Pseudosport's 1991 BMW 318is

A few months ago my friend's co-worker was looking to sell his e30 for $2k and asked my friend if he knew anyone who would be interested. I was tempted but at the time I already had one too many cars. A couple days went by and all my other friends were not interested so I foolishly asked for pictures.

Crap, it actually looks decent. I told him I wanted to go check it out in person then the whole Covid thing happened. MA and RI went on lock down and I was laid off from my new job which delayed things. Seller was understanding and said he would hold th car. Fast forward to last week and I was finally able to drive down to see it.

From what I'm told it was a Florida till 2008. In 2009 it was repainted right before he bought it. He then drove it daily up to 2014 till he got a new job and company vehicle. After that it sat in his garage a couple years but eventually he lost interest and bought a 55 chevy.

Overall it's in decent shape minus the interior. The driver's seat is ripped, headliner has been partly removed, and the dash is cracked. The only rust spot is under the rear battery and below the bumper. It's pretty bad but I should be able to fix it.

When we went to fire it up it ran rough and I was a little dissapointed till i noticed the intake boot was torn. After adding some duct tape it smoothed out and I was able to drive it up and down the driveway. That was good enough for me so I gave him a deposit and filled out some paperwork. This is probably a bad idea but whatever. Hopefully I can go pick it up this weekend. Anyway here are some more pictures.

Do you have a plan?  

These motors come alive above 3600 rpm,  about the time you might be thinking about the next gear. Just hold out for, more.

Have fun.

Love the tail lights! 

I think you did pretty well on that price wise as long as the rust isn't too bad...

Seems like a sweet deal. Around here even a crusty 325e is starting to ask over $3K. The battery box rot is a little surprising, given the condition of the rest of the car. It seems really rather nice outside of that problem area. The intake boot isn't to big of a deal, you can get them for $50. I'd be most concerned about the cooling system, since all the plastic end tank systems are a known weak spot. Other than that I think you just have to watch out for the timing gears on the M42, they are known to wear from my recollection. Just needs a bot of an interior sorting and it looks like you could have a nice weekend car or start building it into something more.

That's a hell of a deal. Nice job.

Plans?

Thanks guys, so far the only plan is to get it home and start sorting it out. I already ordered the intake boot and I'm trying to find a write up on how to replace the headliner. There is also some issue with the sunroof as one corner sits lower and was leaking at one point. Right now there is a bunch of silicone sealing it up and it comes with another sunroof track. 

As far as extras it has Tokico shocks and springs, some kind of stainless muffler, and there are new braided brake hoses in the trunk. No idea how many miles it actually has since the odometer stopped at 126k but it also comes with new gears to fix it. It also has an amp and sub but no idea what brand. I'm probably going to remove them so I didn't care to check. The only other thing he mentioned was that it has a Euro clock. Is that something e30 guys geek out over?

iansane (Forum Supporter) said:

That's a hell of a deal. Nice job.

Plans?

QFT

Looks like a pretty good deal, congrats.  Take a look at the M42club.com forum and the M42/M44 FB groups and E30zone. 

The battery tray is a common rust area, maybe check to see if the trunk seals or taillights may also be leaking.  The sunroof looks pretty clean, that's another common rust area.  Also check under the gas pedal, pinch welds and right behind the front wheels.  Plastic timing chain tensioners can be a failure point. 

Worth noting...use the front frame rails and the rear subframe to jack the car up.  There are small boxes right behind the front wheels that look like jacking points but are actually non-structural pieces for the assembly jig.  

That muffler definitely isn't stock, the 318is had a single-output exhaust.  The respray look OK from here...the fact they didn't paint over the black bumper trim is a big plus.

The Euro clock is likely a cheap (ebay) replacement.  There should be an OBC in that space.  The screens in the OBC typically fail and it's easier/cheaper to just throw a clock in there (my 318i came that way).  There are a few different types of OBCs (9 button & 12 button?) and the harnesses are diffferent.  I pulled one from a junkyard and then realized it wouldn't fit.  

Odometer gears are an easy replacement.  There are two types of gauge clusters (VDO & motometer).  Pretty sure you need to pull the cluster and check the back to make sure you order the right gears (I also need to do this w/mine...ODO reads somewhere north of 250k). Hopefully he ordered the right gears to replace.

The taillights and plate filler look interesting, I like the look of the taillights.  I'd guess they're both Depo or generic ebay replacements...but the E30 crowd will geek out over euro replacements.  There are Startec taillights listed for $1500 a pair in FL.    Facelift (1989+) lights are pretty easy to find if you want to go back to OEM ~$100 or so.  Check the foam seals on the taillights closely...mine had a big gap in the seal.

The headlights look like Euro Smileys.  If they're actually Hellas (not cheap Depo brand knockoffs) they're pretty desirable and not cheap.

Feel free to ditch the cold air intake...BMW engineers already thought that one through. The OEM system is a cold-air intake drawing air from behind the headlight.  

Electric fan & mishimoto radiator is a common cooling system upgrade, I haven't bothered since my cooling system works well.  The M42 switched from belt to electric fan in the E36 318i.

Does it have LSD?  Jack up the rear wheels and spin one.  If they both move in the same direction you have limited slip.  If the other wheel runs in an opposite direction it's an open Diff.  LSD was an option on coupes (i've been told). 

Very exciting.  

That license plate is hysterical, if you were around for the Vin Diesel-era XXX movie . . .  

It seems weird to connect a BMW with rust.  Best of luck with the build!

