Friday, September 02, 2011

Lots of News and New Cars

It's been an absolute age since the last post. Four months to be exact, and hasn't some action occurred since then!

Firstly, and the biggest news is that there has been a major addition to Team Orange. Dad made the outrageous purchase of a classic e12 M535i! What a car it is too. The first of the real M cars for the road. 3.5 litre M30 in the still fairly light body gets this thing along in a real hurry.

Dad imported "Black Beauty" from England where it was sold by a typically crazy car enthusiast who wanted to get it away from England's salted roads!

It successfully made the journey and has since been imported, quarantined, washed and registered. Of course, being an e12, it has also burnt out its ventilation fan and has a misfire that is proving difficult to track down.

The only work completed so far is Dad covering the bottom of the car in a good layer of fish oil to keep the rust away and the remedying of the misfire. I've sourced some fresh badges for the rear and a new set of bellows for the rear CV joints and they're on their way to Dad to get installed.



In Mustang news, the old girl spent 2 months at the shop getting a new dash installed. Turned out to be slowest dash repair in history. By the time we got it back, we'd moved into our new house and Winter was long gone and it was stinking hot. I had to pick it up on the same day I got a root canal and it was 100 degrees outside. Nice timing by the workshop! Whatever; the results look really good (the dash, not the root canal) and it is a very respectable place inside the cabin now.

While it was in the shop, they also fixed the heater controls and fitted a new speaker in the new dash so the old dodgy speaker on the floor could go. I haven't had a chance to try the heater out since it's still in the thirties and there's no way to tell if it's working.

While I had the e46 in the shop getting the transmission serviced and the next worn out part of the cooling system replace and generally making a massive donation to BMW's service department, I had to fall back on driving the Mustang to work. Apart from losing several kg and nearly passing out from heat exhaustion, I also noticed the mysterious brake shudder had disappeared! Maybe the brakes were just tired and needed a couple of months to rest up? Unfortunately, it also developed a bad habit of overheating and embarrassing itself on the garage floor when I got home or stopped for any significant time. I flushed out the radiator and replaced the lower hose, but it didn't help. The fall back plan is just to leave it in the garage until Winter.

While I had the bonnet open, I took the change to tidy up a bit. I straightened out all those awful steel lines (fuel and vacuum) and re-ran the throttle switch wire to make things a bit nicer. Not a dramatic change, but all in the right direction.

In a rather strange coincidence, we developed a Mustang parking area at work during the time I was driving it. I always park over on the Southern end of the car park and then one day, there were three generations of Mustang there!

2 comments:

Dad said...

All I have to do is work out a way for Pete to have a drive of the "new" e12 when he is next in Australia. Cheers, Dad

Unknown said...

Nice to read this information about the winter tyres..