My ride. Current Mood: ouch. The car was towed into our shop not running, had no compression and 249,000 on the clock. A little checking led to...

Sneak Preview.

Tah Dah! Broken chain guides. This vehicle was not terribly well maintained. Which is to say this vehicle was poorly maintained. .249 million miles, and the chain guides had never been replaced. The front cam oiler bolt had loosened up too. I was almost ready to pull the head and send it out until I could find a replacement engine, when one of the other guys mentioned the car had a knocking rod when starting. Damn.

Gah. Look at the crap on the exhaust valves. You can really see every one of the miles on this thing.

Blech. You can really see how poorly this car was looked after. Everything is dirty, and that's after I've dumped 4 or 5 cans of Gunk's Foamy Engine Brite onto everything just to clean it enough for me to work on it. EVERYTHING was covered in oil and road crap. Be glad I didn't take pictures of the state of the car before that, the skin under your fingernails would be crawling. Ick.

Intake off, just more dirt.

Doesn't look so bad in the right light though. And it IS an E34, still an awesome car. I've had plenty of cars (something like 65 at last count) in my time, and this is one of the few I ever looked forward to spending money on.

I love how the rear of this car looks. I don't even mind the Glacier Blue paint job. I think I'd actually prefer it to black or silver.

The Down Side. The clearcoat on the paint is toast. The whole car is going to need to be sanded down and shot. It's ok, I don't mind as I can use the practice wet sanding.

Some rust. I don't know how this corner got rubbed without being dented, but it rubbed to bare metal and rusted. Weird.

Some cancer in the right rear wheel arch. Nothing major, totally repairable, and it will look straight when finished.

Some more cancer. No big deal as this trim and the other door molding will be removed before painting. The car looks so much cleaner without the trim and molding, I couldn't live with myself putting them back on.

Happy Times! I picked up a wrecked E32 for $500. 89,000 miles! Now I've got an engine and tranny, and a 3.64 limited slip differential! What a score, if you need some E32 parts email me, the car got stripped. Not too many good interior parts though. Also, the engine and trans were pretty dirty looking, and I couldn't justify swapping engines without cleaning it up, so...

Block and Head sandblasted. Everything got taped off, block got painted black, head got clearcoated. Motor mounts, Oil filter canister, timing covers. All pulleys will be done as well, including the alternator housing too. Aluminum mounts for all accessories didn't escape the sand. I bought 150 lbs of sand at Home Depot. $3.90 for a 50 lb bag of fine playground sand, and the stuff works great. Did it all outside at the shop, many days spent washing sand out of everywhere. It's like going to the beach and not being able to wash sand off in the ocean. Totally worth every grain of salt in the hair when you see the results!

Other side. Exhaust manifolds blasted and painted too. High temp black grill paint will work until I can get the other manifolds off the bad engine and send them out to get ceramic coated. I don't expect the high temp to last very long, but I did want to blast the rust off, and at the very least it'll keep them rust free until the car's running again. If burning off paint is the consequence of the car running, well then I'm prepared to accept that!

Transmission. Blasted, waiting for me to pull the thing apart and inspect the seals on the stator for the A Clutch Pack. Don't want the whole "rev in neutral" problem, now do I?

No, I don't.

Timing Covers. I have two on the engine now that were cleaned of crap in the parts washing tank, but these two have been blasted and clearcoated. I'm going to put these on, and blast and polish the spare set. So I'll have had the set on the junk motor, the set on the good motor. The junk motor set went on the good motor for blasting and painting, so I wouldn't care about overspray, and they would keep sand out of the motor. The good motor set got blasted and clearcoated, and they will go on the good motor again when it goes in the car, in which time I'll have the bad motor set blasted and polished, and will put them in the car further down the road. Got that?

Got Boost? This turbo is tiny, like really teeny tiny.
It'll work for mocking up the up and downpipes though.