An E36 restoration continued.
Firstly, I have been remiss in updating the blog and for that I am truly sorry. 2019 has been a hell of a year for Bahnstormers, starting with our barn find of 9 E28s and culminating with a move to a workshop roughly 3 times the size of the original Bahnstormers HQ. Our social media following has grown to over 3000 followers and we have been blessed to work on some amazing cars, some of which I will be reflecting on here in the blog over the next few months. First of all I would like to pick up where I left off with the restoration of the E36.
To reacquaint ourselves, we had been asked to embark on the restoration of a 1992 318i saloon, which had been in the ownership of one man since new. He had brought his baby daughter home from hospital in it and taught her to drive in the very same car. He had shown commitment to the restoration by shrugging off the estimate which came in at roughly 10 times the value of the car, and was quite wedded to the idea that having driven it further than the distance from Earth to the moon (225k), but only the first 69k home again, he couldn’t very well abandon it on the side of the interstellar highway. The Bahnstormers team therefore rolled up their sleeves and set to work (cue the A-team theme).
It’s a generally accepted fact that early E36’s were not particularly well protected in comparison to the later cars which are generally quite good on the corrosion front. Add into the mix the fact that this car has been used almost daily to commute to Heathrow from Wiltshire and that all adds up to a lot of exposure to salty roads. It was clear from the outset that this 36 was going to need major surgery and to help try and keep the costs down we decided to source a donor car which we assumed would be easy… apparently not. Drawing your attention to a comment I made in part one of this article I assumed we’d be falling over ourselves with choice locally with E36 saloons for sale on every street corner. I was wrong, very wrong! Finding a suitable, early E36 saloon proved to be very difficult indeed. Most had either been turned into drift rods or were immaculate low mileage, high price tag future classics. When suitable candidates did come up they were snapped up almost immediately (including a 1992 saloon in the correct colour with head gasket failure). After resorting to twice daily searches eventually our donor came in the shape of a cat c write off 316i saloon which happily provided a matching interior, immaculate front wings and the all important rear wheel arch cuts that we would need to repair the frilly rear arches of our project. Now I must stress that generally I dislike destroying perfectly good cars for the sake of impetuous project time lines but in this case the car had already been consigned to a sad fate and therefore I took some comfort from the fact that a fair chunk of it would live on in another vehicle (well several other vehicles in the end).
The strip down of both cars began in earnest and whilst we found ourselves repeatedly exclaiming how good the donor was and what a shame it was, the same could not be said about the project we were supposed to be rectifying. Horror after horror was revealed at every turn, from removing the front wings, to pulling back the carpet and removing the rear sub frame, galloping rot and sealed up drains from previous repairs that meant the poor m40 had been lugging around the equivalent of a small paddling pool’s worth of water.
After what turned out to be quite frankly months of toil for our superstar Bahnstormers fabricator and a regime of bush and suspension component replacement that would be the envy of one of our 9 E28 barn find restorations, the 36 was deemed solid and replacement panels began to go back on. The car did not receive a full re-spray so the wings went on and then the rear quarters and sills where painted separately. After having worked on almost every system in the car over quite a long period of time we treated the car to a bit of a shake down before eventually reuniting it with its doting owner, whom I’d like to take this opportunity to thank for being such a pleasure to work for and for whom bad news and delays (and there were plenty of both) were always met with the utmost positivity and humor. The car is very lucky to have such a dedicated custodian.
Some weeks after dropping the car back, I happened to be sitting in traffic waiting to exit the local supermarket car park. I glanced across and a very smart black E36 caught my eye, wow that early 36 looks clean I thought to myself. I raised my gaze slightly to see the occupant waving back at me having not realized it was the self same car we’d done so much work to, in that moment having temporarily tricked myself into thinking it was most likely some low mileage garage queen. I was smug that we’d done such a good job and that this incredible car should not only get back to Earth but maybe even make another round trip to the moon as well.
