Welcome to the club. Since banging up the right rear quarter panel on my iX recently, I'm also looking at replacing it. Unfortunately, as you have discovered, rear quarter panels are very expensive, and very time-consuming to replace. They are part of the whole unibody construction of the vehicle, so replacing them involves removing the rear window, cutting the C pillar, and welding the repl
Forum: Technical Forum

It's on Mallett's Bay in Colchester, a little north of Burlington. The bay is large and sheltered, and usually has more reliable ice than the broad lake. Here's a Google map: Mallett's Bay It's not far from Willsboro Point as the crow flies, but it would take a bit of a drive and ferry ride to get there. (The Burlington and Charlotte ferries are closed for the winter,
Forum: Car Talk

QuoteFerdinandWhat kind of camera and mount are you using? It was just my phone and the car mount it came with! I'm a photography enthusiast with a fairly large array of cameras and lenses, but what they are putting into phones these days is getting good enough that often it's easier just to leave all the gear at home and stick the phone on the dash. QuoteYou're not using those t
Forum: Car Talk

QuoterkjDave, what's that clicking noise, the key ring thingy? I think it was a loose camera mount.
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Here are a couple more pics a friend took. All the flying snow indicates that I messed up and slid off-line into the deep stuff, but it makes for cool pictures:
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The ice on Lake Champlain has finally gotten thick enough that the Sports Car Club of Vermont was able to hold our first ice time trial today (lots of snow this year has insulated the lake ice and made it impossible until now). I showed up with the iX and was one of two BMWs to make an appearance amid the usual armada of Subarus and a few Audis: I was running on studded winter tires, which mak
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That's not a "snow-x", that's ice racing! Very cool. Watching you slide around out there so painfully made me think: I really love my studded tires. That's sort of what we do around here on frozen lakes. We had an event last year where the lake was hockey-rink smooth, with not a snowbank in sight, and driving without studs was sort of like that. With our events
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Quoteb19spd Don't have the bently manual, I've seen ppl talkin about it on other fourams! Wot is it and where can I get 1? Bentley manual Sorry I don't have any particular advice on the flasher problem, but if I were you I would listen to what Rick says. He knows whereof he speaks.
Forum: Technical Forum

QuoteFerdinand The point though, maybe your gasket seal is fine but the pump itself is leaking through the shaft seal. It's possible, but having experienced this myself, my bet is on the gasket seal. That's where mine leaked, and like Tyler's, it wasn't so much a leak as a gushing torrent. And yes, The surfaces were clean, dry and smooth before I put it together! The second ti
Forum: Technical Forum

QuoteEarendil Would it be bad to add some other form of liquid seal to assist the tiny standard gasket in sealing the water pump? I've had the exact same thing happen. Adding gasket sealer to the water pump gasket fixed it. Supposedly with clean, smooth faces you're supposed to be able to install the water pump gasket dry. But IME using gasket sealer is the way to go, and ensures that
Forum: Technical Forum

QuoteMichiel 318iS lol, I was wondering about that 'tool'... Am I a fool as well now? Nah, it's just North American slang. "Tool" can have different meanings, including a particularly off-color one that is especially suitable for someone that does something like ram the back of your E30. (Consider the "tool" that is possessed only by the male half of the popula
Forum: Car Talk

QuoteArcheo-peteriX One of the regulars here has done this before and can expand on what I've said. He may also have a source for a new tank that could save you a lot of $ Are you lookin' at me?? Yeah, I did this last summer. My tank had a leak at the top for a few years, and I got tired of only being able to fill it 2/3 full. As Peter says, the job is a PITA, but it's not to
Forum: Technical Forum

