with a load on it, it munched, banged, was difficult to shift, and at times seemed to lock up the rear wheels. Sadly, I had to conclude that the trani itself was no good. Conversations at the time with Mike Miller (and recently independently echoed almost verbatim with Rob Torres) yielded the prevailing wisdom that, with the last 320i rolling off the line in 1983, these tranis are gettin' up there in years, and whereas a bad used one was once rare, it is becoming a very common situation. In my case, I bought another box, which I haven't had the chance to put in yet. The upside (if there is one) is that you get VERY GOOD at pulling them out and putting them in quickly and efficiently. I hope I'm wrong, and I hope you have better luck than I did.
  5. thehackmechanic
    Unless you can't or won't learn to drive a stick, buy a stick. It is an ineffable part of the experience of owning an '02, particularly if it is your first. It sounds like you're predisposed that way anyway. Odds are that the automatic you're looking at is probably not such a unique steal (of course what do I know? I haven't seen the car).
  6. thehackmechanic
    I was caught by the phrase "stop all corrosion." If you live in a wet climate like the Northeast (I see the NJ address), you are NEVER going to "stop all corrosion." It is a constant balance between wanting to drive the car as much as possible while not doing harm to it. It is an act of violence to buy a rust-free (or nearly so) classic car of any stripe and to live in wet climes and not garage it, or to drive it through salt and slush. My opinion. That rant out of the way, I'm thinking of the Tom Petty song "she's gonna listen to her heart... it's gonna tell her what to do." 02s are great at transmitting their needs to their owners, as long as their owner is listening. I agree with the poster who mentioned fixing window rattles; sometimes the most satisfying thing in the entire world is identifying a window or a door rattle, fixing it, driving the car, and thinking "yep... it's gone... nailed that one." My personal feeling is gas lines before anything. NOTHING stops you quicker than the strong smell of gas and carries more risk if you ignore it. When a line pops, it's the thing you need to deal with RIGHT FREAKING NOW. These are such easy cars to deal with gas lines on. Just look at and feel them. If they're cracked and hard, do them now. Then do the same with the coolant hoses; just squeeze 'em all. On one hand, these are such easy and cost-effective cars to change every coolant hose on (don't talk to me about my E39), but for starters, if one is mush, just change that one, drive the car, and move on to the next layer of the onion. Ball joints are up there as something that can mess you up. If the car has the original riveted ball joints, change them before you put too many miles on the car. Potentially every part on a 35 year old 2002 is a "normal wear and tear" part (especially if you plan to use it as a near-daily-driver), but I think you'll get a lot of bang for the buck out of a hands-on-what-is-the-car-telling-me approach, particularly if this is your first '02, than out of ordering sets of urethane bushings. --Rob
  7. thehackmechanic
    I have not purchased from Ireland or 2002Haus, but I did buy some stuff from Dave at Aardvark. He is a card-carrying nice guy and even helped me out with a driveshaft balancing issue for a shaft I didn't buy from him.
  8. thehackmechanic
    My memory is that all tiis and pre-74 2002s had the larger 228mm clutch, and that the big-bumpered '74 (non-tii) through '75 had the smaller 215mm clutch. Of course my memory is pretty bad. :^)
  9. thehackmechanic
    Thanks Jim, I really appreciate that. Good luck with your '02. To a large extent, cars are one of the mirrors that we see ourselves in. Enjoy seeing yourself in yours!
