My projects and other things that torment me

I initially put a deposit down on a car in Northern Ireland but something was nagging at me and the seller "couldn't find" the v5 - turns out the car was a cat C so I bailed. It had confirmed that I absolutely wanted one though, ideally in black with the dark check interior and 15" BBS. I put wanted ads up everywhere and searched every classified site but with little luck. I was getting impatient so I emailed a guy from a BMW forum seeing if he'd sell his car. Coincidentally he had been planning on listing the car that day so we agreed a price (think it was £1500 which was strong money at the time but hilarious now). I sent a deposit (my first taste of a "blind" purchase) and book a flight to go and get it. When I collected it, it was better than expected and I couldn't believe that I owned such a car for half what my Mini was worth. 

The car was pretty much perfect as far as I wanted it, had a great spec and drove like news so I didn't end up doing too much to it apart from enjoying it 
Thread here: forum.retro-rides.org/thread/36172/1990-bmw-318is-new-pics?page=2

I only ran this until July 07 months as my job changed and suddenly needed to do big miles so more modern cars entered the picture, an e39 530d which was only 4 years old at the time and an incredible car but an insane expense when I look back - Ireland was in a financial boom and finance was far too easy to get:


I bought and sold a few Minis over the next few months, bagging a decent enough profit each time:
The market for late Minis in Ireland was inflated and they were cheap in the UK so this lovely Mini Se7en was bought purely to flip:


This was bought completely by accident. I was over visiting relatives in the UK and this was in the village for £2k and looked absolutely mint. The car had run the bottom end and a crunchy second gear but there was not a spec of rust on the car, so I bought it without hesitation and trailered it home the following weekend. It sold without even advertising it.


I went to a fresh new event called the "Retro Rides Show" in August 2007, a much quieter show which has gone on to be one of the biggest in the UK! Some nostalgia:

forum.retro-rides.org/thread/19406/rr-07-perspective-90-pics

Summer 2008, my girlfriend decided that she wanted to start driving, so of course first stop is to buy her first car. I really tried to dissuade her from Mini's but she was having none of it and, frankly, it made sense as I knew how to spanner them pretty well. She managed to go against all my advice and bought the prettiest one which was also the rustiest and highest mileage.



It also had a dodgy second synchro and a few other mechanical issues and I was way too busy to do it so we farmed it out to a contact I had. She passed her test and started to use the car more regularly towards the end of the year. 

All was going great until I got a call from her on the 23rd December, just as I walked out of the office ready to do all of my Christmas shopping, that went something like: 
Her: "Mark, I've run out of oil, where do I get some?"
Me: "What do you mean?"
Her: "The oil light is on, and I was driving around looking for a garage but its just stopped"
Me: "Ugh I'll get the trailer"

To make things worse, she was stuck about 2.5 hours away in one of the dodgiest parts of the country. I picked the car up and once home I decided to do the work myself (in fact, I never farmed out work again after this experience). Turns out that it lost all of the oil through a huge hole in the diff casing - the replacement gearbox that was fitted when we bought the car had a broken diff tooth hiding in it. It then threw the diff tooth through the diff casing, lost all the oil and thus seized the engine.

So this is what faced me in disassembly:
















So the rebuild started in fury on the 29th January (The delay was due to me going to London for New years and then being ill for 3 weeks). The Engine and head were further disassembled and this was what we had:


Piston rings were measured and found to be shot.

Oil pump was inspected and given clean bill of health.

Pistons were then cleaned - pain in the *** they were filthy.



Cylinder head:

Cyl 1:

Exhaust Valve was in a bad way - with signs of major leakage.

Inlet Valve was ok, small bit of pitty on the seat. Nothing a lapping wont fix

Cyl 2,3&4:

Exhaust valves worse than Cyl 1.

Inlet



The inlet valves also had lots of oil deposits.



Here's a pic:

From left to right:

Exhaust 4, 3, 2 (after 20 mins lapping), Inlet 2





Here are the exhaust and Inlet valves from Cyl 2. Exhaust has had 20mins lapping, Inlet was just out of the head.





Here are the cyl 2 ports.



The exhaust was still not good after lapping, but Inlet required just lapping. Some strange heat marks in wall of cyl 2 below the pitted part of the seat. We decided all the exhaust valves required replacement.


