Scrapyard Rescue! BMW E21: Will it run and drive after 20+ Years?!

[Music] foreign [Music] how's it going i'm michael and this is budget builds my dad and i bring rusty crusty old cars back to life [Applause] what's happening budget builders and welcome back to the channel well if you can't tell we're back at the scrap yard that we bought the porsche and the toyota hilux from and my friend eric had gave me a call a local i guess junkyard or toast tow yard had these three cars for a while it was time to get rid of them with scrap being up they brought them in but of course we want to save them so we have two three series and a little alfa romeo we're going to get them drug home let's see if we get these things run all right so the first of our three scrap yard saves we're going to attempt to try to get running is this 1981 bmw e21 320i so from what i understand on this car as you can see here the last time this car was actually inspected was 1989 1990 right around 1990 the car had a fender bender as you can tell the hood and this fender a little shinier than the rest of it from what i can tell the frame is super straight it was just a little bunk and i think they replaced the hood and stuff and obviously they used a little bit better quality paint than the rest of it now it's still really nasty but it's it's better shape hopefully the whole car will clean up and we can get it all to match pretty nice from what i've been told car's been sitting for since probably late 90s early 2000s and let's see if we get the thing to run now this car is showing 142 000 miles the interior i would say matches up there's one little tear in the seat but it's actually really clean as far as under here you can see the board probably wasn't too bad you can tell that that was an older repair that's been done for quite a while now but this engine is exceptionally clean under here other than a little bit of a mouse nest here and there nothing looks terribly a little chewed on but thankfully not too terribly bad and i actually popped this guy here and look how incredibly clean the internals on this engine are our wires look good they're a little eaten up from little mice but not too bad if we got a jumping out issue we know what's going on there and i went ahead and let's throw our hand check that out nice turns over nice and freely for us which is a good sign first thing i do want to do though is we always want to go ahead and pull those spark plugs let's put a little bit of marvel mystery or some fogging oil down in there so we know we have some nice lubrication on the top in case we have a little bit of surface rust going on there and then we start checking everything else out and seeing if we get this gal to run 13 16 plug socket our first cylinder looks exceptionally good it's obviously was maybe running a little on the rich side mighty power core that's an old goofy spark plug the mighty power core for your bmw wait this is a japanese car another pretty attractive spark plug pretty attractive you know what i mean whatevs hmm that one looks good but it looks completely different so like the last time it looked like maybe it was clean like the last time it was run maybe it had a running issue maybe they did the work to it and tried to fire it off and it didn't run good so they gave up on it oh boy obviously let's get this battery pulled out of here this is an old [Music] old duralast it's probably older than i am oh my and while we're here let's make sure there's no big rat's nest in this air box really clean in there cool deal now when i was at the junkyard i pulled this dipstick to check the oil which was clean [Music] and now it doesn't go back in so i'm really not sure what's going on there but that's something i want to figure out let's slap our battery in here and see what happens i'll get a little sparkage there see what we got check it out so the key was on obviously for steering fuel is showing like it's got some in there we got a clock oil pressure light no blower of any kind all right let's give this key a quick turn and see what happens sounds really nice it's a good sign obviously we don't have any spark plugs or anything in there this thing is grody so i was sitting here i gave this brake pedal a few pumper rooneys and i'm not gonna lie i think this is one of the first cars i've ever done that had brakes i don't know that they're good brakes but there's some pedal there we might have some brakes somewhere in this car that works that'll be nice all right i've got one spark plug here let's go ahead really quick with our plugs out and everything and verify we have fire that's going to be one big thing obviously with this car it's all electronic ignition everything so as long as all our connections are good our computer we have power everything where we need we should have fire here if we don't oh boy so let's go ahead and see what we got [Music] yes super nice that's a good sign all right so while we were turning this thing over checking spark i did put my phone up underneath and could actually hear the fuel pump running now what's nice as you can tell there's not a ton of moisture here and surprisingly it smells pretty good so i'm thinking that they drained the tank or left it completely empty because i don't really smell any fuel at all there so hopefully that's a good sign and which sometimes it is sometimes it isn't a lot of times you want to leave your fuel fuel tank fuel your fuel tank full so because any kind of open air you have in your tank is going to let moisture create condensation and moisture inside and that's going to rust your tank out so we might have issues there hopefully not it does have an external fuel pump so we can at least get to that it obviously while we turned it over you could actually hear the fuel pump running it sounds dry so let's try to get some fuel in there and i also want to i don't want to take a chance of tearing anything up i know a lot of people just fire stuff up but i like to change oil on all of my engines before we crank them so i'm going to go ahead and run to the store we'll grab some gas we'll grab oil and filter i'm going to get that changed in this car so everything looks good there [Music] holy crap holy crap then gorilla put this on last there she goes all right so thankfully our oil looks excellent no metal shavings or anything down in the bottom of the pan here we'll put this plug back on but maybe not quite so darn tight you gotta be bye felicia all right got that filter pulled there it is quite a bit older filter what's nice to see is just that little bit of turning over actually pulled oil all the way up and filled that whole filter full so that's really nice to see i'm gonna run to the store now and go ahead and grab everything we need [Applause] all right there you have it so tell me this maybe i'm the only one do you stick all of your funnels by size oh my goodness in this funnel so