  10. thehackmechanic
    Many of you know me through my Hack Mechanic column in BMW CCA Roundel magazine. That doesn't mean I know more than you do, but it does mean that you can trust me to describe the car and answer questions truthfully. I'm getting ready to sell this car in the spring. I thought I'd give y'all a crack at it before I subject myself to the vagaries of CL and eBay. I had this car posted here before, in the fall, at the overvalued price of $8500. I had overestimated its value for a number of reasons (I had sold a 73 tii for $9000 in the spring before the economy went south, and I had thought that this car had all original paint and original body panels, which it does not). Since then, I've done a bunch more work on it, including having the rust hole in the floor patched, ordering a tan carpet set I haven't installed yet, and installing brand spanking new Bilstein HDs all around. I think, as-is, you could pry it from me for about $7000. But just to be clear, I'm not out of work, and I don't really need the money, at least not yet. I am, however, about to get insanely busy, so this is a little window of opportunity for me to put a line in the water again for interest in the car. This is jewel of an early '72 tii, VIN 2761350, complete with those wonderful close-in pre-2 1/2 mph bumpers, intact fuel injection with black plastic intake plenums, and 10:1 pistons. The time-worn phrase "restore or drive as-is" applies, I think, particularly well to this car. The photos below were taken after I literally just wiped it off with a damp towel. It'll pop when the rubber is dressed and the chrome is cleaned. The shock towers are perfect. The frame rails and rockers are fine. The discoloration on the left rocker is not rust-through; I've since hit it with a wire wheel and brushed on some tan Never-Rust (great stuff -- like POR15 but not as nasty to work with). The car is very, very solid, but is not 100% rust free -- there is a hole at the corner where the left inner front wheel well meets the rocker, but that's really about it in terms of rust-through. There was a hole in the driver's side floor, where the posts for the accelerator pedal should be. I had a patch welded in so the car can be presented with a working accelerator pedal. There is some rust blistering through the Sahara paint in a few places (bottoms of front fenders have very small bubbles; doors have some rust blisters behind the trim), but it is still a very pretty car; most of the paint is shiny and lies very flat. It's in this condition where if I pull the trim off and try to sand down the blisters, the whole car will probably need to be repainted, (although the tan Never-Rust I found is close enough to the Sahara paint that isolated splotches of Never-Rust may not look too bad). Originally I was absolutely dead-set against having the car repainted, as I was convinced that the paint was original, but after closer examination, I now can see that both front fenders, the right rear quarter, and almost certainly the nose have been changed (although the nose and fender welds are just beautiful). Thus, whether to repaint the car is, I think, less of an issue of violating originality and more a simple economic choice. Really the question of how much to do to the body should go to the next owner. Me, I'd spray some oil-based undercoating like Waxoil everywhere, keep the car dry, and leave it largely in its "survivor" state. I would throw bigger sway bars on it, and put those beautiful original seats in clean dry storage and replace them with some tan Recaros for daily driving. The car has 82k miles on it, and they are probably original. There is a repair receipt from 1983 that lists the mileage as 74986, and a Delaware title from 1990 that shows the mileage as 80055, so it is plausible. I bought the car last fall from a guy up in Portland ME, who bought it from a friend of his, paid $800 for a major service (oil, brakes, tune-up), then lost his heart to a fastback Mustang and sold it. Judging from the mouse nests and acorns I've cleaned out of the car, I don't think it's seen many miles the last 15 years. Other things that make me think the mileage is real are the presence of the original riveted ball joints and the little plastic cap on the back of the screw that holds on the cold start relay. When I bought it, it was nearly undriveable due to flat-spotted dry-rotted 165 tires and a horrible driveline vibration that I traced to a loose guibo that had ruined the transmission output flange. I replaced the flange and the guibo and put on some bottlecaps and reasonable tires and now it's smooth as silk. I've done some work (belts, bushings, Redline fluids, etc) to make it driveable, and it's pretty nice -- it's quick and quiet. There's 190 to 200lbs of compression in all cylinders. It starts right up and runs well. It doesn't munch second gear. I've done basic R&R on the fuel injection (replaced the belt, adjusted the warm-up regulator, synchronized the pump and throttle body). It's still running a bit rich, like every tii I've ever owned. The car has a brand new set of Bilstein HDs front and rear. I should've replaced the shock tower bushings and the riveted ball joints while I had the struts out, but I decided I had to stop somewhere. The radiator looks a little funky, but does not leak and seems to cool the engine ok. If I were going to depend on the car, I would give it the obligatory cooling system replacement. But the car is very driveable. The interior of this car is just beautiful, marred only by the obligatory dash crack and the water-stained rug on the driver's floor from the hole behind the accelerator. I have purchased a new rug but have not installed it yet. Even the trunk is pretty. The car not only has the original owner's manual and supplement, it also has the tool kit. The headliner has no tears. The door panels have the most intact chrome I've ever seen. The trim on the car is very presentable. I replaced the front and rear Roundels and, as I said, put some bottlecaps on it. The total effect is, shall we say, vahry nahce. I should sell this car before I fall even more in love with it than I already have. As I said, I thought I'd give you folks first crack at it before I go the Craigslist / eBay route. I could easily keep working on it and drive it more, but I'd like to get about seven grand as it sits today. I have many photos of the underside of the car and up under wheel arches (solid as Gibraltar), and close-ups of of the blisters in the paint; I'll be glad to zip them up and send them to any interested parties. The car is registered and insured and sitting safe in my garage here in Newton MA. If you're serious and you want more information, best thing is to call me at 617-365-8303 (I travel a lot for work and don't always check the e-mail that the 2002faq notifications are sent to), but please no calls during business hours; only after 6pm EST. --Rob Siegel
  11. thehackmechanic
    Yup, that's me, and if you ever meet any of us (ie, Mile Self, Mark Calebrese, Mike Miller), we're all basically like we sound like in the magazine -- just a bunch of car guys like anyone else. And a collective thanks! Regarding the question about whether the gold BBS wheel has a polished lip... I don't think so; I think it's just silver paint.
