[ADEe92]

Thanks for the offer umr - I’ll keep it mind!

[ADEe92]

I went ahead and fixed the front end of the car this week with Superpro adjustable caster control & radius arms with urethane bushes. After a wheel alignment (because of the M3 specs of the arms, the wheel alignment was wildly out when I first fitted them) the car is driving great. Very little additional NVH over stock - seem similar to reports from switching to the M3 factory arms. Urethane bushes have served me well on the e30 over the years, so hopefully these do the same and offer a bit more resilience to the insane speed humps they put in at my kids school - the stock e92 almost beaches itself on them?!



Easy enough to fit, it’s interesting that e92s don’t use tapered balljoints like most other cars - when you unbolt them they just fall out rather than requiring the big hammer like normal ones, and then you torque them far higher than I would have expected when refitting.

[ADEe92]

​Finally a bit of progress on my e30 coupe project - it seems it’ll be moving a bit closer to being an e9x

I’ve been hunting ever since I picked up the coupe for an affordable interior for it as it’s a rolling shell & e30 parts prices have gone a bit nuts, with good condition sport front and rear seats around $4k, with fully reupholstered interiors asking $7k if you can find them at all. I’ve been holding off on getting on with the bodywork until I found some sort of option for the interior so that the costs don’t completely blow out.

Given the difficulty of finding anything to buy, I decided to roll the dice and see whether e82 seats might be able to be modded to fit. The seats are from a late sport + edition, so Dakota leather and blue stitching exactly like my e92 but they are a manual seat rather than part-electric. Maybe I’ll have to paint the e30 space grey now so they’re twins!



The base cushion of the back seat is remarkably close to the e30 coupe seat base in all dimensions:



The backrest is too tall, but the width is good, so a quick bit of juggling of parts showed that if I remove the section of the seat base with the iso-mounts + trim the side trim pieces I should end up with a backrest at the right height for the e30 + the lines in the upholstery should end up even etc. Alternatively I could trim down the backrest and keep the isomounts, but either way the dimensions are close and it can be relatively easily modified to fit.



The fronts are slightly taller than e30 seats, but a similar width to the Recaros in my e30 sedan and no bulkier than Recaro Classic C seats that were an option on e30s (and I knew they’d fit seeing as e92 seats have already been fitted to e30s and you can buy brackets for them to bolt in).



With black door trims and side panels + new black carpet it should end up looking great & I’ve found someone to paint the car now too, so I will begin making some progress on it.

The shell will go to paint jail for a few months, which will give me room to move in my shed for a while and tick off a few other things.

[ADEe92]

With some nice weather today, decided to begin modifying the rear seat to fit the e30. I took the rear seat out of my sedan (as the rear seats in the sedan and coupe only have minor differences in the e30) so that I could work on it a bit more easily than climbing in and out of the coupe. After measuring things up, I disassembled the backrest and cut 110mm out of the bottom of it and then reassembled, ended up with:



Pretty happy with the result (the leather still needs a little more stretching around the bottom to tighten it up a bit more). Next up will be adapting brackets so that it bolts in to the stock e30 seat mounts, then cutting down the side panels -I’ll do that in the coupe - and it’ll be done.

[jzx_andy]

Awesome little project mate

[ADEe92]

Thanks - the final goal for my coupe is for it to end up something like this, minus the m-stripes:

[ADEe92]

I postponed my rear seat job for a bit and decided to tackle the worst bit of rust on the car - the battery tray. Replaced it with a new panel from Valcas Garage. Given the early e30 has no body galvanising, after removing the rust I went with cold galv followed by epoxy primer in the hope of avoiding it happening again (although the battery is going in the boot, so there won’t be any acid there this time around!)

from this:


to this (came out quite easily once the spot welds were drilled out):


to this:


Still undecided on whether I’m going with satin black in the engine bay (70s muscle car style) or with the new body colour.

On the e92 front, little to report except reliable daily driving