The adventures of Austin's e30

[SIZE="4"]Well, I've been meaning to write up a modlist for my car. It's undergone a ton of work since I bought it right at the end of december. I had just wrecked my previous e30 so I had a full car worth of parts sitting in my drive way. I went up to strictly German in braselton to look for a shell to swap all my parts into. The shells they had were pretty rough which was kind of a bummer.

Right before I was about to leave Bobby mentioned that they had a 325is that a customer had just dropped off that he wanted to sell. He told me what was wrong with it, it was an automatic, no power steering, the speedo didn't work, the odometer didnt work (it never works on e30s), the battery drained itself (ended up being the head unit), and metal on metal brakes in the rear (gotta love that sound! haha). But the body was really straight with no rust. So I told them that I was interested and they were going to try to get a hold of the owner to see how much he wanted for it. Here are a few pictures from that day....





To make a long story short I bought the car. Since I didn't have the cash up front I made a deal with my parents that I would pay them back as I parted out my old car. Here are a few pics of the red car.




After I hit the banana peel. (with crotch grab for dramatic effect...)


So I started working on the white car. The first thing I swapped over was the rear rotors and pads. Then I swapped over the gauges so I could see how fast (or the case of an e30 how slow) i was going. Next up I pulled the bilstein sports and h&r races off the red car and swapped them over. Here is a shot from around that time...



At this point I still didn't have power steering and I still had a transmission that was intented for women and amputees. So next up was a steering rack, dash and manual swap. I can't find any pictures from the manual swap but it was suprisingly straight forward. It was just a TON of work. Because I had to pull the transmission out of the red car, then pull the massive auto tranny out of the white car. And rip out all those crazy hoses that attach to the auto tranny. And pull the dash off so it would be easier to pull the pedal box out and run the clutch line through the firewall. Needless to say my car was a MESS at this point. Since I had never had a car in such a state of disarray I was stressed out that I wouldn't be able to put it back together. haha

While all of this was going on I was still pulling parts off of the red car to sell to people. Here is a shot from the night we pulled the transmission out. We ended up pullling the engine out too.



This picture was taken at 5am after working all night! haha



Here is another one with the man pedal, and dash installed!


My garage was starting to look like a e30 grave yard…


So the tranny swap went well, the dash swap went well, but the steering rack swap was a fail. It still leaked like a mofo so we had to swap the pump out too.
I ended up buying some drop hats which lower the front of the car about a half inch. H&R race springs give the car more wheel gap in the front, so this took care of that. Heres a picture from around then.



I also decided I wanted to delete the muffler on my car and get straight pipes made since I have a stock muffler from my old car. Performance mufflers for e30s are stupid expensive. It actually sounds pretty good.



Doing that sideways thing.


Sometime after that I picked up a e36 steering rack at pull-a-part. This is a big upgrade for e30s. Stock the steering is 4 turns lock to lock. Which sucks, especially when your drifting or in the mountains. The e36 rack is 3.2 lock to lock. There are better racks, (e36 M3, Z3, and Z3M) but I didn’t have the $$$ and the e36 was already a good enough upgrade for me. So it took a few days, but I got that done too.
I decided that it would be a good idea to replace my timing belt and water pump so that was next on the agenda. We replaced all the hoses and belts. It sucked. Lol

I finally got enough $$ together to buy wheels. I wanted to have them on for 4ngiefest and the big Import Alliance meet in Atlanta. I couldn’t get a hold of the guy in time, but I ended up picking the wheels up on the way to 4ngiefest.



“Rollin through sonics!!” hahaha


So I finally got the wheels on. It was a pain in the ass to make them fit.




Soon after that I did the fatlace show at Formula D at Road Atlanta. Some of you may have seen my car there. I go to school at Georgia Southern. So I had finals the whole week before, including two the Friday before FD. So I drove home after finals and worked on my car until 4am the night before.



Car shows really aren’t my style. I modded my car to drive it, not to hard-park it like some people. So The Monday after formula D my dad and I had Little Talladega rented out. It was a lot of fun. Here are a few shots from then…

My friend said he saw my front lip fold up under the car from scraping a few times on I-20. haha







So here is a list of what all ive done to my car, I'm sure I'm forgetting some things.
• Manual transmission Swap
• New pads and rotors (all 4)
• Bilstein sport shocks and H&R race springs
• Drophats
• Dash swap
• E36 steering rack swap
- UUC Evo3 Short Shifter
• Muffler delete
• Leather hood bra
• Volvo lip
• Vw lip (still haven’t modded this one to fit yet)
• Replaced front control arms
• Replaced all hoses and belts
• Replaced timing belt and water pump
• Euro plate filler
• 4 16x8 XXR 002’s with nexen n3000 tires (those tires suck btw)
• 5 bbs basketweaves
• 2 bmw bottle caps
• 2 15x7 Team Dynamics Pro Race 2 wheels with nitto neogens
• Taurus side skirts
• Blacked out all sidemarkers
• E34 ebrake handle (its soo much better than the e30 one)

It’s really easy to build a car if you have money. But for a broke jobless college student like me it really takes a lot of dedication and sacrifice to turn your dreams into a reality. I’m proud of what I’ve done and I’ve learned A LOT along the way. With the help of my friends I have personally done all the mods and maintenance to my car with the exception of welding the exhaust and mounting the tires. So if you’ve helped me along the way I really appreciate it.

Your questions and comments are appreciated. I’d be surprised if anyone actually read all that! haha