Thanks guys. It's been a lot of work and it hasn't always been fun.
Haven't done a lot of big stuff over the last few days, but we are getting kinda down to the piddly crap now.
I figured out the 2500 rpm hesitation issue. I bought a new old stock AFM from a guy in Germany and hopefully I'll receive it sometime in 2017. Everything was pointing to the AFM being the issue. Given tracking status hasn't changed in over ten days (WTF), I decided to look at other things. I swapped Ignition modules, ECUs, did a bunch of other checks on stuff and finally said, "I need to adjust the TPS again." I put the meter on it and I had "001" with the throttle closed. I couldn't rotate the switch anymore, so I was thinking it was bad. I decided to move it the other direction. The number shot way up, then gradually came down and then I got "000." Runs really smoothly now. It was off quite a bit. I guess when the motor was hitting about 2500 rpm, the TPS was saying idle. So, as long as the AFM shows up sometime, I can relax a bit.
Next, I had to do the sun visors. I had a brand new pair I had gotten a few years ago. I went to put them in and discovered that the brand new pair weren't for an E12, rather an E21, so they were useless to me. I went through the stack of visors and found the originals from this car. Of the E12 visors I had, they were actually the best ones.
After lots and lots of cleaning, a huge improvement for sure, but next to the new headliner, a bit of a let down.
I had never mounted the trunk spoiler. Reason being that there were two holes that needed to be made on the underside of the trunklid so I could put nuts on the outermost spoiler studs. The original had them but in all the commotion, Mike lost track and I wasn't thinking about them either. I was going to wait and let Mike make the holes, but I got tired of nothing getting done, so I sprung into action. The current owner of my old white M535i was nice enough to take some measurements of the holes in his trunk lid and I figured out the diameter of the hole and started shopping for a hole saw or something to make it. I soon discovered that the big drawback to hole saws is the bit that drills the pilot hole. There isn't enough of a distance between the bottom layer of metal and the top of the trunk lid. After conferring with a friend, he suggested I use a cutter with a spring loaded locating pin and said to look at the Rotabroach. So, I bought a set from Amazon and the largest size in the smaller set was sufficient.
I bought the stick lube as well. I used a small drill bit and drilled a pilot hole through the hole for the stud in the top of the trunk though the bottom layer. That was perfect for setting the locating pin.
Then I chucked up the ol' Rotabroach and voila!
Super clean hole. Very impressed. Made quick work of it too. I touched-up the bare metal with some primer and then later some polaris and good to go.
I mounted up the spoiler. So interesting.
Once the spoiler was on the car, I affixed the stripe, the roundel and the model badging.
I hadn't yet mounted the lower left dash panel. Reason being that I didn't have a reverse light harness. I have no idea what happened to the one that was on the car. I decided to pull the one out of the 6er in the backyard and use that as a guide to make one. Turned out it only had half of one. Fortunately, it had the grommet and the part that connected inside the car. I had an E28 one, so I combined the two to make a good one and then spent an hour feeding it into some heat-shrink tubing. Hooked it up and everything worked. Awesome. With that done, I attached the fader, switch for the power antenna and the power window circuit breakers and then the panel to the car. I can't find my new pedal pads, but they're cheap enough and easily available that I can just pick up a new pair.
I while I had the front of the car in the air, I put the lock wire on the front strut to knuckle bolts and called it a day.
Just a couple of piddly things left. I should be able to drive the car now, but it's still insured for like $6500, so I need to figure all of that out before it leaves the garage again.
