How to buy a good BMW e30 325

hey i'm donny and you're watching the e30 shop today we're going to talk about how to buy a good e30 so i contacted a friend of mine aaron yule and asked him to bring his 87 e30 coupe over so we're gonna check it out and here he comes hey donnie how's it going hey aaron great hey so uh what year and model is this car 87. uh it's a 325 is it an e or an it is an e okay awesome well let's uh let's have a go over here okay so we're gonna start and we're gonna see if the car has been wrecked before we're gonna validate the vin and the model of this car you want to follow me aaron we'll come on around here so the first thing we want to look at is this vin right here and every car in the bmw e30 line has a vin number we're going to look at that on decals all around the car and right here it says 07 of 86. so this was built in 7 of 86 which means it's a 1986 model your car okay one of the first vin decals that we're gonna find is gonna be on the end of the door jamb and it ends in 4593 so that means this is an original vin decal to the car place we're going to find the bin is stamped right into the cowl and it ends right underneath the wiper you'll see that the entire number stamped in and it says 4593 the other place we're going to find it is right here on the dashboard and it's pinned in and it'll say the entire vin ending in 4593 so we're going to check the passenger side of the car the first thing we're going to look at is the sticker right here and you'll see it's got the original bmw vin ending in 4593 if this was not an original fender it would have a d.o.t and a number on it or you wouldn't find the sticker at all also right here if i get my finger up in here i can clean this off you'll see the original hood ending in four five nine three so we know the entire front of the car is original which means the core support is probably original too now one other thing we want to look at back here so check the passenger door and we got an original sticker ending in 4593 so we know that's the original door and we're going to come back to the trunk and we're going to find the same stickers here but i don't know how to open the front no key all right um here we go here's the original trunk ends in 4593 a couple more pieces of information that you want to know is if a fender's been replaced this seam seal from the factory will be broken and you can see it goes right over the nut so this has never been removed on a car that's had a fender replaced this will be probably completely different and the nut will be free and clear another thing i want to show you is right here on the driver's side strut tower you'll see that it says lock silver metallic this is the original bmw decal for the paint code and codes down here on on each end all right a couple things under the hood we want to see if this is all original things that i like to look for is to see if the radiator fan shroud is on the radiator cap that supports it and covers it to the front is missing goes through these two holes and these light covers right here one of them's on if you look over here you'll see one clip is not clipped in and the other one's missing and then i also like to look at the battery tray right over here and you can see that there is no rust on this battery tray at all that is really clean and really nice and um pretty unusual driver side i noticed a couple other things i noticed it's got a little k n sticker here which just means this is the stock air filter and they have a k n filter inside it's nice to see this is all complete and all here also you know here's just something i noticed this is the ground it goes right over here to the hood hey some things that are nice to look for in the trunk but to see if you have all your tools i do notice that the antenna is missing but i bet if i pulled this back yeah the power antenna bracket is there but the power antenna unit is missing is the original hersh power antenna unit which can be replaced easily and then over here we got the tool kit and some of the tools are in here it's missing the little crank to help move the sunroof in case it jams up or a window regulator just missing maybe the screwdriver and the pliers just a few things and then down here under the spare tire cover we're going to check and see the spare tires here and it is i'm going to pull this out i want to see what kind of shape this is in this is interesting down here we've got the original dead sound deadening material and there's just no rust here at all this crumbling is just some of the edge of this material coming off so this is super original and rust free now over on this side these are things that you're going to look for you're going to want to see if the original jack is in here lug nut wrench best lug nut wrench in the world and then you've got the latch for the zac one other thing to look at in the car is to make sure that the battery cover is here these are pretty easy to find and on a coupe and a sedan the batteries are in the back and on a convertible batteries are in the front okay we talked about the trunk area and the spare tire well whether there's rust in there or not here are the areas on an e30 that rust that's one of them another one are these two pockets that go down underneath the battery and down here in this thing we call these rear pocket wells and if you come around to the back of the car right down here is where that usually rusts these tires kick up a lot of stuff and it'll rust a hole right in here in the bottom of this pocket these actually are in really good shape and there's a rust spot right here this is on every e30 this is about 99.9 percent rust free for an e30 and this rear apron down here is pretty rust free too and this is the tow eye hook another spot to check on all the e30s is the entire rocker right here and you'll see here's the seam joint at the factory and you can see where the quarter panel meets the rest of the rocker just this little bit of undercoating is coming off that's actually not rust and if we follow around to the front the fenders are notorious for rusting right here people have a tendency to jack the car at the fender