the use of the ambigious pronoun is deliberate (part 2)

last week someone posted on the chicago audiworld forum saying he was looking to get rid of his 91 (e30) bmw 318i to buy a mercedes 190e 2.6 for his wife to drive. since i wasn't particularly attached to my 190e and i always liked e30's (2) i told him i'd be up for a trade depending on the condition of his car. i was originally looking for a manual trans 190e way back when but they're impossible to find, and since his 318 was a manual, i figured it'd be more fun to drive every day.

he e-mailed me pictures and it looked pretty good, so we agreed to meet in schaumburg on saturday to swap cars. we got there and looked over each car, test drove them, and discussed what problems each one had. he offered to give me some cash in addition to the trade, but since he had just replaced a bunch of stuff on the 318 like the clutch and exhaust, and the 190e needed a new exhaust, i told him we could just do a straight trade of titles. so with that, we signed over the titles and swapped keys, and off we went in opposite directions.

on sunday, the guy called me and said that when he got back home to chicago, the 190e was making an awful noise from the front wheel and it felt like it had a flat tire. it wasn't a flat, but he had the car towed to his shop for them to look at. on tuesday he told me that his shop said that the wheel bearing had gone completely dry and cracked the spindle which may have screwed up the control arm (which was surprising to me since i had been driving the car for weeks and it was fine on the drive to schaumburg, and wasn't making any noise on his test drive). they said it would be about $600 to fix and even though it's an old car and i no longer owned it, i felt bad that the car i just gave him was undriveable so i paid for half of the repair.

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on monday while driving to and from work, the 318 died at stop signs 3 times. the rpm's would fall when i'd push the clutch in and would keep going past the idle speed and the engine would die. adam said it might be the idle control valve, so i changed my driving style to wait for the rpm's to come down in gear as much as possible before pushing the clutch pedal in and it has been fine.

the 318 had a short shifter installed which was actually an oem shifter from a z3. however, the shaft on it is different and is angled too far forward (as i assume the console on the z3 is shaped accordingly) and shifting into the top gears would cause the shifter to rub against the center console, and when the car was in a bottom gear, the shifter looked like it was in neutral.

so on tuesday (yeah, valentine's day, so what), i put the car up on a jack stand and took apart the shifter. i bent the shaft backwards using two big pipes and re-installed it, but then realized it wasn't bent far enough. so i took it out again and bent it some more. as i was going to hook the shifter back up to the selector rod under the car, i realized i could fit under the car without even jacking it up, that's how high the stock suspension sits. anyway, i buttoned everything back up and now the shifter doesn't rub against the console and its neutral position is where it should be.

the previous owner gave me a keyless entry system that he bought but never installed in the car, so i installed it after work yesterday. it's a ~$30 unit that came with two remotes and was very easy to install since the battery of the 318 is in the trunk, and the wires going to the trunk lock are right there. i just spliced into the green wires going to the lock, hooked it up to the battery, mounted the receiver, and programmed one of the remotes. presto. i stood in the garage constantly locking and unlocking the car from the remote because i was so amazed that it was so easy to install.

next up are suspension and tires since i can't comfortably drive a car without having some confidence in its handling. i ordered a bilstein/h&r shock/spring combo from turner which arrived today, so i will be installing that this weekend. for wheels and tires, i found a set of fittipaldi wheels and dunlop tires for cheap on ebay. these are actually the same wheels that dave used to have on his 318 (that he sold to eric, who made it into a race car but sold it before getting to race it.)

hopefully these will be the only things i have to do to the car in the near future. i don't want to dump a bunch of money into it since i already have one money pit.