ke70dave

Just walk away.

I have previously spent far too long trying to bleed an upside down caliper. Once you do it you never make that mistake again.

I'll race ya in the beema. Although it's currently almost manual but still unregistered.

Nice fabrication skills mate. Enjoyable to read. I have never had the patience to fix rust and dents. I usually fix it just enough so it looks OK and won't rust until I sell the car:p

I would probably still use a fan behind the radiator rather than in front and make a shroud for it. Or grab a fan off a fwd car at the wreckers that comes with a shroud and make it fit.

If the OEM cooling system is in good order it should handle mud bashing perfectly fine. My old 1.3L Sierra would hoon all day at low speeds. A new radiator, radiator shroud, thermostat and a good clean out of the cooling system an it never over heated when stuck in mud. I am very skeptical of high flow thermostats.

Did you replace the little capacitor thing on the distributor? I'm afraid I haven't been able to watch the video but the capacitor has given me drama before and they are cheap to replace.

what LCA do you intend on using

Right updates! OEM tail lights! Did a compression test yesterday which is a potential worry... 1: 170 2: 160 3: 150 4: 165 5: 120 (!!!!!) 6: 165 120 is low, but its not catastrophically low as you might expect with a head gasket failure or worse? I also completed a cooling system pressure test and it held 1.2bar pressure for a good 15mins, so iit hasnt blown the headgasket through the cooling system. The spark plug and the compression tester tool came out of cylinder 5 with a considerable amount of carbon bits on them, so i guess its possible that the carbon buildup is effecting the valve seating. First step is to adjust the valve clearances as i suspect they might be a bit tight (doesn't tick as much as i think it should?). Then next step is a leak down test. I also have some subaru upper cylinder head cleaner to put through it which should dissolve alot of the carbon. The car hasn't been driven for about 18mths so it wouldn't surprise me if it came good after a long drive. I have been chasing a rough idle for a while, found a considerable number of vacuum leaks. I have it to the point now that it idles a bit rough when cold, but it comes good once it starts to heat up. Really need to get a new exhaust made, it has holes in all of the mufflers which makes it difficult to diagnose issue as all you can hear is an awful exhaust leak...

The map sensor was shared across many Toyotas of that era, so when you find out the part number (sorry I can't help with that) go to wreckers and check out any 80s/90s efi Toyota

There must be downsides..... Logetivity?

Whatever you do buy good quality wheel bearings. I've been burnt twice buyig cheap bearings. Especially when you have to press them on.

Big question i have to ask is why do you want to spend so much cash on a car at, ~20yrs old? If you have that much in your bank buy a house mortgage. If you don't you will be paying it off for years and your 30k car will cost you like ~40k by the end. I've been where you are, bought shiny cars the moment I could (~16k s15 when I finished uni), 6yrs later and I'm back to a $1700 e30. The new cars don't have much soul and having huge loans above your head isn't much fun. For the sake of the thread, Id go the evo.

Have you considered an intank lift pump? I used a commodore lift pump in my ke70 tank years ago, adapted it to the oem ke70 pickup. Was Silent!

What sort of litres/100km you reckon you are getting fuel economy wise?

Thanks mate. So today rather than fixing more important things I put in the series 2 headlights. Much better:) Actually that's not true. I pulled out the mechanical idle up widget and it seems to half work. It's not stuck closed what I thought it would be given it idles so low. But I did find a few suspicious vacuum hoses, so time to replace all of the vacuum rubber hoses.

yeah i sent a few pms to spencer a few yrs ago discussing e30s, he had a 318is at some stage too. The steel wheels are pretty cool, I'm going to repaint them. Alot of the e30s come with steel wheels with plastic hub caps, i havent seen too many with the silver steelies and bmw centre cap. down the track id like to get the "euroweaves" wheels, they are an oem bmw BBS wheel. look like this,

Great to hear its still in use. certainly a blast from the past!

ha thanks.... So far the main thing i have noticed is that the car is put together amazingly well. I took the door card off to replace the door handle and it took me ages, little clips and what not everywhere. All seems to be designed to really minimize nvh.

