I guess every so often, I have to update things, right? Apparently it's true that projects aren't really ever finished. Of course, I've had to fix a few things and then I also fixed some stuff that wasn't broken.
One of the more annoying things I've had since I put the car together was the fact that I had what amounted to E24 rear trailing arms. The arm itself is the same between the two cars, but the E24 has a wider track in the rear and vented rotors. The offset of the rotor is different and the vented portion of the rotor was added to the back side, so the stub axles themselves were actually longer, pushing the hub flange closer to the fender. That explains why the tires always rubbed from day one on the car. Of course, what was also apparent is that the rear subframe and trailing arms doesn't look to have ever been out of the car with the yellow paint being present on the fasteners when I removed it, so I have no answers, though it wouldn't surprise me to the find that this was all done after the fact. Anyway, this really created a problem trying to come home from San Diego in 2017 with stuff in the car. There was considerable fender to tire interference. We had to come up with something to prevent this, so JP at La Jolla Independent helped us with this:
Basically, it involved adding another spring perch flipped upside down to help raise the rear of the car. With it loaded up with all the crap, it was okay, but it kinda sucked to drive empty. Felt like I was staring at the road in my jacked-up Nova. Also, the rear wheels had some positive camber and it just didn't like to go around corners. That said, it was drivable and I didn't make it a huge priority. That is, until I registered for the 2019 Targa California. Now I gave myself a reason to fix this.
Essentially, all I needed to fix this was the E12 stub axles. The brake calipers have spacers in them which I could remove and reassemble, so everything should work. I ordered two new stub axles. I can only get one. Great. Walloth and Nesch show one available, so I order like $1200 in stuff from them for the 2002, an E24 project I've been working on and various other crap. They send me an email after shipping the order saying that the entire reason I placed the order was NLA and they're refunding that cost. Ugh. So this left me to try to find a car with the parts. I figured I'm in for buying entire trailing arms since no one wants to pull these. JP tells me about a car in the yard in Chula Vista. I figure I'll be there in two weeks for St. Paddy's day. It literally just hit the yard and no one wants this crap, so maybe I'll be okay. So I start monitoring the inventory every day to be sure. I'm checking other cars with older dates to see how long they stay on the yard. Seems like I'm going to make it! Sure, I could have paid someone to go get the trailing arms, but I don't know if I'm cheap or just don't want to bother anyone, who knows. Probably both. I head over to San Diego the Thursday before. Ray and his son Jack go as well. We're all sitting at Darin's Thursday night and I check the inventory. No E12. You have got to be kidding me. I decide to tag along with them anyway on Friday and I ask about the car at the gate. Not in the system so they say it's been crushed. Jack and I go over to look in the prep yard to see if the car is still there. Couldn't see anything. Great. Ray is pulling parts, and I find a bunch of Volvo 240s, so decide to make the most of my time there. Thats when Ray calls and says the car is still there. They're just starting to pull the row out. No way! So I get to work and get the left trailing arm pulled. I have the right most of the way out but they have to move the car. While they moved it, they dragged it around, bent the crap out of not only the backing plate but most importantly the bolt for the sway bar. Ugh. In the end, I prevailed. Add to that, the guy at the window couldn't understand what I was buying so I paid for a hub and a control arm. Out the door for $50. When I got home, I broke them down and here we go.
Cool. Then, I got busy. But, I also ended up talking about exhaust systems with some one and found that SuperSprint makes an entire system for the E12 M535i. Including headers. Neat. Then I got an email from Turner Motorsport saying they were having a sale. Crazy. This stuff showed up 7 weeks later. Oops.
So, I had a huge month coming up where it was going to be non-stop work with some traveling involved too (The Vintage). Targa was coming the first week in June, so this stuff needed to get on the car! I got started the next week.
I love how it looks basically stock. Sounds pretty good too. Honestly, at first I wasn't sure how worthwhile the upgrade was even though everything went together perfectly. The only complaint is that the bracket for the front hanger on the muffler comes straight out instead of going up and out, so I'll have to come up with another option for that. Had a bit of minor fettling to do to the heat shield over the idler arm as well, but I'm impressed.
So, now that the important part is finished (upgrading the perfectly fine stock exhaust), I moved on to the swap of the stub axles and removal of the extra spring perches. I was prepared with new lock rings for the nuts and got to work.
Wow what an improvement!
Time for Targa California. I loaded up with my spare parts, some sparse cleaning supplies, put some film on the headlights, swapped the kidney grille and hit the road. Then I stopped at a rest area.
The M535i performed flawlessly. I was pretty impressed with it by the end. The exhaust also opened up a bit and changed color so pretty excited about that too.
The other thing I decided to do with the car this year was take it to Monterey for Car Week. You may remember that this was the plan in 2016 when I was jamming on it constantly trying to get it done. We then had a bit of a setback about 2 weeks out from the event, which essentially killed all momentum until early 2017. I received an email looking for E12 5-series cars to take part in a special display. I had done so many events already this year that I wasn't sure I could handle another one but I had two thoughts. When are they going to feature the E12 again, and why are they featuring it now? I submitted the M535i for consideration, received an email back saying they'd love to have the car and registered for the event. This was soon followed by an email to all club members saying that they could park together if they registered with an E12. So, so much for being special I guess. Given I have driven the car to Portland, LA and most recently have done a couple thousand miles of driving across the desert and then all around central California, I knew I had my work cut out for me to clean this guy up!
My plan was to start on it August 1st and then do some work eating that elephant up until when I had to leave. Well, turns out scheduling doesn't always work out so I got started late. Plan was to leave Tuesday, August 13. I started cleaning late on Saturday, August 10.
I left late on Tuesday. Original plan was to drive straight through Tuesday and get started bright and early Wed. Didn't work out with various work commitments and I was so far behind. I had nothing ready to go. I found a set of lights to swap in for the trip, put the trip grilles in and headed out.
I spent the night (4 hours or so and a much needed shower) in Corona and met up with a few people in Huntington Beach at 5am Wed. We arrived in Pacific Grove, CA around 12:30. Checked out the Little Car Show and then I came back to OcCoupe's shop and started cleaning again. Then one of my old cars showed up!
It has an S38B36 now and got plenty of coverage through the weekend so I'm sure you will find it somewhere. Anyway, back to me.
I spent the entire day Thursday cleaning the car. I got up at 8 and stopped at 8pm.
It's been a good run, but I had to finally say goodbye to this.
Here we are Friday morning.
Look what I found next to the big ///M:
And happy to announce that the M535i placed first in the M class. The next oldest car was a '99 M Coupe. 9 cars in the class. I got to speak with a couple of the judges and they thought it was far and away the best-prepared of the cars they judged. Of course, I couldn't do it alone. I had plenty of encouragement and facilitation from others. I also want to thank OcCoupe for making some space available for me to do work on the car that would have been very difficult at our rental house.
It took three extra years, but there we go. The trip home went really well. Car drove great. Made it in one shot and got home just in time to go to the post office with the photos to mail. As for what is next, there's a couple minor things here and there I need to look at. Other than that, I'm actually pretty happy with it.