  12. thehackmechanic
    I've never had luck with the "fill it with an incompressible fluid" method. I've always used a rented internal puller from Autozone; I just can't remember the puller number.
  13. thehackmechanic
    I just snagged a set of gold BBS basketweaves with centercaps. I didn't even know these things existed until yesterday. I guess they were options on late E30 325is and convertibles. They're pretty cool; the basketweave is gold but the lip is silver. Now, which 2002 to put them on -- the Sahara '72 tii or the near-rat-rod Agave '73? Initially I thought the tii but I think the gold will pop against the green. Some days the universe smiles on you...
  14. thehackmechanic
    Well I HAD an Alfa and my navigator STILL never looked like her! (amazing the stuff up in the mental attic... MG Mitten... I'd completely forgotten)
  15. thehackmechanic
    The wheels are E30 steelies, I believe 14x6, with 195/65 14 tires (a tad too tall). Those tires and wheels are gone, replaced by bottlecaps that also have to-tall 65-series tires. Mike, the Forbidden Planet billboard was from my son's high school production of "Grease." As part of the set they made up a bunch of mock movie billboards like Forbidden Planet and The Blob. I loved the billboard and they were glad to give it to me (they were going to trash it after the show). But when I arrived in the minivan to get it, it was waaaay bigger than I thought. My garage has 9 foot ceilings, and it's close. I had to borrow the work truck from work which has a utility body (box) on the back and strap it down flat on the top of the box. But it IS fun having it in the garage.
  16. thehackmechanic
    Actually, PATINA would make a GREAT vanity plate for this car...!
  17. thehackmechanic
    Pics? Ok, you asked... these were taken just after I bought it in August. It looks basically the same except it now has bottlecaps and all the trim on it. It's cute, even with the acne...
  18. thehackmechanic
    It's been a fairly cold snowy winter in New England, but there was enough of a break today where there wasn't snow or ice on the roads, but it was still cold enough that there weren't big puddles of salty water. So I took the Agave '73 2002 out when I ran errands. This car is one step back from being a rat rod; now that I've reattached all the trim, at 20 feet away it's cute, though the paint is completely oxidized and there are isolated blisters on every panel. But everywhere I went the car raised attention. From the 22 year old Jamaican man who recognized it as a BMW but had never seen an '02. From the woman in the grocery store who said "my boyfriend in grad school had one of those man I LOVED that car." From the people who pointed at it at traffic lights. I think the car actually made people happy...
  19. thehackmechanic
    Sure sounds electrical, but a quick way to delineate electrical from fuel problems is to give it a good blast of starting fluid into the intake. If it starus and runs for a few seconds but then dies then it's a fuel problem. If it doesn't start at all then it is likely an electrical problem.
