The Lama teaches me three big lessons

A few weeks ago I wrote about lessons learned when I stepped outside my usual risk-averse “I generally don’t buy cars I’m not familiar with, and I almost never buy cars I can’t personally inspect” wheelhouse.

I can’t believe that I forgot The Lama.

In 2014, I bought a very nice, very original, nearly rust-free E30 3-Series BMW 325is. I kept it for a few years, did some light sorting on it, and when I lost my job in 2017, I sold it and took a profit. In retrospect, it was too early. E30 prices were really on the upswing. Had I waited, I could’ve taken a really nice profit. I tried to get into another E30 to flip and augment my unemployment, but by that time the word was out.

However, E28 5-Series BMWs were also on the rise and didn’t have quite the same premium as the E30 3-Series cars. So in the summer of 2018, I bought a 1987 BMW E28 535i sight-unseen in Tampa. The ad said, “Unmolested rare 1987 BMW 535i 5 speed transmission, has only 133,000 miles. Rare find, especially with a manual gearbox, Lama interior. This car does run and drive but needs tune up and front brakes. Does have minor surface rust and driver’s seat needs repair, car is all power and everything works. 100% original, no modifications were done to this E28 except for new fuel tank, fuel pump & filter, new sensors were also changed out. Great candidate for full restoration, great bones. No accident history. $2250 obo.” (And yes, BMW spells the interior color “Lama” with one L.)

The cell phone pics in the Craigslist ad were poor, but the car appeared to be intact, other than a few isolated rust bubbles at the bottom of one door and around the sunroof. The seller and I chatted on the phone. He said the car had belonged to a gentleman who passed away. The car then sat in the family’s garage for five years. The seller bought it and began sorting it out (hence the fuel system work) but then found another project. He sent me the VIN, I ran a CarFax, and it came up clean, showing that the car had lived in Florida its entire life.

I told the seller that I’d consider flying down and road-tripping the car home (after all, I’d recently completed the Ran When Parked adventure of buying a dead 2002tii, reviving it, and driving it back). He said that the car was sitting on its original dry-rotted TRX tires, and at a minimum that would need to be addressed. Plus, he said that the car was running rough, that the brake pedal sometimes sank to the floor, and that since he posted the ad, he noticed that the car was leaking a little antifreeze. Still, running and driving beats dead every day and twice on Sunday. I did some reconnaissance—I found that round-trip flights on Spirit were $110 (meaning that I could fly down, look at the car, and fly home if I didn’t like what I saw), and I spoke with an old colleague of mine, who lived in Tampa, about the possibility of camping out there for a few days while I gave the car what it needed.

After a few more calls with the seller (in which I remotely diagnosed the coolant leak as something trivial and joked that I was undercutting my bargaining position) it was clear he just needed the car gone. We put together a deal—I paid him $1400, which included him having the car towed to my friend Al’s house. Al isn’t a car guy, but he was certainly capable of driving the car and telling me what he found. He said that the brake pedal did initially go to the floor, but firmed up with repeated pumping, which sounded like either air in the brake lines or a bad master cylinder. However, he also reported that there was a loud rattling noise.

The gears began turning in my head. It sounded like a mini-Ran-When-Parked was in order. Have a master cylinder, spark plugs, belts, and a just-in-case water pump drop-shipped to Al’s house, buy a round-trip ticket with a three-day return, fly down, go out to dinner a few nights and talk about old times, change the master in his driveway, and drive home if I could or bail and fly home and arrange to ship the car if it got too hairy.

The dry-rotted TRX tires, though, were a problem. TRX was Michelin’s odd metric-sized low-profile tire used during the 1980s on a variety of European cars. They’re mounted on specific TRX metric-sized wheels. So if the car has TRX wheels and needs TRX tires, there are no inexpensive off-brand options. You either pay Coker Tire the $350 per tire for reproductions, or you ditch the whole TRX thing and find a normal set of wheels from a later model. So I combed Craigslist in Tampa, Ocala, and Jacksonville for a set of four used wheels and good tires that I could slap on, but nothing materialized.

