Reviving the Albatross

When last we saw my 1988 BMW E30 325is—the car I should’ve have bought, towed home to Boston from Upstate New York by the truck I shouldn’t have bought—I’d just discovered that it’s a Franken-car. From the cowl back, it’s what it should be according to the VIN—a two-door sport-package E30 3 Series BMW built at the subtle mid-cycle refreshing referred to as a “facelift.” However, the engine compartment and nose held a dark secret—they came from a pre-facelift 1987 325e. This wasn’t the end of the world, nor even terribly surprising, as I was fully aware when I purchased the car that it had a salvage title. However, it turned out that the Frankenstein’s monster-like configuration extends to the engine—rather than having the 325i’s 168-hp high-revving mill, it has the 128-hp low-revving “eta” engine (eta is the seventh letter of the Greek alphabet and in scientific applications the symbol for efficiency), likely from the same donor car as the front body panels. That was definitely something I had not signed up for.

In my weepy post-mortem of the purchase a couple weeks ago, I laid the blame on both my lack of expertise with E30s as well as my being overly focused on two things when I looked at the car. The seller claimed it to be an essentially rust-free running 1988 325is with 88,000 miles, and he was asking five grand. I’d already run the Carfax and VIN decoder, both of which verified the VIN as belonging to a 1988 325is. The Carfax even backed up the 88K mileage claim. The photos in the ad showed the trunk spoiler, sport seats, and steering wheel of an “is.” The fact that it was missing the nose spoiler didn’t bother me. I drove the Armada towing a rented U-Haul trailer to Albany to look at it. It was raining when I got there, so I was hyper-efficient. Rust-free? Yeah, pretty much. Runs? Once around a muddy parking lot, check. Sign the title, hand over my money, load the car, hit the road, miles to go before I sleep and all that. . . .

When I discovered the Franken-car nature of the beast, I beat myself up over my monumental oversight. Although the nose and engine compartment differences in the pre- and post-facelift cars are subtle, and though this car’s “eta” engine is wearing the “i” intake manifold, which masked its identity, the engine swap also included swapping the original tachometer for the low-redline tach that goes with the low-revving engine, so if I’d simply looked at the tach during my 30-second test drive, I would’ve seen the 5000-rpm redline that was dead wrong for the car and known that something was up.

Reader “Johnston Motorsports” made a very astute comment on my last piece: “Sometimes buyer’s remorse is better than thinking about the one that got away.” I gave that a lot of thought. After all, I recently wrote a piece about missing out on a dirt-cheap basket-case Lotus Elan +2 because a flipper snagged it and then octupled the price. The Elan +2 and the FrankenThirty are now firmly ensconced in my mind as the bookends of regret. The thing they have in common is that they’re both cars I probably shouldn’t have been considering in the first place, but being wired as a bottom-feeder, this sort of thing appears to be my fate. On the one hand, five grand isn’t much these days in the vintage car world, but on the other hand, my Facebook Marketplace “saved” list is filled with $5000 cars, and I can’t buy all of them. To have jumped on this misbegotten E30 instead of the fully loaded 1963 Rambler Ambassador 990 or the 1972 Volvo 164e stick with factory air and electric overdrive clearly felt like a bad decision.

In addition, the fact that the car had far more invasive mouse-contamination issues than expected was the turd on top of the Franken-sundae. A similar thing happened with the Armada, but its contamination was completely halted by the cabin air filter. In contrast, I found that mice had gotten into the E30’s heater box, something that was woefully obvious the moment I turned on the blower fan (and again, like the tach, something I kicked myself for not noticing during even a short test drive).