I dropped the car off at my parent's house for now since I still need to make room for the car in my yard. Haven't had a chance to mess with it much since it's been raining. When I went to pick it up the hood would not latch closed. Decided not to force it shut in fear that it might not want to open again and left it unlatched for the ride home without issue. Think the PO mentioned that the hood release cable was messed up so I'll add that to the list of stuff to buy.

I also need to figure out what's up with the sunroof. Guess it was leaking at one point and has been siliconed shut. One corner sits lower so I'm hoping it just needs to be adjusted but the car came with another sunroof cassette. Even with it not closing all the way I would think that water would still drain out. The bottom of the rockers by the drain are a bit mangled since someone tried to use them as a jack point so maybe that has something to do with it. 

The headlights say Bosch on them instead of Hella. Not sure what the difference is. At least they are not cheap aftermarket ones.

I also went digging for previous owner info on r3vlimited. I took a wild guess that the last owner's screen name was "DuHast" and was right, lol. Looks like he bought the car in 2009 and is the one who changed out the headlights, license plate filler panel, and air filter. He also fixed a bunch of the hoses under the intake and replaced the water pump. Glad he did the headlight since it used to look like this. 

The owner before DuHast is the one who did most of the work to the car. He was a manager at a body shop and had the car stripped and painted.  Here is the Forsale thread from 2009: https://www.r3vlimited.com/board/forum/e30-classified-forums/for-sale-wanted/cars-for-sale-wanted/100019-91-318is-northeast-rust-free-perfect-body

Quick copy and paste of details from his listing.

-Full disassembly and paint (Almost 7 grand worth, DuPont Chroma base/clear)
-Struts & springs with mount bushings and all, 1.25 drop
-New control arms w/M3 offset urethane bushings, ball joints,tie rods etc.
-Alignment done by BMW
-All new urethane subframe, trailing arm, diff bushings
-Cross drilled rotors and new pads of course
-New Michelin tires, stock weaves painted smoke silver as well
-New Alternator
-4.10 LSD

One thing I noticed is that the odometer has been broken since before 2009 and it was estimated that the car had 160k on it back then so who knows what it has on it now. 

More pics of the car being painted I found on Photobucket. 

Even better score!

That car has a lot of choice parts. Full shadowline, euro smileys, some go fast parts—a lot of car for 2k. My first E30 was an '86 325e I bought in 2004 and it had battery box rot. Just about any E30 driven near snow has it, even some that didn't. Not a hard fix. Same goes for interior, the wear you're seeing is indicative of nearly every E30 out there.

Overall, to echo everyone else, killer deal dude. Not sure if you've ever owned an E30 but they're unbelievably easy to love. The ergonomics are glorious, the weight of the steering/pedals/shifter is perfect, parts are reasonable/plentiful, they're fun to work on, and they handle nice. 

I may be in the minority here, but having driven a few 325iS', and owning both a DINAN chipped 325e and a '91 318iS, I honestly prefer the straight 6 variants. I was hoping the 318 would bring me back to the warm & fuzzy memories of my 1990 Jetta GLI 16v, as they seem to share a lot of similarities on paper.... but it felt more like a Civic DX. Not trying to throw shade, just saying, if you come across a similar screaming deal on an M50, DO IT, it makes these cars legendary.

Nice! My 318is had rust in the same spot due to the battery being placed there, though not as bad. Hopefully that's all you have to deal with.

If you're looking to sell it I'm interested, I'm right up in MA too. 

I put the car on the road back in July and have been doing a bunch of short drives and errands in it just to see what it needs. The first thing that needed to go was the stupid loud muffler. Even at idle it was obnoxious. Bought a stock style replacement catback but the old system had been hack in and they cut off the factory flange after the converter. This made replacing it a little more tricky since I needed to cut and weld in the new one. I was able to install the system in my driveway with one of the old exhaust clamps then brought it over to my friend's house to weld it up on his lift.

While it was up in the air I found what was causing the random noise I’ve been hearing in the front suspension. Not sure what the purpose of this was but once I removed it the noise magically went away.

Now with the quiet exhaust and the front suspension noise gone, I could focus on other sounds. The next most annoying thing was a rear clunk when going over bumps. After poking around I found that the rear shock mounts has loosened up and damaged the threads.

Pulled the mounts and shocks out to see if I could fix the threads and noticed that one shock was leaking and blown. Figured I’d might as well check the fronts and one of those was blown too. Wonderful. Really didn’t want to spend the money on shocks right now but ended up ordering some Bilsteins. Also found that the driver's side caliper wasn't doing anything. I pulled the bleeder and nothing came out when pumping but if I crack the line before the rubber hose fluid comes out. Just going to ignore this for now. 

The car also came with an envelope with new odometer gears. After watching a few YouTube videos it looked easy enough to do so I installed those too. Now it finally was a working odometer again for the first time in 11 or so years.

Good progress.  I've got to do the odometer gears on my car as well...I've been putting it off.  

Do you have any more pictures of how you hung the exhaust system? 

I don't like the way the exhaust is mounted on my 91 318i (sedan). it slowly shifts and vibrates against the rear valence.  The mid-pipe also sags a bit.

FYI, there should be a bracket that attaches to the transmission and holds the downpipe.  I'm not sure how useful it is...  My car didn't have it (or a cat) when I bought it.  I pulled the bracket off an E36 318i and flipped it upside down.

Was that bungee on the drivers side? Bet it was holding up that dead caliper at one point while someone dug around. 
Glad to see one of these saved, they're cool