Then I did what I do and crunched the numbers for the projected expenses for driving the Lama back. I figured that, at a bare minimum, between the airfare, gas, two nights in a cheap model, and food, it came to $650, excluding the cost of wheels and tires. And that was if nothing went wrong on the 1400-mile drive. When I received a shipping quote from a broker who a friend recommended (and who I’ve used ever since) and the cost came in at $700, I realized I’d be an idiot not to pull the trigger on it.

So I had The Lama shipped home. My friend Al met the transport at his house. Unfortunately, the photo he sent me of the car being loaded showed it engulfed in oil smoke, which was the first I’d heard of this particular problem.

The smoke show was repeated when the car arrived and was dropped off a few streets from my house (my street is too small for multi-level transporters). Once off the transport, the car died in the middle of the street. I got it started, but it ran horribly, smoked like five chimneys, and rattled like a chainsaw. I pumped up the brake pedal and beat it around the block and into my driveway. It was then that I noticed the gas dripping from the back. I put the car up on my mid-rise lift and was glad to find that the gas leak was just a loose clamp on the output hose from the fuel pump, and the chainsaw noise was just a loose exhaust shield. Both issues were fixed in minutes. Was that all? Did I just get lucky?

While the car was up, I bled the brakes, and found that fluid only came out from one caliper, likely due to swelled flexible brake hoses. I put them on order and took the car for a short test drive. This time the car easily started but still ran poorly, still generating clouds of oil smoke. If I was lucky, the smoke was due to stuck rings from the car’s five-year-long sit, and they’d unstick with use, but there’s no knowing which way luck goes until it plays out.

With the chainsaw noise gone, I could hear the engine, and the valve train sounded loud. I did a compression test and found 155 in five cylinders and 135 in cylinder #4. Concerning but not awful. I followed up with a leak-down test and didn’t see any open valves.

But when the engine cooled and I pulled the valve cover to adjust the valves, I was horrified to find a broken intake rocker arm on #4 cylinder. Most of the pieces had collected in the depression on the exhaust side, but looking carefully, I could see where one piece had chipped one of the cam lobes.

So much for luck.

What did I just buy?

The six-cylinder M30 engines in the big BMWs sold in the United States from 1968 through 1991 are, like the four-cylinder M10 engine in the 2002, incredibly stout as long as they’re not overheated, and broken rocker arms are uncommon as long as the engine isn’t raced and over-revved. But the rocker arms run on shafts that are banged into the head. To replace a rocker arm, the rocker shaft passing through it has to be banged out. And to do that, the head has to come off. I was perfectly capable of doing all that (I’ve done it many times), but the problem is that you invariably go from simply yanking the head and replacing the one broken part to sliding down the slippery slope and completely dismantling the head and bringing it to a machine shop to have it resurfaced and have the valves done.

My reaction was to re-evaluate the project before moving further. I put the car back up on the lift, examined it carefully, and found a bit more rust than I’d expected; the inside corner of one of the doors completely rotted out.

Taken together, I sighed and thought, “That’s what I get for buying a car sight-unseen.” I decided to get out of the car. I photographed it, described the condition accurately and honestly (my wife would say TOO honestly), and advertised it locally for what I had in it, but there were no takers. As Thanksgiving rolled into December and the car was still here, I somewhat reluctantly accepted The Lama and its broken rocker arm as a winter project.

So, as the Queen of Hearts said in Alice in Wonderland, off with its head. There was the immediate whiff of a smoking gun when I looked into cylinder #4 and saw a little nick in the piston crown where the intake valve had kissed it. At least I knew why the rocker had broken.

With the head on a fold-up work table, I wondered if I could do the arthroscopic version of the procedure and simply drop in another rocker arm without disturbing anything else. To my surprise, I did succeed in separating the two intake rocker shafts just enough to pull the broken rocker arm out. I thought that, boy, I could pull a used arm out of my parts stash, drop it in, bang the shafts back together, drop the head back on with a new gasket, and be done with it.