Hello All, Well after coming back from Canada a few months ago i was on the hunt for a new project car. After i sold my ke70 in about 2011 (damn that is like 5yrs ago...) I had a WRX, and S15 and a suzuki sierra. I really wanted the ke70 feeling again, small car RWD, old school cool. But i wanted a more modern version perhaps, and something with a bit of power out of the box... So last weekend i bought a 1985 323i e30 coupe with 156,000kms on the clock. I think the kms are real based on exterior condition but everything is still 31yrs old so it needs some work thats for sure. I chose this particular car because it has no rust, paint is pretty good, body is very straight and the interior is very nice for the age. It has been sitting for around 12mths unregistered so i got it for quite a good price. Unfortunately the car was not running great when i got it. Dizzy cap, rotor, spark plugs and draining the fuel tank seems to have made a significant improvement, but it still idles a bit funny. I have driven it up the street a bit and it seems to drive ok. The BMW of this era run a fairly crude efi system. It has a regular distributor with vacuum advance and then an airflow meter and a few sensors that run an analogue (!!!) ecu to run the injectors. Idle control is taken care of by a sophisticated mess of vacuum lines and actuators. Unfortunately it seems that someone has made a fairly poor attempt at repairing the vacuum lines and i am currently studying diagrams in order to put it back to how it is supposed to be, with hopefully some simplification along the way. The car is auto but i have purchased complete manual conversion "kit" from a guy parting out a car. I just need to buy a new clutch, machine flywheel and some bushes before fitting it. As for plans for the car, I aim to clean it up, convert it to manual before registering it. Then track down an LSD, some shocks and springs and some sticky tyres. I'll see how the oem electronics goes but i have a haltech e8 here that i will probably install to control the fuel. I just need to buy a wideband. I don't put too much faith in the fuel economy of this thing and the cost of replacing sensors is probably higher than getting the haltech running. I have purchased some oem tail lights as well as some series 2 projector headlights. I just need to sort out the wiring plugs for the headlights. Oh and it has AC that is pretty cold! Anyway let me know what you think. Apologies the interior shot didn't turn out great.

Could any of those things. I'd be lookin at CVS and wheel bearings. CVS only make noise when under acceleration in my experience Can check wheel bearings by lifitng wheels and pulling on the top and bottom of wheel tryin to feel the play in bearing. Not just the wheel scraping on something plastic?

I reckon you need to look at optimising your ignition curve. That is how you make power. You could track down a cheap aftermarket ECU and use it to run just the ignition. I got an old haltech e8 for $200 and ran it on my g13a Suzuki Sierra engine. Still used the carby but the e8 ran the ignition and I could program it on a 32*32 table at whatever rpm intervals I wanted. Used a GM ignition module and the stock electronic distributor. I also made some diy knock headphones using a knock sensor from a nissan sr20de and plugged it straight into the mic input on my laptop. You could also plug a wideband into the ECU and view or log the data too.

Did you replace the rings? If so did you gap them correctly? Did you get a valve grind too?

Everyone has a different opinion on what "fits". 15*7 +10 with a 195 50 r15 is as big as I would go with reasonable Street suspension, ie softish. Didnt matter how I drove it it, the tyres never rubbed on anything. No point fitting wheels and tyres that are so close to the guard that you are scared to throw it into corners for fear of rubbing tyres.

To be honest if you don't know when the carby kit was last done, it's probably worth doing. The needle and seat is the big one to replace. Remember that the jets are between the fuel bowl and the opening, so you can't actually squirt carby cleaner through the jets without taking it all apart. In saying that you can have some success by spraying tons of carby cleaner into the top of the carby with the engine running. You will need to operate the throttle by hand as the carby cleaner will tend to make the engine die. Basically spray it into the top of the carby try and clean off as much junk as possible.