seam this is just body work there's two frame rails underneath the front of the car the jack goes another 10 inches in and you jack the car on the frame rail not the bottom of the fender this can easily be pulled out with pliers and re-coated one other spot to check is the sunroof the sunroof is mounted onto the car by three hex screws on both sides they tend to rust there a little bit you can replace the sunroof seal it's about 138 dollars it's actually really easy to do i have a video where we replace a metal roof with a glass roof and we'll show you how to replace the sunroof seal so one other thing to look at at the cars besides the cracked dash is the glove box now this one actually works it has the latches working it's got the straps here to keep it down and it's got the owner's manual wow that's that's really nice and the service book and wow it looks like we have all of the owners the original owners paperwork here years and years worth of documentation if you ever have any of this you should save it and my friend pete real will tell you everything you buy for the car throw the receipt in the glove box so you can find it yeah wow look at this floor mat installation in case you don't know how to install a floor mat just flipping through all this stuff whoa this is the original window sticker and i think you think the price is in here somewhere oh check that out it's got our 4593 vin 22 225 for the base model i know that the is cars in 1986 87 were like 5 000 more so that means a car like this brand new was 27 000 30 some years ago that's freaking amazing all right now we're gonna take the car and look at the interior and then uh do a driving impression of the car see how well it's put together you have to adjust the seat for me aaron has long legs i have short legs well i guess the first thing i noticed right in here is that the uh check panel is hanging in the mirror is missing i'm gonna assume this broken mirror is the mirror so we'll fix that later make a video on it another thing to look at in this car is the steering wheel this is the is steering wheel um so someone's upgraded the steering wheel on this base model car i noticed that the leather stitching here's the relief for it the leather is off of this and on ebay you can get a replacement wrap that has the bmw color thread all in through here and it's under thirty dollars another thing i've noticed is it's got an m3 shift knob on here which is pretty cool this is easy to replace the boots here the plastic ring is missing and we'll make a quick video on how to replace that too this is an accessory someone's added this can come out or stay in i notice that the stereo's missing um that can easily be replaced but this check panel is in really good shape the led screen wearing out here is pretty common you can actually get replacements for those two they just slide in when you pull that whole piece out i want to show you the condition of the seats too these are sport seats so these are not the original one piece bottom comfort seats these are uh eight piece sport seats and if you come over here and look at this passenger seat you'll see these are eight panels it's one two three four five six seven and eight with the headrest these are the nicest seats ever people put them in 911s they put them in all kinds of hot rods so they're super comfortable and if the foam's good you can just recover them all right let's take a look at the back seat see what we have back here this should flip forward oh and it kind of does looks like we got some repair work to do here um the carpet is blue probably my favorite carpet it's in really good shape the back seat if you look in there looks pretty good it's the original blue vinyl perforated back seat and if you look at the back dash that's the original eye dash that has the little tiny speakers the s models came with premium sound speakers which aaron has already bought another dashboard and we're going to switch that out later so we've checked out the whole outside of the car the inside of the car i think it's time to do a driving impression so let's take it for a spin so aaron jump in starts and runs really good idle's at 700 that's great we got our check engine light which is pretty normal hit that and find reverse uh-oh it looks like someone put a really short shift kit in this so i'll do my best that's good shifting is gonna be tricky you can see it's raining now so let's turn the wipers on but we're still gonna drive it all right here we go wipers work that's good steering feels really good first gear there we go [Music] put our seatbelt on first [Music] it's a bad habit [Music] 2.7 liter engine feels really good it's got all of its low end torque and what we're going to do is we're going to go to the shop and just right down the street maybe show you another project over there brakes work great [Music] i think the only thing we need to deal with on this car is the body roll it's got a lot of rear end swinging around so that means we need to go through all the bushings and um that's not too bad to do we're just pulling up to the shop now and i've got something i want to show you it's cooler than that 59 apache truck too all right this is what i want to show you come on over here so there'll be a big video on this build later but i found two m3s believe it or not on a farm and we picked both of them up and this was one of them and uh believe it or not it's all here so this is kind of cool if you want to come around behind me this car's been hit really hard so got some work to do but i want to show you the inside of this car it's missing the driver seat and someone's stolen the cluster but if you look in real close on the console to the right of the steering wheel you'll see the bird's nest all right so let me show you uh why this car has the name it has so this car is going to be called t-bone we're going to completely get this car running we're going to do an s52 swap and we're going to drive it t-bone

Channel: The E30 Shop

Views: 64,378

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Id: 6Um8AGcj8K4

Length: 15min 41sec (941 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 30 2021