The car was already partially apart in the back corner of my garage for a timing belt replacement, the kind of thing you don’t want to be wrong about lest the pistons crash into the valves. While doing that, there were of course numerous “while you’re in theres.” As I wrote last month, I found that a trickle of oil across the bottom of the engine was coming from a hairline crack in the oil pan, and that the radiator showed the clear circular fin-mashing indicative of contact from the fan. It was actually my posting a photo of said radiator online that kicked off the stitched-together discovery, as there was a cooling system update for the 1988 facelift that this car should have had but didn’t. I had already ordered a new-style water pump, not realizing that the car needed the older-style one. I returned it, and installed the replacement before finding that it had an unacceptable amount of play in the bearing. By the time the third water pump arrived, the wind had gone out of my sails, and what should have been the joy of tinkering with my new toy turned into a dirge of obligation that felt like actual work to get the damned thing back together. Although the hurdles in the way of getting it running again weren’t anywhere near what they were with my Lotus Europa, the E30 was now sitting in the same corner of the garage that the Lotus sat in for six years, and I had the same feeling that this BMW was an albatross around my neck, a reminder of questionable decisions.

Okay, so let’s get on with it . . .

The timing belt replacement isn’t difficult, but is a bit persnickety. The belt tensioner is really just an idler pulley where the actual tension comes from a hokey spring-on-rod that’s sandwiched between the idler and the water pump like some engineering afterthought. Since I had to do it several times due to incorrect or bad water pumps, I got very good at it (and obviously I turned the engine a few times by hand to be absolutely certain I’d gotten it correct), but the fact that neither the water pump nor the belt had anything obviously wrong with them wasn’t lost on me, and part of me felt that I would’ve been better off not to have touched anything and just sold the car as-is. In truth, you can’t know the condition of the timing belt until you get a good portion of the way into removing it, so really I was just crying over spilled coolant.

I replaced the three main cooling hoses, but held the line on reusing most of the other cooling parts. The radiator with the smushed fins went back in, as there was oodles of clearance between it and the cooling fan. I did replace pillow-soft rubber fuel lines, ancient spark plugs, and a torn intake boot, all things that needed to be done if the car was to be driven further than around the block. I also fixed a clutch hydraulic line that was so soft and bulbous that it would no longer stay attached to its fluid reservoir.

When I was done with the belt-pump–related refresh, I turned my eyes back to the first bump in the road—the cracked oil pan. There was a divot around the crack where clearly some object had impacted it. I cleaned the area, roughed it up with a stone on a Dremel tool, heated it with a torch to burn out any oil in the crack, cleaned it again, then slathered J-B Weld into it. Twenty-four hours later, fresh oil went into the engine, and the repair appeared to be tight.

Regarding the mouse contamination, I’ve written numerous pieces about de-mousing. The sequence is 1) Locate and remove the source of contamination—typically a nest with a blast radius of detritus; 2) Clean the area thoroughly with Chlorox wipes or similar; 3) Wipe the area down with an enzyme-based cleaner (I use Rocco & Roxie). Only when those three steps are done can you consider using something like Lysol in the vents or an ozone generator in the cabin to remove the residual smell permeating the fabric. I began the non-trivial task of removing the heater box (which is actually a climate-control box as it contains both the heater and evaporator cores), but then remembered that the E30 is the first generation of BMW where both the heater core and the A/C evaporator core slide out of the box into the driver and passenger footwells. This, combined with the fact that the blower fan can be removed from under the cowl, meant that I could leave the box itself in place and reach in from both the top and the bottom and clean the innards. While this will never be as good as removing the box and disassembling and pressure-washing it, I simply wasn’t willing to go to the level of effort you’d put in on car that’s precious to you. It was my hope that this arthroscopic approach would knock the stench down from gag-inducing to regular old a-little-mousy-smell-is-part-of-the-olfactory-patina.

But when I opened up the cowl panel, I found the entire thing packed end-to-end with a mouse nest. As I pulled it out, I saw that the nest extended into the blower fan. With the fan removed, I could see the contamination in the evaporator core beneath it. Fortunately, not unlike the filter in the Armada, the contamination largely stopped at the evaporator core.

