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Showing content with the highest reputation on 07/18/25 in all areas
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11 pointsAnd a little interior update. Bought a new gear gaiter, handbrake boot and armrest cover and recoloured my leather to a sexy cinnamon brown. Not sure how well the vinyl door card inserts will wear but I have some spare leather I can recover them with if required.
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2 pointsBMW 633csi 1980 Ever wished you could get your hands on a shark? This beast has had a full professional repaint. Plus full engine and gear reconditioning. With a bit of finishing off on this Beemer you’ll be cruising in style. Over the last several years the following has been completed: Has had a full windows and engine out respray. Brake master cylinder has been completely renewed and brake service. New shock absorbers all round BBS 17” replicas added - they are very rare with this size and offset. Ceiling relined (sunroof section needs to be reattached). Genuine mono steering wheel. New window screen and seals. Has a current WOF, but may need some work before next one comes up? I’ll try and get to some of these items as time allows: Steering box may need a look at. Needs new tyres. Current ones, whilst still have plenty of tread, have flat spots from sitting. Cosmetically the exterior is in exceptional shape. Interior wise , the dash has a crack or two (I have a replacement dash). Radio needs to be put back in. Heater box works, but control valve needs replacing. Also the wipers and indicators aren’t working. 3 of 4 windows aren’t working either . I’d give this car a 8 or 9 out of 10 exterior wise . A 6/10 interior. 7 or 8 out of 10 mechanically. Open to offers or swaps $25000 Happy for viewings or questions. Royal Oak 02102924907
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1 pointBought this one back in May to swap the interior in to my Black 130i. I’ve got 2 other bimmers that are black on black so wanted a nice contrast for the 3rd one. Plan is to tidy it up, fix engine and sell. Cosmetically it’s pretty tidy but the reason why it’s posted here is because the engine is turning out to be a bit of a headache to sort out. It has a persistent tick/rattle at idle coming from the exhaust side of the valvetrain, on the rear bank of cylinders. Like my black 130i I thought this would be a fairly straightforward fix with a decent cam, bearing ledge (tried 3 different ones) and set of 12 new lifters. Nope! I’m a bit poor on time with 2 young kids these days, but after finding nothing really conclusive taking the valve cover off 3 f**kn times I went back to basics and checked compression. Cyl’s 4&5 are about 24-26psi down on others so although not terrible, it leads me to believe the lower readings on those cyl’s correlate to the noise I’ve verified with a stethoscope coming from the valvetrain for those cyl’s. Aside from the tick at idle it drives nicely, has some trick Bilstein “Executive tuning” shocks. Pretty low kms at 135k. Not a fan of the auto but the auto blip on downshift is somewhat sporty. Have since done a full interior swapout including dashboard and centre console with my black 130, cut and polish and a general tidy up. Here’s a few pics of progress. Made 1 decent iDrive monitor out of 2 that had different issues A bit of a going over of the paintwork Little bit of wear on the original bearing ledges, but now I know that wasn’t the issue. The 3rd set I installed was pretty mint and from a car with around 100k kms on it. It seems the 130i n52’s have hollow exhaust camshafts, where as other n52’s have solid ones despite all being the same pn. The cam I fitted in my black 130 was from a 330 and was solid, and the others I pulled from a 323 and 2x 325’s were solid too. Bit of an oopsy with the tensioner. Must’ve put the dummy tensioner (hardened steel) in crooked when I did the timing and chewed out the alu threads. Tightened the tensioner to strip (was pretty f’d off and not thinking straight) then removed it and managed to fix the head side by running a tap in the hole and replaced with a new tensioner. Whew! As for Compression results… I got the engine up to operating temp then pulled the coils and plugs out followed by adjusting the vtronic motor to the position ista calls for. Then my sh*t comp tester blew out the hose after testing 2 cyl’s. I got another tester and by the time I got home, proceeded to test with the engine luke warm. Wasn’t fussed about outright numbers, just deviation between cylinders. Let’s see what leakdown testing finds…..