Then I decided that, having gotten this far, I should at least lap the valves. So I banged the shafts out, pulled the cam, and did the twisty thing with the wooden valve lapping stick with the suction cup and the end, attached to the valve, its edges coated with grinding compound.

I did this on all 12 valves, but using both solvent and compressed air to check the seals, I was never quite sure that I did a good enough job. So I took it all in to the machine shop, which checked the head for straightness. Of course it was slightly warped; they all are at this age. And the machinist surprised me by saying that not just one intake valve was bent—four of them were. (I told him that that the leak-down test didn’t reveal anything obvious. The seen-it-all machinist deadpanned, “They were obviously bent when I spun them. They must’ve been sealing on carbon.”)

I picked up the minty-fresh head from the machine shop and began reassembling it. To hold costs down, I bought one new rocker arm to replace the broken one, but reused the rest of the original rockers and the shafts. I nearly re-used the cam, as I convinced myself that the broken edge of the lobe wasn’t actually on the rocker’s running surface, but when I carefully inspected the cam, I found that there was a good-sized gouge right in the middle of another lobe. I sourced a good used cam and threw things back together.

With the head reassembled, the valve clatter was gone, but the car still ran horribly. I checked the fuel pressure and it read over a hundred psi. At first I thought that this was due to a bad fuel pressure regulator, but it turned out that the metal part of the fuel return line was clogged, spiking fuel pressure and making the system run incredibly rich. I reamed it out, fuel pressure returned to normal, and the car finally ran decently but not perfectly. Replacing the fuel injectors with a rebuilt set made it cross the line to well-running.

Whew!

Despite having ample opportunity to look for wheels and tires to replace the TRXs while the car was laid up, I never found the cheap set of good wheels and tires I imagined would be thick as snowplows in the Northeast. I did, however, find a nice set of $200 BBS basketweave wheels from an E32 BMW 7-series, and ponied up for new rubber.

I did the full required brake job, knocked a few other items off the punch list—such as the voltage regulator and the blower motor—and then decided to list the car again. This time it had traction. A couple in Alabama who’d heard me speak at a BMW event down there contacted me. I offered to fix a few more things, and we settled on $4250, which was about what I had in it. So if the aim was to make money, I failed miserably.

Of course, the aim in most of my automotive endeavors isn’t really to make money. It’s to buy cars I like, have a relationship with them for the time they sojourn with me, keep them for however long it feels right, and move them on to the next owner when it’s time. Nevertheless, there were three big lessons from the Lama.

The first was the one I already knew—unless you or another knowledgeable car person you trust lays eyeballs and hands on the car, there’s a lot of risk. People can lie three ways: They can lie through their teeth, they can lie by omission, and they can lie passively because they assume but don’t know for sure. It’s unclear which was the case here; I don’t know whether or not the seller knew about the broken rocker shaft. But had I or a knowledgeable friend looked at the car, the combination of the oil burning, the rough running, and the valve train noise might have warned me off.

The second was that I’ve long said that dead cars pose a lot of risk as well as a lot of potential reward. If you can revive a car easily, you can either have a nice driver for yourself or a potential moneymaker, but if you can’t drive it, anything can be wrong and you won’t know. Even if it’s not a remote purchase—hell, even if a car is local and free—there’s no way to drive risk down to zero. These older BMW engines tend to be very robust and seem to like being revived, so I thought the risk of the car acutely needing engine work was low, and even after having done a compression and a leak-down test, I didn’t expect a broken rocker arm. I thought that the Lama’s $1400 purchase price was low enough that it had the risk baked into it, but I was wrong.

The third was that there’s a huge distinction between a car like, say, a vintage Porsche 911 or a split-windowed ‘Vette that’s worth gobs of money in any condition, and a car like a BMW E28 5-Series sedan that’s worth moderate money if it’s in great shape and less than you’d think if it’s not. So if you’re actually trying to make a little coin, it’s better to pick a car whose value isn’t so condition-dependent.

Live and learn. Well, at least live.

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