every time you want to use this funny you have to pull every single funnel you have out and then you end up sprawling them out everywhere that's probably good enough for now this thing has like three fuel filters so like i said it didn't smell terrible but it probably it's probably got old leaded gas in it and that's probably why it doesn't smell too bad instead of this ethanol junk that we have nowadays so this thing's probably going to be kind of loud because obviously first thing that happened when it went to the scrap yard was they picked it up and cut the catalytic that catalytic converter out from under it so it's probably going to be straight manifold but fingers crossed let's see what it does this is always like one of the most nervous but exciting parts of bringing a car back it's finding out if it'll run obviously gonna upload that oil prime and the fuel prime our oil pressure lights actually kicking off which is a good sign that means we're building enough pressure to push that relief and kick that oil pressure light off so that's really good let's go ahead and break one of our lines loose up front here and see if we have any fuel coming to the front i don't know if this is the return or the in or what but oh we've got some leakage oh my goodness got some weepage it's got pressure on it smells not very good i would ought to crank on that right hmm what do we do what do we do i've never messed with this style fuel injection though i know the old volkswagens had it but everything i had was diesel so all right so i broke all these top lines loose and it appears i only have one that actually has fuel in it so i'm thinking the little i think each of these have little spring-loaded pins or something that actually allows fuel through so i am going to try that right there [Music] all right so i wanted to get an idea of how this actually functions and thankfully sitting in the back of the trunk was this fella this is that main ci cis distribution block and everything and looking at it it looks like it pulls vacuum which opens the hobenfelder mcbob that pushes fuel up here now there's probably a reason this was in the trunk so i went to reach down up in here and this thing was completely stuck i pushed it as hard as i could barely started moving it and it started spewing fuel everywhere so that is our issue apparently you would think you'd give a little bit of fuel at idle and be very fairly close but it actually does pull it just a little bit and then obviously as you rev it up more vacuum you fuel pull the more that actually opens so that right there is our issue what i need to try to do is get this boot off so i can try to free it up and obviously if we can't free it up we have one right there that might possibly work so let me go ahead and try to get this boot off here so we can see if we can start getting this thing working for us so i like and i don't like when you do this i just noticed a fancy little stanley screwdriver which means somebody was working on this and they forgot their screwdriver in there but a free screwdriver that's always nice all right so without removing the intake i was actually not able to remove this boot what i did was push it down and pull it over a little bit so i could see that top because i was actually once i pushed up pretty hard i got that the actual float there to free up and then what i did was used this dipstick to push down on it and i push it back up what the pb blaster in my face okay so what i did was just work that back and forth back and forth sprayed some pb blaster on it it's free it's not super duper free we'll see if it wants to try to rev way up then obviously we'll have to potentially take this thing apart i i noticed the other one had some painted bits that this one doesn't so maybe at some point of time this fuel system was actually rebuilt here but we've got fuel to it we now have fuel going to the injectors it smells like butt but i don't know it might run a lot of the times this old fuel this fuel injected stuff will run on stuff that surprises you that's not like straight nasty fuel obviously we mix that fresh in so hopefully we've got a good you know 82 octane or something in there that this thing will run on well there's a cylinder or two well it runs obviously we're short a couple cylinders i'm gonna go with it's probably an injector issue just with knowing that that cis plunger and everything was stuck anyways we've probably got some stuff stuck in those injectors you can see beating around on those injectors a little bit we picked up a couple cylinders and then we dropped one i think we're at three cylinders i think we're still on and off picking that other one up obviously like i said we're straight manifold here where they cut that catalytic converter off so it's a little noisy all right with a little more looking around i noticed this and two plug wires two and three were backwards and this is a replacement head like that's why i said it looks so clean in there and that's because it's brand new so i wonder if something broke when this was in that little accident broke something off the head or something because you can see it got crunched right there and they had to replace it or busted the radiator and left it running and they had a new head put on and never could get it to run right because it sure don't run right now let's start from square one and go ahead and check that compression see where it stands and then we can go from there dead even weird sounding gauge about the same so i got that valve cover pulled off and look at that head and valve train i mean that thing is gorgeous so what i went ahead and did is rolled my cam lobes until they were facing down which tells me both valves are fully closed which tells us we're on our compression stroke and at that point back here i don't think you'll be able to see but i rolled it around in this little notch and there's a line which is all right with the timing marks being good and everything i'm not incredibly concerned with our compression at this point it was all dead even 120 125 extremely close that is on the low side this is a crappy little gauge but our the biggest thing is our numbers aren't super far out we have pretty nice even numbers now when you get one that's 15 to 20 percent higher or lower than the other ones that's when you really want to start worrying what i think we have going on here is we haven't run it that long the more we run it the better the the better those rings will seat in the valves will start seating better and i think that'll actually bring our compression up but at this point we haven't run it enough to the point where i'm really concerned with those compression numbers now nothing seems to leak by the valves look super good everything's nice and snug here so i just i don't see us having any issues up here and they're good enough that i don't think we have a dead cylinder what i think