Hmm, strange - I didn't get any notifications about posts on this thread, oh well!
07lilredwagon thank you
Smiler I'm just finalising my house buy (it's taking forrreeevvveerrrr) and I should hopefully be planning on getting the car into somewhere reputable to battle all the rust. I really do like the car so I don't mind spending an organ or extremity to get it completely fixed-up (provided it's saveable!), sadly welding and painting are the only two things I can't really tackle myself
olig you probably did see it there, I have a ride thread on there
Speaking of which, I took this photo before work the other day of it which I quite liked..:
This week/weekend I have been ticking off a few issues on the niggle list.
Not chronological, but ordered to make copying pics in easier!
Firstly, the boots struts were dead. It made opening the boot a chore and it always felt like it was going to drop. So with the help of my brother and some boot gymnastics I managed to roll around inside the boot and change the struts.
The ones that arrived were correct in that the 'fit' the car, however they don't really have enough lifting force to open the boot itself and the retaining clips wouldn't fit on one of the ends of the strut. As such I had to chop them up and refit them a little poorly, but they're hidden out of sight and seem to do the job! Oh and of course, while I was there I had to clean everything up...
Dirty boot, post install
More generic gunkiness
After a wipe down
Wheel given a bit of a wipe too to tidy everything up
The all the boot carpet trim was cleaned, hoovered and reinstalled
While I was under there I did notice two things... Firstly the rear deck behind the back seats is actually a wooden frame, which I thought was pretty old school given the car is only ~21 years old!
Secondly was this, which is equally interesting (in my sad mind anyway...), however definitely more worrying...
Near the rear, nearside top mount the body metal has a good crack in it. Something to add to the list of fixes when it eventually goes in for rust repairs...
A while ago I also bought the extra functional OBC computer. After lots of curse words were fired at the Sony head unit (during which I managed to yank the stereo cage out, whilst leaving the radio in the dash?! - magicians table cloth anyone?) I managed to get to the retaining clip on the current one. I removed that to find...
That they're different lengths. Balls. I had already thought this might be the case, and it can be fixed with a simple change of more trim on the dash - so onwards with plugging it in and getting it workin-... Oh, no. It doesn't work.
Cycling the ignition causes nothing to happen on it at all, even the dash is relatively dead (making me think the OBC must run in series in some way with the dash?). Plugging the old one back in caused everything to work fine - so I'm going to hand it to
adam73bgt to see if it's compatible with his 520i, as I know there were different OBCs for different models.
While everything is out I may as well order a new head unit to get more functionality out of the radio and get rid of the horrible 10 disc changer bolted into the boot... So the dash is currently sat like this:
Awaiting a new radio! I'll hopefully order one tonight or early this week.
I also glued the sagging headlining cloth above the seatbelts. I just used some simple stick PVA glue and gently dabbed onto the fabric and then stuck back in place - seems to have worked a treat! (no pics, sorry!)
Next issue - the rattling, loose driver's door bump strip.
I have some pictures somewhere of the old strip on the door but can't find them... But basically the strip was hanging off towards the back edge of the drivers door. So when opening/closing the door it would make a horrible rattle, rather than the "Volkswagen Golf" type 'clunk' the rest of them made.
I had wanted to change this for a while but it's quite a lot of work for a relatively small change so I wanted until the weather was good - like today
Door card is removed to access retaining clips
Strip is removed, and of course is cleaned up underneath... (pic is pre-clean!)
New strip installed
You can see in the second picture it's still not a perfect fit - but it's held captive by all the clips now so is firmly in place and the 'clunk' is back
Everything back on
Next little job, was a clean up of the leather on the steering wheel. The wheel is typically shiny, sticky nasty hold (insert some sort of rude joke here). So I used a painting brush and copious amounts of interior and leather cleaner to gently clean the wheel. I frothed up the cleaner with the brush, then wiped clean with a microfibre. Finally I left some leather cleaner (multi-purpose cleaner and feed) on for a minute or two then wiped up the excess.
The results are as follows:
It needs retrimming really, but it'll do for now
Aaaaaand finally, a job that is currently ongoing due to ordering a filter that doesn't fit... Changing the cabin/pollen filter.
Man is this job needlessly difficult and stressful on the RHD variants of these cars. The steering column prevents a solid filter being put in, so a filter that slides in two (you'll see...) is used.
The offending filter that came out... No wonder the blowers barely work!!!
I looks like it might NEVER have actually been changed, gross.
Awaiting a new filter so the car is currently like so, missing a lot of trim under the steering wheel:
And you can almost see the reason for the wet passenger footwell in this picture...
A nice brown coloured hole and needs closing up
That's all for now, I'll hopefully update again soon. This post is faaar too long to proof-read, so apologies for any glaring errors!