Thanks! I really should get a PDR guy to try and make that fender less awful, but it's kinda tricky when you have no money.
Yep, that's what it's for. It's usually used in conjunction with that big L-shaped bracket, but honestly the little trapezoidal bracket is enough on its own. Especially if you run the "wrong" size and it's already a tight fit.
1995 525i 5-speed - Thread
Whenever I've got some downtime at the shop, or whenever I'm frustrated with a particular job, I'll often go and mess with my car for a little bit. It's very therapeutic, and my car gets incrementally better from it, so win-win!
Today's little fix of the day was securing the jack in the trunk, which had been flopping around the trunk since I got the car. I also threw in a factory wheel chock that I picked up from the junkyard a few weeks ago. It's one of those stupid little details that make me happy with the car.
After work, I went on a nice little drive with some friends, since I hadn't really driven this car properly aside from basic commuting. I'm pleased to report that the new suspension holds up quite nicely on sweepers and twisty mountain roads. The car feels tight and controlled, even when going through turns at relatively high speeds. The only thing I'd change at this point would be adding sway bars and AKG bump steer correction plates, which I'll do once I have some more money.
On the way to the drive, my friend grabbed this quick roller shot, which I think came out lovely:
Can't wait to find some rear bumper trims next time I see an E34 in the local junkyard, as that's still a major eyesore on the car.
Next up will be going through the engine, as it needs a few things. First, an oil change, since the oil currently in the engine is some conventional Shell oil of indeterminate age. Then stuff like air filter, spark plugs, valve cover gasket, fuel filter, etc. I'll probably re-seal the intake manifold as well, since the car idles a little rough upon cold starts. Hopefully that takes care of the lackluster power delivery... it feels like the engine takes a while to wake up and it has a little bogging throughout the rev range which finally clears up around 5k. After the engine is all sorted, I'll get a chip for it, as I miss revving to 7k every day. That and an exhaust so I can actually hear what the engine is doing.
1995 525i 5-speed - Thread
I’m super glad I found this thread! I just picked up a 91 525i in the exact same color last Monday. I’m new to BMWs but have been wanting one of these older models for the longest and finally found a good example of one. I’ll be following this for sure!
Great seeing progressive threads like this. Makes me miss having cars I could tinker with on a regular basis. Well done.
I get that, but I'm still not a fan of the dent. My friend is getting a bunch of PDR work done to his E34 next week so I'll see if it's something that they can knock out.
Start a thread! I love seeing other gold E34's.
That's why I daily drive an E34, because I would get bored otherwise.
1995 525i 5-speed - Thread
Really neat project.
Have you thought about picking up a PDR kit on Amazon and trying your hand at your dent yourself?
I picked this one up last year: https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B07...?ie=UTF8&psc=1 showing at $139 Canadian now, but I bought it for $48 Canadian (~35 USD) when the price was down for some reason.
*I don't actually have a single dent or ding on my cars, (I bought preventatively because the price was low, and in the past I've had pro's do PDR on the 530i, and it was $$$), but I did fix a dent on my kitchen hood fan...
It looks like deals like that may be had on Amazon.com too.
Speaking of tinkering, I did a few more little things the other day. First was replacing one of the busted rear bumper trim pieces with a nicer one.
Ultimately that whole rear bumper needs to be replaced since it's quite cracked and damaged, but at least it looks halfway decent for now. After that, I changed the oil with some Mobil 1 10W40 and a Bosch filter that I found laying around at the shop. The oil that came out was some ancient conventional Shell stuff that was well past its prime:
While underneath the car, I only noticed two leaks— the valve cover gasket and the power steering lines. Not too bad at all for a 221k mile engine that sat for a year! Those will be easy fixes whenever I get around to tackling them... straight 6 power steering lines are an absolute breeze to replace when compared to V8 lines.
The engine bay has stayed pretty clean since I scrubbed it. At some point I'll give it a more thorough detail to catch the remaining dirt and dress all of the plastics, but it looks pretty darn good for now.
In that last picture you can see that the radiator temperature switch is unplugged, that's because I currently have the aux fan connector jumped to run at high speed due to a bad resistor in the fan. That's on the list of things to fix, but the temporary fix works for now and keeps the AC cold.
Later that day I drove the car out to a scenic mountain road to put it through its paces a bit. It performed admirably, just needs an intake and an exhaust to hear that engine sing. The new suspension setup made it very good in the twisties, I was quite impressed. The Vanos seems to have smoothed out a bit with the fresh oil too, not sure if that's just a placebo effect though. The sky looked pretty dramatic at the end of the road, so picture time:
All in all, this car has exceeded all my expectations and I'm very happy to have it.
1995 525i 5-speed - Thread
I also enjoy how the car blends in with the rest of AZ. I doubt it would pop as much as it does for you, up here in my neck of the woods. Beautiful pics !
What rocker covers does that have?
I'm wondering what to do with my exposed black sills and bottom rear bumper which are black.
https://www.bimmerforums.com/forum/s...1#post30448071
Sorry for bad lighting of this old photo, but compared to my car which has more "concave" shaped small rockers yours seem to have a cover skirt or something.
side.jpg
(E: Also hidden door seal rubbers, what's up with that? I've got Large daggy rubber seals hanging down below each door.) Are these rocker covers something I can pull off a stock later model e34? I'd love to have a closer view of the door bottom and seal differences. If I can get something like that myself I might colour code them white plus also the bottom of the rear bar I'm currently working on which I can't decide what to do to it yet.