most of it's going to be is either the cis block right there or our injectors i think our next step is actually going to be to pull all four of these injectors out set them in their own individual cups turn this thing over and see how it all looks how the spraying all looks all right so what i've gone ahead and done before getting too crazy is we pulled all of our injectors and those you just take loose from the hard lines give them a good yank and they pop on out of there the o-ring the seals aren't the greatest i will have to order a set of those but what i did was actually pulled them out and you see they're just nasty and i took a little brass wire brush and just gave them a little cleaning obviously what you do with these you back flush them but i want to verify that the issue i i wanted to verify that the issue wasn't down in here with that distribution block and so this distribution block is actually that spare one that we had in the trunk and the reason i went ahead and replaced it is this thing is gross it is crusty and wasn't circulating right the plunger was stuck wide open and plus i wanted to kind of dig in and get an idea of how these worked anyways it's a pretty cool little system all it is is just that you have constant fuel pressure the little plunger rises up and allows your pressure to go to each of your each of your outlets here what's kind of cool is they each have their own individual screen they're almost like a little injector screen and then you're also screened inside the injector so it's kind of cool your your double screen there so the injector should be okay obviously there could be some varnish in there but honestly even though this was crusty the screens themselves really weren't all that bad so i think those injectors are going to be okay all right so it's each each of those sitting right there let's go ahead and turn the car over and see how our fan looks i'm not sure that you can even tell but it does have a nice even spray for the most part they're not completely perfect but compared to what it was before when we had the old one on there they were this one was blowing up i just wanted to blow a little bit and it was if after you cut the car off this thing was still spraying fuel everywhere and it was just an absolute mess and that's i think a lot of what we had going on was just way too much fueling so much raw fuel being dumped down in those cylinders and that was a lot of our issues there so now that we have this replaced and that working i think it'll be good enough like i said we'll run some additives and stuff that i think will further finish cleaning off those injectors because for the most part it should just be some tarnish that could be giving us some issues there [Music] [Applause] all right good [Music] all right so i took some time yesterday evening once it started getting dark and i actually went through and pulled all of these injectors again and actually went through and back flushed all of them they have their own little each they each have their own individual little screens that actually get clogged up and were clogged up so we back flush those all right so as you can see what i'm actually using here is this little piece of tie wire and i put this in my mouth and pry open the injector needle here on the end and then wrap that little guy around there and then i blast it back through with blake blake brake cleaner and then we give it a couple blasts and what we're actually doing is there's a screen in there and we're blasting everything out of that screen trying to get these injectors cleaned out the best we can they may just need to be replaced but i'd like for this thing to be able to run the best it can on these and then i also spent a little bit more time going through and checking for any vacuum leaks because this thing is actually vacuum actuated if you have any kind of vacuum leaks that's going to give you trouble so i actually went through we taped up some bad spots and i did find one little port under here that actually had nothing on it so once we did that it fires up and it actually sounds a lot better now it is cold right now we have not run it we rolled it down the hill here let's fire it off see how it runs and see if it'll drive we have some breaks i think there might be one break in this car working uh the clutch is slow to actuate but it does actuate i've got my little people with me they wanted to go you can hear them in there they wanted to go for a ride with us let's buzz it around really quick and see what it does okay in the front seat mommy's gonna record so they'll get in the front seat [Applause] you don't want a picture who wants to drive now hold on guys so as you can hear we actually do have a little bit of fuel starvation still going on knowing we have the screen that we have yeah baby no we have the screen oh my you're ripping it apart [Applause] knowing we actually do have the screen in the tank and then three other fuel filters and the injectors probably need replacement i think that's what we have going on it runs super smooth super clean it just cuts out over 3000 rpm or so so you can't really get on it and obviously with these little people in the car we don't want to anyways they wanted to run around a little bit more so we're going to do that [Applause] [Applause] i think with some fresh fuel and some injector cleaner some solvent or something i think the car will clean up with some with some drive time [Applause] hey if you've tried in the past to get on our website and it didn't work for you we did have some hackers get in there and messed it all up but thankfully my friend cody from broke premiere went on there he's the one actually created the website fixed everything back up so if you guys want to jump on there you guys have some stickers some decals pretty soon we will have hats shirts and hoodies on there but if y'all will go check his channel out show him some love and support he does newer modern revivals kind of like what we do i'll put a link to his channel down in the description obviously with some run time this car started to clear up better and i think it will really clear up nicely but this just goes to show what you can do with something that you save that is destined for the scrap yard we took a little bit of time a couple days went through the mechanicals and the fuel system on this car got it running and moving down the road if you guys want to see more on this kind of stuff be sure to the subscribe button notification bell peace out and catch all on the flip side [Music] you

Channel: Budget Buildz

Views: 197,592

Keywords: willitrun, sitting, barnfind, fieldfind, oldcar, classic, budgetbuildz, drive, garagefind, woods, buried, dirt, crazy, bringbacktolife, bmw, e21, 320i, scrapyard, crusher, save, rescue, m10, gas, 1.8, 5speed

Id: pAYlUMfNRcI

Length: 29min 21sec (1761 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021