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1 pointAnyone notice the guy got the roundel on the bonnet filled up and painted over? Interesting look lol
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1 pointConverting my heater over to electric started from the failure of the central locking system and electric windows on my coupe. During the diagnostics for the electrics I discovered 3 water leaks contributing to the water under the carpet that corroded out the +12V junction under the passenger seat. 1. One of the floor bungs had popped out allowing road water to enter when driving in the wet. 2. The seal between the heater and firewall had failed + the drain for the air entry into the heater was blocked. 3. My heater core is leaking (but only just). Because the heater solenoids are also stuffed with one side is stuck on hot and the other cold I decided rather than try to fix / replace everything why not convert the heater to electric. The BMW solenoid spare part is around $650+GST... My battery is in the boot with the main 70mm² cable running under the drivers seat. Tomorrow I'm going to cut this cable and re-join it with a barrel hex-crimp + fit 2 x 6mm² cables in prior to crimping. These 2 cables will be double sleeved to make sure there's no chance of a short to chassis. They will supply the bulk power to 2 new electric heater elements. I purchased a complete second hand heater from the wreckers. I also used this as an excuse to pull the dashboard out of the donor car so I could see how it's done and what old brittle plastic breaks in the process. It's remarkably easy, just time consuming. I've now stripped down the heater unit and removed the air-conditioning core and the heater core. My air-conditioning compressor died about 10 years ago and de-gassed itself in the process so I removed it back then - not worth fixing. When I did the engine upgrade a while ago I ripped out all the remaining air-conditioning garbage from the front of the car - got rid of around 60kg. I've purchased 2 x 300W ceramic PTC heaters from Ebay. These should draw about 21-23A at 14V since they operate almost like constant power devices. This means a total load of 42-46A on the alternator - hopefully it can cope. If not then I'll upgrade it. The new heaters should arrive later this week. I'm going to fit the new heater elements to an aluminum plate that will be glued into the position the old heater core lived. There's 3 openings that also need to be blocked up; where the air-conditioning pipes entered, where the coolant pipes entered through the firewall and where the coolant pipes enter the heater box. Now for the controls for the heater elements. The heater element will not be allowed to run unless the engine is running and the battery voltage is above 13.5V. This will turn on 2 relays that supply 13.5-14.4V to one end of the heater elements. The heater element on-off control will use the original water solenoid control signals. This will operate the left and right heater elements independently just like it used to. I'll construct a simple dual switch using mosfets which is enabled by the heater solenoid signals. There will be a temperature sensor on each heater element to limit the element to 95'C (similar to coolant temperature). The mosfets will switch on and off to keep the elements at 95'C. There will be a secondary sensor on each element to switch it off if it reaches 110'C in case the primary fails (drop out the main relays). The mosfets will pull the other end of the heater element to ground. The climate control system is expecting the heater core to run at about 90-95'C (coolant temperature) so I'm hoping setting the elements to this temperature means the temperature regulation will still work in a similar way to original. I suspect the 300W heater elements won't get to full temperature most of the time though. The airflow will likely be much higher than required to keep them below 95'C. It's also likely it won't create anywhere as much heat as the old heater core could have as 600W is not much power. It will be instant heat though as soon as the engine is running and it will still be enough to heat the small space - it just might take a minute or two longer to warm up. I'll take a bunch of photo's once the heater elements arrive and start fitting everything to the donor heater case. I'll also include the fairly basic circuit for the control of the elements once this is knocked together. Given there's a lot of E36 out there with failed heater solenoids and heater cores just waiting to leak (or already leaking) this mod might appeal to some people. The cost in dollars to do the conversion is relatively minor. The time is not. I'm guessing around 4 days to build the new heater, strip everything out of the car, bypass the heater pipework, fit the new heater and put everything back together. My car is already stripped out except for the dashboard - no seats (except drivers seat), carpet, glovebox or console - about a days work so far to strip everything out, clean it up and rust-kill a couple of surface rust areas that have been sitting wet for a while.
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1 pointDisassembled the front seats in the E30 as there were a few niggles, sorted all excluding the stuffed backrest shocks, which will be replaced one day. The drivers side backrest bolster had broken and missing plastic piping and a split wide open seam for a few inches. I sewed a new run of piping using the original nylon core around some spotlight vinyl, then sewed that into the two parts of leather using the existing holes so as to not make a ‘tear here’ line(leather needles have a blade which cuts as opposed to separates the fibres). Happy with result.
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0 pointsAh k, the solid one I got from a 330 was manufactured in late 2004. I was thinking maybe hollow cams were exclusive to 130i N52’s. Who knows…I’ve seen alot of cross-over of parts changing over the years messing with bimmers.