Alpine E30 Convertible Running Log
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I will post a larger update down the road when i get around to uploading like a million photos, but I took the car down to The Vintage in Hendersonville, NC last week/weekend - needless to say, the trip was one for the books and a must - do for anyone on this forum. No major mechanical issues either - the worst one was a bad brake light switch that I fixed temporarily with a clutch switch and some good ole manual control
. So much cool BMW brain-melt action, and even better, just an awesome group of people who love 'em and drive 'em hard.I made my trip a bit extra special by taking the long way there, driving to Pittsburgh day one, then cutting south along Skyline Drive/Blue Ridge Parkway for around 250 miles through VA until I reached NC where the majority of it is still closed due to damage from Hurricane Helene last fall. The event went for three days in NC, then i took two days coming home (including driving the Tail of the Dragon).
All in all, a wonderful trip I'd love to have some fellow WIBimmers accompany me on with their own cars in future years!
The stats:
2700 miles
8 days
12 states
2.5 days of rain
One flash flood warning and one large rock hit to the skidplate
28.5mpg average
One failed brake light switch - found a replacement at the Vintage! (no, I didn't steal it from another unsuspecting vert owner)
20lbs of Stromung exhaust lugged home with me diagonally across the interior
25+ Alpinas viewed at the CCA museum in Greer
At least 10 E9's that i left drool puddles on
And a partridge in a pear tree
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Maintenance > photos
Oil change: 208,357. Used a Mann filter and trying out the Liqui Moly Classic 20W-50. Seems okay for a car of this age and appears to have a little more ZDDP than standard Castrol GTX, and falls under the FCP euro lifetime guarantee, most importantly. It’s not like M20’s are overly picky about their oil.
Also installed a new valve cover breather hose, and most importantly, my Strömung catback!
The perforated old one that despite being so rusty it sounds like a maraca, weighs a good 10lbs more at least:
Sounds like an awesome trip, looking forward to photos! I'd love to take a trip like that in my e30, maybe next year...
It was fantastic!! You. Absolutely. Should. It’d be awesome to have an alpine e30 convoy!
Bonus pics of my skidplate that saved my trip:
Also found a busted headlight lens I missed. Booo!
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The hikfab plate has saved my pan so many times, it owes me nothing. If it’s bent bad you can straighten them in a press (ask me how I know)
Glad to see the car made it relatively unscathed
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I never posted photos from the Vintage this year; the photo dump is at the end. Such a fun event that I’m going back this year!
I put a lot of miles on it overall last season, driving it up until late November before finally putting it away. Had a minor issue with a hanging e brake halfway through the summer but beyond that it ran and worked great! I ended the year at 212,283 miles on the odometer, so over 7000 miles? Pretty proud of that.
Took it up to Hayward in June, the Vintage in May, and all over the state after that. The z3 shifter made a world of difference, and I love the Stromung catback - it’s a little droney at neighborhood speeds but it sounds so good when wrung out that I don’t care. Minimal to no drone on the highway is way more important to me, and I can’t hear any over the wind noise!
Winter projects:
- Put in rebuilt alternator. Had it done at MJ Auto Electric in Butler and they did a great job, it looks excellent.
- E46 rack swap (AAE 3310N). Currently in progress, I’m working on getting the steering coupler shaft thingy out now and fighting the upper splined joint hard. Any tips are welcome, it’s stuck fast.
- Rebuilt PS pump, I’m swapping in a ZF to replace the Vickers that it had in there. Luckily got a ZF with all the brackets so it’s a direct swap
- Replace all PS lines and the reservoir, goes hand in had with the rack swap.
- Address a small coolant leak coming either from the looped throttle body heater hoses or from the thermostat gasket itself.
- Correctly repair the C191 injector harness; I admittedly kludged it together to get it working last time and need to go back and fix it correctly with good heat shrink and crimp connectors.
- If I can find good used speakers (or if anyone has recommendations), replace the blown rear speakers.
- Replace the literally worn through seatbelt buckle. Old car problems!
- Valve adjustment- New oil dipstick o-ring, the tube is dirty and im assuming the crankcase pressure is just enough to blow oily air past that o ring.