So bring on another another delay.. I was then in a heavy head-on car crash which helped progress things, so the rebuild was set back even further. I don’t have many more pics, but here is what was done once I recovered:

Everything cleaned
Bores Honed
Crank polished
New Big end bearings
New Main bearings
New cam followers
New piston rings
New exhaust valves
New valve stem oil seals
New Spark Plugs
New Oil Filter
New Air Filter
New Fan Belt
New alternator
All new gaskets
2 Gearbox bearings replaced
1st gear replaced
New diff housing
Engine painted
New Engine mounts

Some potato quality images of the completed work:




Radiator seemed to leak a tiny bit of coolant at the start, but then mysteriously stopped. I found a couple of the pipes weren’t 100% secured – me rushing I imagine.

The engine literally fought us every step of the way - it was a frustrating job and without my Dads level head with me, I would have burnt it to the ground. It was 2 full days and 3 full evenings to put back together and get running. The head rebuild took 20 tedious hours+ (all done by my Dad) and the rest of the rebuild wasn't far behind that.

Finally on March 4th, it drove out of the garage under it’s own steam! 

Mileage when replacement gearbox/new discs&pads & service: 78600

Mileage at point of blowup: 80501

Mileage after first service: 81400

The car has been faultless since, except for the fact that its been parked up for 11 years now but always starts on the button! She still owns it though and it's likely to come out of the shed soon.


I sold the e39 530d towards the end of 2008 (off road since 2017 according to records) and missed having a BMW on the drive, so found a cheap 318iS on ebay (drunken bidding) in November which I bought blind.

By the time I had it home, I had realised I'd made a huge mistake as the car was a huge disappointment. It showed what a great car my first one had been and I realised that this was going to require serious money to get it anywhere near right so I decided within about a couple of weeks it would have to go, especially because I had bought another car blind and on impulse!

I had gotten quite the taste for buying chod on road trips to the UK - usually would involve an early flight, some buyers remorse, a lot of beers, a cheap hotel and a groggy 200+ mile drive home the next day. 

In April 2009, I bought a '78 w123 230c blind from the UK. A friend came with me for the trip and by the end of it, we'd agreed that he'd buy the car as soon as he sold his 4 year old 320d and run the w123 as a daily (which he ended up doing for 4 years). It was a nice car but had the start of some serious grot. He crashed the car and blew the headgasket, ended up getting an OM603 conversion with a "restoration" at quite a bit of expense but unfortunately it turned out to be lipstick on a pig and rotted from the inside out and eventually the seat fell through the floor

Thread here with more details: forum.retro-rides.org/thread/59095/1978-mercedes-230c-w123-travels

The Merc bug had bitten pretty hard and I fancied a v8 so in June 2009, I bought a w116 350SE on a bit of a whim from about 2 hours from my house.

It looked great, v8, leather, cruise, sunroof and was in a brilliant colour combo. I put it to one side as I worked on the w115 and then attacked the w116. My mojo was completely killed when I saw it was a bigger job than the w115 so, considering everything else I had on, I made a conscience decision to cut my losses and sell in April 2010. Sad but thats life. Car was fixed up and I saw it up for sale recently looking quite smart, so at least it didn't get crushed! 
Thread here: forum.retro-rides.org/thread/61756/1979-mercedes-benz-350se-sold

Part of my decision to sell the W116 was that I had been able to nab a bucket list car (well a LWB shed version) in the form of a Datsun 260Z through a blind drunken eBay bid in November 2009.

I was chuffed to be able to buy it and was aided by a few RR members in collecting it. Shortly after I got it home, I let a mate borrow it and it never really ran properly again despite lots of new parts. I never did a build thread for this car as I never actually did anything with it much to my shame, I stuck it in the shed and sold it as it stood for what it owed me (good bit under market imho) to a friend of a friend May 2020. Unfortunately when he pulled it apart it appears that the original work done on the car before my ownership was a complete bodge job and the car had plenty of filler. As far as I know he still intends to restore it to its former glory. 

