The Armada Tows Home a Prize

Well, I did it. I actually used the 2008 Nissan Armada to do what I ostensibly bought it for—to haul a trailer out to see a car and, if I bought it, to tow it home.

As I’ve discussed, for me, this is a big part of the utility of owning a truck, be it a pickup or full-sized SUV. This utility comes in two flavors. The first is towing a car that’s either dead or too hobbled to make the drive. If it’s dead, you need to be able to winch the car into or onto the trailer, and I’m not there yet, equipment-wise. The second is where the car runs and drives but you want to be able to make it happen, showing up by yourself and coming home with the car without roping your spouse into the process to drive one of the vehicles home. And, as I’ve freely admitted, this utility has more to do with my self-image than with reality, as the last time I actually did it was, incredibly, 2019, when I showed up with a truck and trailer and came home with the 48,000-mile original-owner survivor 1973 BMW 2002 I still own.

Still, inaccurate self-image or no, like many of you, I spend an inordinate amount of time looking at cars online, mostly on Facebook Marketplace, and I like to think that my pounce reflex is pretty well calibrated. That is, I ask a minimum number of well-targeted questions and know when it’s time to drop everything and show up with the truck, a rented trailer, and cash.

The prey in the crosshairs was a 1988 BMW 325is, an example of the E30-bodied 3 Series built back when BMW could do no wrong and didn’t need ridiculously oversized kidneys to provide brand identification from orbit. The E30 has developed a cult following, has a reputation of being (along with the E28 5 Series) the last BMW built for 300,000-mile service lifetimes, and is referred to in fanboy circles as “god’s chariot.” I’ve never really subscribed to the hype. I like the E30, but I don’t love them in the way I do BMW’s early-1970s-era cars. But I did own a very nice, very original Zinnoberrot Red ’87 325is about ten years ago that I bought as E30 prices began rising, sorted out, and sold a few years later as part of managing the finances during my job change from engineer to writer. I’ve been keeping my eye out for another well-priced E30, but anything I saw in New England in the $4000–$5000 price range where I joke that I do my best work was rusty junk.

So this concise ad piqued my interest: “1988 325is. 88,000 miles. 5 speed transmission. Runs perfect. Needs some paint work. Car is solid with no rust. Vehicle has a salvage rebuild title. Why I don’t know.” The three cell phone pics showed a car that looked remarkably like the one I sold in 2017, shiny Zinnoberrot Red but with a tired-looking interior. The asking price had just been reduced from $8500 to $5000. A message to the seller yielded the VIN and a video showing the car running. I ran the CarFax, and in addition to showing the salvage / rebuild event in 1992 and the current owner’s purchase in 2001, it showed steadily increasing mileage at annual state inspections that validated the 88,000-mile claim. I then ran the VIN through a BMW decoder website that verified that the car had the limited-slip differential, sport suspension, bolstered seats, and other options associated with the “is” package.

I wasn’t really that concerned about the salvage /rebuilt title. Cars get totaled for all sorts of reasons, the event was 32 years in the rearview mirror, the same guy had owned it for 23 of them, and it was less important than the rust status of the car now. If a salvage title was something that scared off others but enabled me to get into a rust-free E30 for what I wanted to pay, good.

It all was enough to trigger a human-to-human phone call (always do this, by the way, if you’re truly interested in a car). The seller was in Averill Park, New York, about halfway between Albany and the New York-Massachusetts border and about 2 ½ hours from me. He said that he pulled the car off the road two years ago to concentrate on other projects, and it had a dead battery, but he’d jump-started it and drove it to a friend’s body shop, in whose parking lot it was currently sitting. Regarding the “no rust” claim, he said he put it up on the shop’s lift and did not see any rust-through anywhere on the car.

We began to talk about arrangements for me to look at the car. “Just so you know,” he said, “the price is firm.” I said that I don’t bargain for the sake of sport, and that if the car was truly rust-free and had nothing big and bad wrong with it like evidence of a cracked head, I’d likely buy it. The fact that the car wasn’t at his house made it difficult for him and me to both be there on a weekday, so he recommended doing it on Saturday. I was concerned that by then the car might be gone and offered to pay him a small non-refundable deposit to essentially buy my place in line (I’ve done this a few times, and it usually works out well), but he said that, talking to me, he was convinced that I would show up like I said, unlike many of the Facebook Marketplace time-wasters, and that he’d hold it for me. “Unless someone offers me ten grand,” he then added. “That’s different.” I laughed and repeated my “All’s fair in love and vintage cars” mantra.

So I lined up a U-Haul auto transporter for the weekend. This is often more of a pain in the butt than you’d expect. What seems like an inexpensive ($60 for the day) ubiquitous commodity is often unavailable anywhere close to you on the day you need one, or you reserve one and then on game day get the dreaded call from U-Haul that it’s not available because it wasn’t returned on time. I wound up reserving one west of Boston so at least I could pick it up on the way to New York. When I arrived at U-Haul, the transporter in the lot had a flat tire, but fortunately another one was soon returned.