- Replace the tee fitting for the headlight washers; it’s never worked and it’s annoying. Might put in a smaller fluid bottle to give more room for other things
- Replace the cracked drivers side low beam; I scored a full set of ellipsoids from an old member here a month ago and I’ll probably refurb using the best lenses from both and new adjusters.
MY EYES!!!!
- Realign the muffler (it sits slightly twisted currently) and smoke test both the intake and exhaust to look for leaks. I’m almost positive I have some leaks in the cat section, but honestly with wanting to go to a header + universal cats at some point soon I’ll probably just use exhaust tape or JB weld to patch and send it for now if/when I find leaks.
It isn’t winning any concours awards anyways.
Anywho, here’s the trip pics!
A sweet print they gave out at the CCA museum!
Skidplate hit I took on Shenandoah from a fat ass rock. The HIKfab plate saved my trip and maybe me - oil on the tires where I hit it might’ve sent me off a cliff.
Obligatory Buc-EE’s stop. Clean bathrooms, but man, sensory overload. You can pry kwik trip from my cold dead hands.
Tail of the Dragon!
Some company for dinner at a German restaurant in Hendersonville! As a Wisconsinite, I can genuinely say that their food was pretty top tier and on par with the best bratwurst up here.
One of my favorite magazine articles ever was Sam Smith’s piece on the alpina 2002 at Laguna Seca. Seeing that car in the flesh was incredible. My favorite feature was the metal strips riveted over the back window to keep it from flying out at speed!
I have never seen so many Alpinas in my life. Between the 15 or so inside and the 25ish outside, it has to be one of the largest gatherings ever in North America.
This guy won sticker of the week in my book!
Japanese market LHD e36 M3!
Group drive on Thursday! Maybe 150 cars? We caused a huge traffic jam on the way out of town, sorry not sorry. I saw at least one overheat
Mt Pisgah - one of the best drives of the trip. I want to run it again this year with the quick rack - the factory one was definitely a hindrance.
A phenomenal view, finally. I spent most of my time in the mountains in the rain and fog, even getting caught in a flash flood warning in Shenandoah. The top was far closer to “water resistant” than “waterproof”
Leaky roofs call for desperate measures
Two days before the trip, I smoked an absolute hoss of a raccoon on I94 and narrowly avoided taking out my oil cooler. I ran like this most of the way down, picked up a new lower valance in Chicago on my way by, and swapped it once I got to NC.
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Might put in a smaller fluid bottle to give more room for other things
What other things???
That is so cool
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What other things???
That is so cool
I thought that logo and the hofmeister link sticker were two of my favorite gems of the trip - I kinda want one of the stickers for my tool box
And nothing exciting haha! Unless….
No, I mostly want the room to install a dedicated battery cutoff with a nice mount plate and maybe a heat shield. I keep nuking batteries in the fall when I forgot to disconnect the battery; there’s a parasitic draw somewhere and I’ve never worked that hard to find it. I hoped the new radio would do it but no dice. This is the battery switch I plan to use:
It’s a marine rated switch and we use them on all our ski team boats; some have had them installed for 15 years in what I would call a pretty brutal environment (vibration, heat, water, cold) with zero issues. This car used to have one of the screw type disconnects on the terminal and it sucked.
I’m envisioning doing a flush mount in a bracket similar to this, mounted right in front of the strut tower so I can reuse the factory ground location. I’ll have custom cables made (and probably put them in some sort of cable hider, maybe something printed?) so it all works and looks fairly OEM.
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I will add pics later, but progress is being made! (famous last words)
E30 has the linkage modified, rack installed, pump rebuilt, and is waiting on one section of 14mm ID power steering hose to get fully bolted together. Gotta bend the high pressure line to fit it as well, hoping I can get it right the first time without kinking. After that, it gets bolted together and test driven. Fingers crossed.
I also decided to put a new ATE clutch slave in with the new line since a) it already has to come out, b) the brand i bought apparently has a habit of stranding folks within a few thousand miles, c) ATE is the OEM manufacturer, and d) mine went to the floor once last year randomly and never did it again. I'll throw the old one in a ziploc in the trunk just in case though.