QuoteJUMPNYC ...Bloom Boxes... Those look really cool.
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QuoteJose Pinto It is stupid to produce electricity out of natural gas or oil and use it on EV by means of large pouting battery packs, it will always be more efficient end cheap to burn the oil or gas directly on your car! Are you certain about that? I could be mistaken, but I seem to recall reading something that suggested the opposite. Certainly energy is lost during the transmission from powe
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Quoterkj Is there a way to safeguard without slowing down the whole show? Most of the free anti-virus programs that I've had experience with, including Avast and AVG, are huge resource hogs and slow older systems to a crawl, as you have experienced. That renders them useless, since the only way to run the computer is to uninstall the AV software. IME Microsoft's Security Essentials (
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QuoteArcheo-peteriX Early Mazda Rotary car ads used to compare the traditional engines with 'boing, boing' or something like that with '......' or 'hmmmm' Here's a trip down memory lane: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0KtK7cy6A0 I remember those ads well. My best buddy's older brother had a first generation RX-7 that I coveted. Now I own two Mazdas,
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QuoteFerdinandBonus, now I can flash my reverse lights manually whenever someone behind me forgets to dim their high-beams, I used to do that with the first car I ever bought with my own money, a 1974 Corolla. The reverse lights would come on when you moved the shift lever over to the right on the way to reverse, but before you actually engaged the gear. So I could flash the reverse lights j
Forum: Technical Forum

QuoteEarendil At some point I will either decide to restore it, or more likely call it a track car and keep it in an uncivilized, light, loud(interior wise), and machine like state. If you do make it a track car (and I'll heartily approve that suggestion), my biggest piece of advice would be to build it to a particular class for a particular governing body. I've seen too many people bui
Forum: Technical Forum

QuoteFerdinand QuoteRallye des Neiges...(Here's a Google map of the route.) I'm guessing those marked locations are the Ends of Sections? There were more Checkpoints than that. Yes, those are ends of sections that I located after getting home. At each checkpoint there wasn't even enough time to check our score, let alone push a button to mark where we were on the GPS trace! Quo
Forum: Car Talk

Quoterkj Okay, I have to respectfully disagree with some of what you say Dave; in new york the Bmw's started coming through recommending , no, specifying, unleaded fuels in 1983. It said so right on the inside of the gas lid door on the E30. You can disagree if you like, but that's actually what I was trying to say, so I think we're actually in agreement.
Forum: Technical Forum

Quoterkj Hey Stan, I think the E30 cars were intended to run unleaded fuel. The gas tank fill has that smaller fill tube so the leaded pump nozzle would not work. My 1983 323 had the same set-up.... Here in the states anyway. Yeah, this all got me wondering when leaded gasoline was phased out in the U.S. The phase-out began 1976, and was complete by 1986. So during the early years of the E30, le
Forum: Technical Forum

Pretty cool, but not new. Check out Massachusetts's salamander tunnels.
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QuoteFerdinand Well ain't that bizarre. That whole new section "Car Talk" just appeared on my browser. I swear it wasn't there earlier. It's a new section that I added on January 7, and made an announcement about here. Your browser apparently still had the old page cached. If you want to make sure you haven't missed anything, you can try the "recent messag
Forum: Community Forum

QuoteFerdinand see: stevemckelvie.com That was a fun read. I'll need to post a comment there to let them know what happened. We were car #3 and they were #4, so as he said we were seeing their headlights in our mirror most of the night (at least on the long straight parts). It's interesting to see that Neil and I weren't the only Yanks to be taken aback by the pace of the checkpoi
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QuoteFerdinand Rallye des Neiges stories are beginning to leak out... Hey, quit poking! I posted my stories two days ago!
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QuoteJose Pinto Sometimes i go to Spain anf fill up there (80km drive, it's a bit cheaper there). I feel no change in car behavior or average consumption. Likewise, when I'm in Canada and fill up there, I've never noticed any difference in the car. This includes running on the track, and I would expect if anything was going to show up, it would show up there. I'm not positi
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Quoterkj I thought them a bit hard anyway.... That's not "hard," that's "sporty."
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The octane (i.e. RON) rating is a measure of how resistant a fuel is to pre-igniting, i.e. knocking. The higher the octane rating, the more resistant the fuel is to knocking. Cars that require higher octane fuel generally have high compression ratios, advanced timing, or both. For example, lots of people put aftermarket chips in their BMWs for more power. These chips work by partly advancing the
Forum: Technical Forum

An unfortunate after-effect of last weekend's rally was discovering yesterday that both my rear shocks (Bilstein HD) were blown. The roads weren't that bad, but there were a few frost heaves and bumps that made the suspension do its job. Nothing cringe-inducing, but enough to get your attention. The shocks are less than a year old and have about 8000 miles on them. So why am I still a B
Forum: Car Talk

Cool! Thanks for the update. I was thinking about your 2002 recently. You've done a fantastic job on the restoration!
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