Automotive Life

This was my most recent possession which I’d owned since 1998 (but sold in 2019). Back then I had a Ford Mustang as hobby car and was running back and forth to work in a BMW 315 from 1981 which I had bought from an acquaintance through an ex-pat mate of mine who used to have a garage in the centre of Dordrecht. The winter of ’97-’98 was particularly cold but, although parked on the street, it never once let me down when leaving home at six in the morning. Up till then I had never been a big BMW fan. Then one day my mate phoned me up and said in a rather excited voice “you gotta come and see what I’ve got in the workshop”. I knew it was going to be something relatively exotic as he normally only dealt with cheap daily drivers so I told him that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea as I had no real room for another project, what with the Mustang in the garage and the old 315 on the street. He insisted that I at least popped in for a coffee on the way home and at least have a look. So a couple of days later I called in to find this 635CSi standing there begging me to take it home. I have to admit it I’m a sucker for a gorgeous car and this was always a gorgeous car. Back in the day it was the sort of car that you looked at from a distance knowing that your pockets were just not that deep, but twelve years on and it begins to be a real possibility. Needless to say we had a deal and then I found myself needing another place to store a car off road. Eventually found someone who used to grow stuff commercially in very large greenhouses but had turned most of his space into storing caravans and campers. He had a small section where a handful of people with no garage of their own were storing old (semi) classics. There was also electrical power available so you could do some work on the site although it wasn’t the place to do big jobs. I had promised my wife that I would sell the Mustang as it was really only a ‘Big Boys Toy’ and was not very practical but finding a buyer turned out to be a waiting game. So until 2001 when I eventually sold it I was constantly swapping vehicles between the storage and my own garage at home.

When I first got the car it had a really awful set of alloys which just had to be replaced. The two front wheels were the same but on the back it had two completely different rims from different manufacturers and all the tyres were just about shot. Not having a lot of cash at the time I bought a new set of cheap alloys with a set of Michelins and this is what it looked like then.

This photo was actually taken in February 2001 and I was still using the car regularly. You can’t see much in this shot but there was quite a lot of rust lurking under the surface and later in the year I put it in the garage and started stripping it in order to restore the body. See link – BMW Restoration 2002 (bottom of page) for the full story.

Not long after phase 1 of the work was complete in 2002 we had decided that it was time to move house to a location where would would have a bit more outside space and a more congenial neighbourhood. We wanted somewhere in an older area outside the town, it also had to have character. After looking around and being disappointed (missing out) a couple of times by the (then) dynamic housing market we eventually found our present house, which we subsequently bought. We moved in in the spring of 2003 and set about rebuilding the place to fit our ideas for living. Needles to say it meant any plans I had for the BMW would be put on the back burner. I even put the car up for sale in 2004 as it was becoming difficult to work around it standing in the old garage most of the time.

Although being up for sale for a while I couldn’t find anybody prepared to pay anywhere near the agreed value so I eventually put it back in the garage and suspended the road tax. There it stood until I had eventually finished the house, the new garage and the garden in 2009. It was still driveable and got moved from the old garage in the picture to the new one I built at the back of the garden by cutting an enormous hole in the back wall and driving through it :-). Later the garage in the picture was demolished.

The old garage was not a healthy place to store a car. It was far too damp as it sat lower than the neighbours gardens and seemed to collect water in the lower walls. a burst water main across the road in 2005 made things even worse.

Eventually in 2010 I found the time to start pulling the engine and making an inventory of the parts needed to complete the job. That eventually got finished in 2012 and in the winter of 2013-14 I stripped the rear axle out and did a total restoration there as well.

BMW Restoration 2002

Late in 2001 I noticed that there were a number of spots on the body where time and the weather had taken it's toll on the beamer. I decided to take it off the road and start the slow process of dismantling and repairing all the damage. The car was completely ...

BMW Engine Rebuild 2010-12

The damp in the old garage had had an insidious impact on the car in the years it had stood there while I was busy with the house restoration, although all the work I had done on the body in 2002 was pretty well protected from the inside with Waxoyl and...

Miller GEN III & MAF Conversion

Once the engine block was reinstalled the next job was the Miller chip conversion. I had received the kit plus the air intake some time earlier but was too busy with the engine overhaul to look at it. My ECU is the 059 model so the first job was to open ...

Rear Axle, Suspension & Brakes 2013-14

The one major area needing attention after the engine rebuild was the rear axle. All the various suspension rubbers were in pretty poor condition and had been on my list for some time. I decided that while the rear axle was out I would also fit a mild...

ABS warning repair

The problem: The problem is well  known within the e24 community, and probably other models but I don't keep up with everything. Above a certain speed the orange ABS warning light comes on and although the brakes work OK the ABS assistance is turned ...

New Instrument Panel

This work was undertaken in the winter stop period of 2015 and was initially one of the blog pages. Before Christmas I was busy doing some online shopping to get hold of the gauges and the Miller WAR programmable chip. The Toad Alarm system I bought...

Alarm and WAR Chip installation

This work was undertaken in the winter stop period of 2015 and was initially one of the blog pages. The second part of the winter work was more electricals, new alarm and replacing the Miller GENIII with their WAR programmable chip. I couldn't decide...

New MAF Sensor

The original MAF Casing as shown at the top of the webpages was OK and seemed to attract enough attention at meetings but I had other ideas floating around in my head. It needed to match the engine more closely and how could I produce it. Eventually ...