For the line, I went to Pegasus and bought a premade -4an braided stainless brake/clutch hose. I got the 21" version with one end straight and one end at 90 degrees. I also grabbed a spare 24" hose section in case the 21" isn't long enough (I measured with a piece of baling wire, it was a ROUGH estimate) and a s a spare. Total cost for both hoses and the two brake fittings needed to go from AN to M10 bubble flare was less than the Chasebays premade part. We'll see how it is to install but it seems to be a good alternative if you want to ditch the stock multi-piece clutch hydraulic setup and spend closer to $40.
I also took the time to solder and marine heatshrink the C191 connector wires. When the engine someday comes back out of the car, I will properly install a waterproof connector but for now it's permanent and i trust those more than butt splices on those itty bitty wires. I can't foresee a situation where I'd need the intake off without the head also coming off, at which point the engine is getting yanked anyways.
Snagged some headlights from @The Full Banana earlier this year, and found that the lenses were already cut off of them. Going to heat and pry the busted lens out of my low beam and silicone the freshie in for now, and source a low beam U.S. ellipsoid housing/lens (driver's side, if anyone has one) to put in the other set and restore this summer when I have more time.
Getting closer! Can't wait to get some shakedown miles in, the deadline for the vintage is creeping up fast.
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I’ll add pictures Friday, forgot to take some today. E30 made it down and back to the vintage again this spring with zero issues (technically +1 because I bought a new coolant level sensor at the swap meet portion and repaired that longstanding issue while down there!). Was a ton of fun, and running the dragon this year with the entire group was a ball. Sooo many BMW’s, everyone there was wondering WTF was going on.
I then parked it for part of June (no A/C makes for a hot commute), then lent it to a friend for his wedding getaway car in mid July. Well, it proceeded to nuke its 1yr old rebuilt alternator on the morning of his wedding day, super fun to find that out when I arrived that evening. Whoops. Got it back, pulled the alternator, had the shop rebuilt it again (needed to rob the rotor out of a spare I had), put it back in, and all is fine. Right?
Wrong. It then started to show that it was overheating, at least according to the gauge. It never smelled hot and I couldn’t get it to ever show crazy temps anywhere, but the gauge would slowly fluctuate between middle and 3/4, never going beyond 3/4. I later found that electrical load could cause it to shift almost a full quarter of the gauge. It all just seemed bizarre since the cooling system is pretty much all 2-3yrs old, and is running through a beefy all aluminum radiator with an electric pusher fan augmenting the clutched engine fan. I’m wondering if it’s a gauge issue partially - the ground nuts on the cluster are tight, but I suspect my SI batteries are dying because my tach occasionally drops out for a split second, and the econometer works like 20% of the time. Probably time to have it rebuilt, it’s a good winter expenditure I think.
Regardless, I knew I had a slight thermostat housing leak where the two halves meet, so I figured I’d fix that to narrow things down, and toss in some new temp sensors while I was there (the ECU sensor was leaking thru the connector). Swapped in a fresh thermostat, o-ring, and housing cover/bleed screw while I was there too, and drilled a little hole in the top of the tstat to help with bleeding. I filled it and fired it up tonight, and the odd gauge behavior resurfaced for a few minutes but then appears to have gone away. It didn’t seem to correlate with bleeding or an air bubble. Hard to say really. Expecting something like this, I bought myself this thing as peace of mind and a troubleshooting tool:
https://e30clusters.com/product/vent-gauge-3-indicators-fahrenheit/
It’s pretty simple to install, looks awesome, works well, and showed me that I had a rock solid coolant temp of 180F at idle even after 20min. Hoping that carries over once I put the car back down and take it for a test rip. I will update when I do so! I had a nice surprise when installing too - apparently some of tbe M20 thermostat housings (maybe just replacement ones?) have 4 bungs for sensors vs the original 2, so all I had to do to add the sender was remove a plug and screw in the new sender with a fresh crush washer. The added bonus is that it’s still reading in the main thermostat housing cavity, so I have an accurate picture of what the temp is doing vs something in the upper rad hose that won’t show an overheat if your thermostat sticks closed. I’ll maybe hook up the oil temp sender over the winter, but for right now I’m not worried about it. I might even repurpose it for a second water temp sensor to monitor temps in the return hose from the radiator or something. Either way, super cool product and I’d highly recommend.
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