Now, this was the Armada’s first tow. If you read this column, you may recall that when I bought the truck, it had blown front struts and two broken front springs. I replaced those with the Moog / Bilstein combination recommended on the Armada forum, but that made the nose of the car sit a bit high, which in turn made me look at the rear of the truck. One of the reasons I’d bought this Armada was that it has the tow package, which includes a self-leveling rear end, and it was clear that it wasn’t doing its leveling thing due to a bad air compressor and blown rear air shocks. Most folks on the Armada forum who complained about this problem solved it by deleting the rear air system in favor of the same Moog springs and Bilstein shock combo as recommended for the front. I resisted doing that, as replacing the springs meant disconnecting the rear wishbones, but finding a set of open-box Bilstein rear shocks for a great price tipped the scales. Having installed the Bilsteins but left the stock springs in place, nothing seemed egregiously wrong with the truck in around-town driving, but then again I hadn’t towed with it. When the auto transporter was set on the hitch, the truck’s nose-ward pitch was amplified a bit, but it didn’t appear too bad. I then uttered the traditional incantation (“May the Automotive Powers That Be have mercy on my Hack Mechanic soul”), and off to upstate New York I went.

Of course, the other part of this was the truck’s air conditioning. As I wrote a few weeks ago, I kluged my way around an odd problem of the A/C intermittently shutting off by installing a wirelessly-controlled switch to directly turn on the compressor. I conducted the drive through 90-degree temperatures by running the A/C normally, waiting for it to switch off, waiting to see how long it took to switch back on, and overriding it when I became uncomfortable. It all worked fine.

Unfortunately, when I got off the Mass Pike and began driving on local roads up through the hills to Averill Park, it began raining. I realized that I had brought no umbrella or raincoat, and had forgotten to pack a pair of the Tyvek coveralls I rely on when I crawl under cars. I wasn’t looking forward to inspecting the BMW’s undercarriage.

By the time I arrived at the seller’s friend’s body shop (which was closed on Saturday so I couldn’t ask to use the lift), the rain had let up to a light drizzle. The seller had already jump-started the car from his pickup. I checked that there was no oil in the coolant or vice versa, then began circling the car, focusing my eyes lower with each pass. I remembered that there was a wide rubber-backed carpet mat in the cargo area in the back of the Armada. I pressed it into service to separate me from the mud as I lay down left, right, front, and back of the car and looked under it with a flashlight. Amazingly, the only rust that I felt might go through if I poked it with something sharp was a pencil-eraser-sized spot of corrosion. However, the engine compartment, though basically stock, looked like it hadn’t seen much maintenance in decades.

With the rain, I was laser-focused on doing what I came for, but I paused to chat a moment with the seller. He seemed like an unusual guy to have owned an E30 for 23 years, as his two other enthusiast cars were a 1980 C3 Corvette and a 1966 Plymouth Barracuda (I got points for saying “Oh, you like cars with big curved rear glass, eh?” and showing him a pic of my BMW E9), but he said he was a technician at a Ford dealer where the car had been traded in, and always really liked driving it.

When I went to the trunk to unhook the jumper cables so I could test-drive the car, I caught a strong acrid whiff of rodent urine and could see the tell-tale trail of seeds, dung, and discoloration near the forward trunk wall. Great, I thought; not another mousey vehicle. Fortunately, when I sat inside, the smell was far less pronounced.

I drove the car for perhaps 30 seconds around the muddy parking lot, just enough to verify that the brakes, clutch, transmission, and shift linkage worked, there weren’t any crunching or banging metal sounds, and there wasn’t a 007-like oil cloud behind it. Other than obviously needing front struts, it ran and drove surprisingly well.

Sure. What the hell. Why not. There’s risk in everything, but where else am I going to find a rust-free E30 for this price? I handed over five grand, he signed the title, and we wrote up a bill of sale. I loaded the car onto the trailer. It was, without question, the quickest bag, tag, and drag I’ve ever done.

As I was driving homeward, I began thinking about the logistics of where to put the car. Bringing it home was problematic. I could park it in the driveway, but if I wanted to tear into it in the garage, I hadn’t worked through the calculus of which weather-shy car would be kicked outside. The trip home took me right past the exit for the warehouse in Monson where I store cars, so if I wanted to just stash the E30 there for a while, it would never be easier to drop it off than right now. But you don’t buy something like this to not begin playing with it, so home it came.

I pulled onto my street, slid the ramps out of the back of the transporter, and was about to unload the E30 when I looked at the Armada and saw that it was now doing the full-on Carolina Squat. Clearly my “maybe I can get by with leaving the rear suspension alone” tack doesn’t apply to towing.

As I thought through the pros and cons of driving the E30 to see what it needed versus immediately addressing the myriad obvious maintenance needs, the central issue was the timing belt. The M20 motor in the E30 3 Series is the only engine BMW built that has a rubber timing belt instead of a timing chain, and it’s an interference engine, where pistons and valves operate in the same space in the cylinder at the top of the stroke, so if the belt breaks, you cry. While I really try to be the kind of buyer who doesn’t ask questions after the sale, I texted the seller asking if he knew when the timing belt was last replaced. He replied “I did it when I bought the car.” That was 23 years ago. Yeesh! I pulled my 2002tii out of the garage, crossed my fingers, jump-started the E30 one more time, very gingerly backed it in, shut it off, wiped the beads of worry-sweat off my forehead, and went straight inside the house to my laptop and ordered a timing belt kit.

And then something unexpected happened. After I put the kit on order, I looked at the photos of when I replaced the timing belt on my old ’87 325is. My eyes widened when I saw the date stamp on the photo of that car loaded on a trailer and towed by my Suburban—7/3/2014. Ten years to the day that I brought its 1988 doppelganger home. Wow.

The Automotive Powers That Be work in mysterious ways.

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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.