As far as car buying goes, that brings me up to September 2010 where, due the recession (and my quickly dwindling bank account due to an obsession with buying cars) we left for pastures new - some travelling around SE Asia and then onto Australia for some exploring. We left behind 4 cars - W115, Mini Miglia, 260Z, my girlfriends Mini and we hopped on a plane. 

This episode is sponsored by Norovirus

This brings us up to July/August 2012 and it was time to go car shopping! As I was in the land of v8s, I was determined to get an Aussie V8 and absolutely 100% not a European car. I test drove a few Falcon and Commodore v8s and everything I could find that wasn't stupid money was absolutely and utterly ruined. They didn't even feel that fast, build quality was awful and I felt like a bogan, so I ended up bringing this home:


I am nothing if not predictable! It was a 2000 build facelift e39 530i Sport. I had noticed this in the classifieds, originally advertised for $16k, then dropped to $14k, $12k and finally $10500 over a few weeks. I ended up negotiating down to $8500 as it had 12 previous owners but it was absolutely immaculate - this sounds very expensive but it was dirt cheap for one of these in Oz. The guy had spent a fortune on it, including a full respray. I ended up doing quite a bit of mechanical work to it and took it on loads of road trips including bringing it to Bathurst!


I had really missed a retro/project car in my life and in 2013 started looking for an old Merc/BMW. I was very excited when I spotted a pretty badly listed BMW on ebay and ended up winning it for $300, out of rego with no forward drive, rust and lots of parts.

It was an E3 3.0L which is a pretty rare car. What I should have done was focus on getting the gearbox and important rust, but I went at it like a full restoration and to be honest got myself in way too deep considering my time/tools/space and resources. I started to get some hassle from the neighbours and it just killed my mojo. I did consider sending it home in a container but in the end I decided to sell it at end of 2013 for what it owed me - it went very quickly and I hope it lives on somewhere, one of my major fails
Thread here if you want to read more: forum.retro-rides.org/thread/148447/1977-bmw-e3-0l-update 

Ahhhh.. that fekking Golf. I was enjoying this thread & now you've ruined it.

All this thread is missing is a ae101 Corolla and a Dturbo to be 100% Irish.

This is like free therapy, I'll continue...

Middle of February all the parts arrived and I quickly got on with whipping the rear beam off the car to rebuild it. I cracked the rear brake lines and no fluid came out and the brake line snapped as I moved it. I pressed the brake pedal and there was zero fluid coming out - the car had no rear brakes. This was supported by the completely rotten rear discs and the rear calipers were totally seized too. Stevie Wonder had really excelled himself on this MOT.

Everything was shot in the rear beam as I expected from the driving experience:








With the rear beam out, I decided that I ought to see how bad the grot really was.

It didn't look great but also didn't look the worst either:






So, as time was getting on I decided to put on the flap wheel of truth and see what it showed:




Then the cutting disc of absolute truth:


To be honest, I wasn't too disheartened. The rust was mainly kept to places where there was no exposed paint and with my careful peeling, I'd even saved the trim piece so if I did it right, it could be reasonably seamless. The inside of the sills was fairly solid too.

So I kept on going:
Rear of the arch - not the worst (but tapered back to ugly rear valance which I knew about when buying the car):

(some stunning CAD templating going on here)

Getting confident, I found lots of lovely grot on the rear of the arch.


Urgh, that killed the mojo a bit as I thought that the inner panel here was solid so to be honest I shut the shed and didn't come back for quite some time :/ I know its not nearly as bad as some of the stuff that gets restored on here, but as I said this was supposed to be a rolling resto, not a welding project and I just knew it was going to consume free time I didn't have. 

In July 2016, I sold the 335i to my best mate (who still has it) due to house sucking more money and tbh it felt like I was wasting the car just going up and down the motorway. Massive fail sale. Trying to be sensible and considering the mileage we were doing, I replaced it with a Lexus GS450h from a local auction (yup thats my definition of sensible). Day 3, the electronics in the car went bananas and I just parked it up as I didn't want to be stranded. This effectively left us in the embarrassing situation of having 6 cars but not one that worked or was road legal. Awesome. Once again, my Dad saved the day and lent us his car while I sorted some stuff out. 

Excellent effort, I'll try harder!

That's a whole different thread man - tipper transit racing is the way forward