  20. thehackmechanic
    As others have said, it all depends what moves ya baby, and don't let anyone talk you out of what moves you. I've had my 3.0CSi for 22 years. It is rust-free. It has seven coats of signal red and seven coats of clear, all wet-sanded between coats. It is beautiful. I rarely drive it. It is a cruiser, not a tosser. I've had probably two dozen 2002s over the past 25 years. Lack of garage space made me keep only the 3.0 for about 19 years, but my new garage has room to play, so I currently have two 02s. I want to drive both of them every weekend. When people see a coupe, if they know what it is they oooh and drool, but if they don't know what it is, it seems to barely elicit a glance. In constrast, 2002s are burned into the Jungian collective unconsious almost like a Beetle. I've had 60 year old women come up to me and say "oh my boyfriend had one of those in grad school I used to LOVE that car!" I didn't read every single post in this thread so I don't know if someone hit on this, but the fenders on 2002s are trivial to remove -- separate the two inches holding it to the nose, unbolt the 10mm screws holding it to the inner wall, and it's off. So it's easy to have a look underneath it for rust. In contrast, on a coupe, the fenders are lap-seamed, joined at the lower corner of the windshield. There's no way to get it off without pulling the windshield and doing some serious cutting. Also, what appears to be a solid rocker panel on a coupe is actually a really wide metal trim piece. I never would believe that what was underneath it wasn't perforated without seeing recent photographs or taking it off myself, and that's difficult on someone else's car. Ditto with the rear shock towers -- they're covered with plastic liners and they shatter into pieces from age if you try and bend them back to look. If you look at a coupe, take a flashlight, crouch down, flip down the glovebox and look forward and up at the firewall and inspect it for perforations, then do the same thing on the hood latch / fusebox side. Coupe front fenders have a water trap where moisture gets in and rots it out and perforates the firewall. Often the first sign of trouble is electrical problems from the fusebox getting wet. The cost difference in both body and parts between coupes and 02s is narrowing, so while the coupes clearly used to be much more expensive, I think this is less of an issue. Of course, the coupe is a Karmann-built body, and if you learn one automotive joke, it has to be... why to the Brits drink warm beer (lucas refrigerators)... but if you learn TWO automotive jokes, the second one has to be that Karmann invented rust, then licensed the process to the Italians. But, full circle, it's all about what moves you...
  21. thehackmechanic
    Ok, that's really bad, even for me, and I AM the hack mechanic!
  22. thehackmechanic
    Had a similar experience a few years back. Wanted to have a shaft shortened and balanced. No one here in Boston will do them because they look at those non-rebuildable U-joints and say "oh we don't touch those." I was told that the trick thing to do was disassemble the shaft and simply take the front half -- without a U-joint in it -- to a machine shop and have them shorten it. I did. It was cheap. I thought I was smart. Then I put the shaft back together with a new center support bearing, put it in the car, and it was horribly out of balance. I took the whole driveshaft into the shop who shortened the front half, asked them to balance it the whole thing, and they couldn't deal with it. It's for these reasons that I no longer screw around with shortening driveshafts, and instead send them to Dave Varco at Aardvark Racing in Cali, who sends them... wherever he sends them.
  23. thehackmechanic
    In addition to the standard stuff, which it sounds like you already know, I'll offer the following two "zebras not horses" things that actually happened to me in the past: 1) Making sure that the points are not only visually opening but are actually electrically separating. If you've replaced them with new points this is probably not the issue, but once when had no spark, I visually verified that the points were opening as the distributor spun around, but due to corrosion and pitting, even though they looked like they were opening, they were still electrically closed. 2) Making sure that the plug wires actually mate to the cap and to the plugs. I once bought a 323i from a guy who, after he tried to tune it, it wouldn't start, he couldn't figure it out, and in frustration he eventually sold the car. Turned out the new plug wires he'd bought did not make electrical contact with the seats in the cap. Moral: Just because wire physically goes from point A to B doesn't necessarily it's delivering any current there. Check EVERYTHING, and don't let your eyes fool you. I assume you know to check the spark as it comes out of the coil (unplug the center wire from the distributor cap and hold it 1/4" from ground while someone cranks the engine). This removes the cap, rotor, and plug wires from the equation. --Rob
  24. thehackmechanic
    If yours is a '73tii, 3.64 (in the manual and in reality) makes perfect sense to me. I always went by what was in Michel Potheau's Roundel article "BMW 2002:A Technical History" which can be found at http://www.02restoration.com/bmw-2002-history/bmw-2002-a-technical-history/ I'll jack up my '72tii tomorrow, spin the rear wheels, and count driveshaft revolutions.
  25. thehackmechanic
    I had always thought that the plastic plenums, the 121 head, the pre-2 1/2 mph bumpers, and the 3.45 rear end all went hand-in-hand. I had two early tiis many years ago, and I recall noting that both of them spun lower engine RPMs at 70 mph than my stock 2002s. Of course, both my command of the facts and my memory are fallible, like any humans. I have an early '72 now and am looking right at what I believe are the original English owner's manuals that came with the car. The orange manual lists, under specifications on page 80, the ratio for the 1600 as either 4.11:1 or 4.10:1, and 3.64:1 for the 2002 and ti. The orange manual does not list the diff ratio for the tii. The white owner's manual supplement contains the specs for the tii; on the specifications on page 19, it says "final drive... BMW 2002tii... 3.45:1." It also lists the compression as 10:1. Of course just because it's in the English version of the owner's manual doesn't mean that North American cars absolutely positively had these specifications. Is the code stamped on the differential anywhere? --Rob
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