E30 Project car

5

535iracer

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Santa Rosa, CA
#1
hey y'all...

My neighbor has an '89 325is that is for sale, and I am thinking of buying it as a project car... its in good shape, but it has over 300K miles on it and is in need of some tlc... the suspension and rear end seem to be pretty tired... I was just wondering most of all how hard this car is to work on... I just rebuilt a porsche 924, and it was a nightmare, i'm sure the BMW will be better... and also, i was wondering if this car has a lot of aftermarket support for suspension components and engine upgrades... I haven't done very much research yet, just wanted to see what you guys thought...

thanks for your help! :)
 
J

JeffD

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Orlando
#2
I started a similar project on a '91 325i about 6 months ago. Buy a Bently manual. change the timing belt. I have found that parts are easy to find and the car is easy to work on.

Jeff
 
B

bichmgnt

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Ventura CA
#4
JeffD said:
I started a similar project on a '91 325i about 6 months ago. Buy a Bently manual. change the timing belt. I have found that parts are easy to find and the car is easy to work on.

Jeff
Click to expand...
It's your neighbors car. Find out when he changed the timing belt last and if he had the water pump replaced at the same time. Belt should be changed every 50k miles. It's good to replace the water pump every other time as insurance. You have to do all the same work anyway so why not. It's a fairly simple do-it-yourself but the dealer will do it for about $250.

The cars are easy to work on and parts are readily available, although it seems there are more bolt on performance mods for the e36. But you can get very good performance out of these engines/platforms with what's out there.

I just had a great suspension put on the car for about $2K in parts and another $1K in labor. Couldn't be happier. A Jim Conforti chip sweetened the power curve. I plan on bolting on a few more parts to go faster and that'll be about it. Others do very extensive mods stroking the engines and going all out for fully adjustable race suspensions. It's all about what you want.

Check out some of these sites -

Ireland Engineering

Unofficial BMW

Turner Motorsport

There's lot's of sites out there for this car. Lots of support from this community as well.

Have fun and good luck!

Steve
 
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