Thank you all for the welcome, advice and encouragement. It's a daunting but fun learning process. Daunting because I really don't want to ruin this car/ engine and it's also something that will carry me and my family around on occasion, so I don't want my shoddy work to end up leaving us stranded somewhere, or worse! But patience and test runs will keep us safe and on track.
Thank you for the links, Stuart. I'll eventually open up the gauge cluster and see for sure what is needed to get the odo ticking correctly.
In between where we left off and what I did to the actual car next was fun and rewarding. I wasn't too keen on either set of wheels that were sold with the car. I did clean up the original bottle caps and intend to keep them with the car, but I did start searching for other wheels that would tickle my fancy and hopefully be a good deal. I found a decent looking set on Craigslist for a cool $100, so I talked with the seller and left before dawn on a 7 hour round trip to pick up a set of aftermarket wheels that just happened to have BMW center caps. They cleaned up well. One of them had the paint chipping off badly, so I decided I would try to repaint it to either match or very obviously contrast the other wheels. In taking the color paint off I ended up having to take the primer off as well and since these are aluminum wheels and I have a knack for polishing I decided to try my hand at sanding off the machine and casting marks off of this wheel and bringing it to a full polish. Boy, what a task! But it did pay off. The pictures don't do the work justice, it looks much cooler in person. Pics will follow. I also have a buddy who just happened to have a decent set of tires from one of his project cars that would fit, so he gave them to me. They are too wide and too tall but I can cruise on 'em! Car feels so much better on some decent rubber.
I browsed around e28goodies' website and picked through a few items I felt I really needed. From the other side of the world I ordered extra angle hood gas springs, front and rear window molding kit in chrome and a fuel injector rebuild kit. Shipping was fairly swift to me at about 11 days. From Pelican Parts I ordered a couple sets of bullet fuses, a front hood roundel, some grill mounting clips and some fresh air vent clips for the exterior vents behind the rear doors, the driver side was very loose with I picked up this car.
I had already ordered some gas springs for the hood from a parts store and they served their purpose while I did initial engine bay work. The new springs installed fairly easily, although they did not include clips, but wow they really do lift the hood up nearly 90 degrees, so much more comfortable to work under the hood now! Note that if I weren't as tall as I am I would have great difficulty trying to close the hood now. The window molding kit was a must have, as the stock ones were cracked, shrunken, faded and warped. I kind of regretted getting chrome instead of shadow line until I started removing the originals and noticed where they were tucked in under the corner metal fittings, they were originally chrome. It's a subtle detail after they've been installed, but knowing what they looked like before makes all the difference. Install was mostly painless, pics will follow. The fuel injector rebuild kit was straight forward to install although I haven't yet noticed any difference from before. Cold idle was the same after rebuilding, although since then I have made more adjustments and gotten some marked improvement. New roundel looks great, grill mounting clips don't quite match mine but they work, I might try to find the exact match later but for now they are doing their job and blend well enough with the others. Fresh air vent clips work perfectly, wing insert is mounted flush and secure.
Short side story: PO had "fixed" driver side view mirror by essentially using something like liquid nails to keep it from falling out of the housing. Passenger side was not fully functioning but not broken either, could still be adjusted. I was working on something in the interior and my always involved 2 year old daughter was on the passenger side of the car on a step stool poking and prodding. I heard a bit of a clunk then rattle and turned my head to see what the noise was and I see the passenger side mirror dangling out of it's housing and my daughter is suddenly invisible, lol. I was slightly frustrated by this and asked her quickly what she had done, she quickly told me that her mom had done it! It honestly cracked me up and I really had no reason to be mad, she's always gentle and if her little hand could break that mirror then it was destined to fall of anyway. Her mom wasn't too keen to hear that she'd been blamed. I, very luckily, found a seller on fb marketplace that was parting out his e28 and I got his very decent side mirror set for a very decent price. They're installed and looking fine, although not functional. I have to look into the control switch, read about it here and in the Bentley bible and see what can be done.
I know this is getting long. Something cool that I thought others here might appreciate is that I found out how to safely disassemble the kidney grill parts. I wanted to do this because I've been painting the hood grills and the actual grills themselves too and I wanted to match the black plastic in the kidneys to the other freshly painted parts. I thought I could just mask off the chrome surrounds, but after looking closely I decided I didn't have the patience to try taping off properly and upon closer inspection figured out that I could remove the chrome surrounds and actually put them back on in exactly the same way they were before disassembly. I used black trim paint on previously mentioned parts and love the look, although the paint is just a tad glossy for my taste. I also spent more time polishing different panels and trying out different waxes and coatings on the paint. New wiper blades too, for less than $4 each, too! More updates will follow in future posts, along with some requests for knowledge. For now, please enjoy some pics of the work and progress:
One of the new wheels after it was home and cleaned up.
This is the one that I crazily decided to hand sand and polish.
Stock wheels cleaned up for posterity.
This is the first trip I took in Black Betty out of the neighborhood after the engine work. Looking fine.
Before new window molding.
After, hard to tell a difference in the pics.
Playing with paint correction.
New wheels and tires mounted, wife is not a fan, I'm not 100% sold on them myself either, tires are definitely too large.
Comparison of before and after trim paint.
Front view after hood paint correction and coating, lipo, grill paint/ chrome polish and new roundel. Nothing amazing but much better than before.
Thanks for reading, sorry for the long post!