Unfortunately, the evap core’s dense fins proved immune to decontamination; no amount of pressure-washing and enzyme cleaning stanched the smell. Used E30 evaporator cores, though, are plentiful, and $30 got me a clean one. The car didn’t have working A/C when I bought it, and this first go-around wasn’t going to include a full-on resurrection, but I did flush the evaporator core before installing it. Getting the smell out of the squirrel cages in the blower fan required several scrubbings with a test-tube brush. I reinstalled the blower motor and the two cores, and the result as tested with the blower fan in the garage was no longer OH GOD SHUT IT OFF!

After draining the bit of old gas remaining in the tank, replacing the fuel filter, and pouring in two gallons of fresh fuel, I fired it up. I was gratified though not surprised that it started instantly—after all, this was a running car when I bought it, not something long-dead. Out of the garage and into the driveway it went. While it was idling, I gave it an initial check for fluid leaks and saw none.

Even though the car was still sitting on homicidally dry-rotted tires, it was clearly time for a run around the block (I’d insured and plated it). Of course, it was at that moment that it suddenly began idling horribly, surging, and then dying. I recalled that E30s have an idle control valve that frequently sticks. I removed and cleaned it, then put it through a few start-and-warm-up cycles. The problem lessened, then largely went away. Around the block it is then. . . .

First, a once-around followed by a driveway stop and another fluid check, then twice. The car ran and drove and shifted and stopped fine, which is a higher bar of functionality to clear than one might think. You can see a short walk-around and drive video here.

I was about to throw the gas can into another car to get another few gallons to dump into the tank, but decided that the E30 was running well enough to simply drive it the mile to the nearest gas station. That felt like a real drive.

And the impressions? Not bad. Not bad at all. The whole design goal for the “eta” engine in the 325e was that it traded off a lower redline for low-down grunt and fuel economy. The FrankenThirty felt nice and torquey when I stepped on the pedal like an “eta” engine is supposed to. Smell-wise, it was about what I expected it to be—certainly not minty fresh, but world’s better than it was. Really, the main thing that jumped out at me was a fair amount of rattling from under the dash, whose source I need to find and fix before it drives me crazy. And if that’s the main soft spot on the peach, you’re doing pretty well.

With the car sitting in my driveway, I gave it a quick washing. This revealed that what I thought was failing clear coat on the hood and front fenders was actually tree sap. I cleaned it off with isopropyl alcohol. Although the roof and trunk lid really do have damaged paint, the unbroken shiny expanse of Zinnoberrot Red on the hood in the afternoon sun literally made me see the car in a different light.

I don’t buy any car as an investment, and this one was no different. I bought it because I wanted a knock-around driver E30, specifically a 325is five-speed with the high-revving “i” engine, the air dams, the sport seats and steering wheel. The days of finding running, shiny, rust-free BMW 2002s for five grand are long gone. E30s used to be the next best thing, but finding a rust-free 325is stick for five grand these days is unthinkable, which was why I jumped on this one, salvage title and all. The only other affordable E30s in New England I saw were rusty enough that I don’t think I could even register them in Massachusetts, where the annual state inspection can fail you for any visible rust hole. I see ads for E30s on the East Coast in the $5000–$6000 range, but they’re typically the 325e with an automatic, or no sport package, or rusty, or projects, or all of the above. This one is not what I thought it was—it’s a mutt, a “real 325is” perhaps in name only—but as I looked at it in the sun after its first real drive, my thought was not regret. Instead, I saw not a mistake but why I bought it.

I’ll still be careful about how much money I dump into the FrankenThirty, but maybe it’s not an albatross after all. Maybe it’s exactly what it needs to be.

***

Rob’s latest book, The Best Of The Hack Mechanic™: 35 years of hacks, kluges, and assorted automotive mayhem, is available on Amazon here. His other seven books are available here on Amazon, or you can order personally inscribed copies from Rob’s website, www.robsiegel.com.