Last edited by fo3; 04-13-2020 at 07:01 AM.
The rockers/side skirts are standard on 1995 models, along with the painted lower bumpers. That can all be retrofitted to an earlier car quite easily. Given that your car is a fairly common color, I’d keep an eye out at the junkyards and for partouts in that color.
I used to not like the side skirts but I’ve actually kinda grown to like them on this car. Normally I wouldn’t seek out a 1995 car due to the oddities they have, but this one has already had EWS deleted, manual swap done, and the steering column has been replaced with an older style manual column.
1995 525i 5-speed - Thread
After finishing up an S50 swap on a friend's E34, I got a chance to give this gold car some much-needed attention. First up was the valve cover gasket, which had started spewing oil and making a mess. Not only was it leaking on the outer edge, but the spark plug wells were full of oil— somehow it wasn't misfiring, but I could tell that the engine was not running as well as it should be.
With the valve cover removed, I was pleasantly surprised at how clean the engine looked on the inside, despite a lifetime of conventional oil changes (me putting synthetic in it recently was the first time this car has ever had synthetic in it).
While doing the valve cover gasket, I also figured I'd replace the spark plugs, since nobody knew when they had last been serviced. I'm glad I did, because those old plugs looked terrible. They weren't fouled or falling apart, just really... old and crusty.
Crunchy old plug vs. new NGK Platinum:
Lastly, I replaced the breather on the valve cover. After I bought this new one, I realized that I could have just replaced the o-ring on the old one since it looked perfectly fine, but the new one was only $6, so whatever.
With the valve cover gasket all squared away, I turned my attention to the engine air filter, which again, had no history of ever being replaced. I'm glad I checked, because it turned out to be some dirty, ancient FRAM filter. Easy fix.
While replacing the air filter, I noticed that the air intake boot was ripped on one side, so that got replaced as well.
The throttle body coolant thermostat that sits in the air box decided to fall apart the minute I touched it, so it got deleted and looped like on every other E34 I've owned. Once I get to doing the intake manifold reseal, I'll delete the throttle body coolant lines entirely and make a smaller loop.
To round out the deferred maintenance treatment, the fuel filter also got replaced. Again, the old part was really old— 2006!
At some point that day I also replaced both brake pad wear sensors, since the old sensors were still unhappy from how awful the brakes were before. No more cluster warnings, which means I can now see the OBC on the cluster!
With all the fresh parts installed and maintenance items addressed, I went on a road test to see if there would be any noticeable difference. Normally there's no perceptible difference after doing plugs and filters... unless they were really bad, like on this car! The engine felt completely different— I don't think it necessarily gained power or anything, but the power delivery became so much smoother. No more bogging, and the engine ran like a properly sorted M50, revving happily to 6500 (still need to raise that limit, 7k or bust!).
I then rewarded the car with a fresh hood roundel since the old one was looking a bit tired. Yeah, the paint still sucks, but it's the little things that count.
1995 525i 5-speed - Thread
The other day whilst in the middle of doing a skiddy U-turn, I noticed that my brake pedal got hard all of a sudden. I drove back to the shop and found that I had snapped the brake check valve that connects the intake manifold to the brake booster, likely because the engine and trans mounts are still rubbish (it's on the list!). Oops.
The brakes still worked, they were just reaaaally heavy. More concerning was the giant vacuum leak from the broken connection, so in came my terrible boomer fix, which was a plastic cap and a hose clamp:
That fixed the vacuum leak so I drove the car like that for a day or so until the new part showed up. Oddly expensive little bugger, $38 for Vaico one!
I had to replace the short section of hose that goes from the valve to the intake manifold because the old one completely crumbled apart when I touched it. I ended up repurposing a section of brake booster hose from an M62tu, since I have plenty of those laying around at my shop. And just like magic, my brakes were power assisted once again, lovely.
Later in the day I addressed the crappy feeling throttle pedal. Step one was adjusting the cable at the throttle body... I almost ran out of adjustment but it's pretty tight now. Eventually I'll need to replace the cable but I can push that off to a later date.
Step two was replacing the throttle pedal bushings. These are destroyed on pretty much every E34/E32 that I've seen— well worth doing for how cheap they are.
Note the yellow junkyard markings all over the pedal/clutch components, that's how you can tell this car was manual swapped by the previous owner.
With new throttle pedal bushings, the cable adjusted, and everything lubricated properly, the throttle pedal feels absolutely brilliant. No more delay, just instant throttle at the slightest jab of the pedal. Rev-matched downshifts are so much easier now, go figure.
On a side note, I used to wonder where the tire iron goes in an E34 sedan trunk... I know where the touring one goes, but none of the sedans that I've owned had one, so I wasn't sure. After doing a bit of research, I figured out how it mounts:
There's a little grommet on the bracket that the jack attaches to, as well as a little plastic clip for the head of the tire iron. Absolutely brilliant! Figuring out stuff like this is almost as rewarding as fixing actually broken stuff, in my opinion.
Going away from maintenance and more into the cosmetic side of things, my Depo package showed up today, AKA part of where my stimulus check went.
I've always wanted to run clears on this car ever since getting it, and now it's finally coming to fruition! It's not purely cosmetic either (I mean, it kinda is) because the front passenger turn signal is smashed and the headlights all have pretty bad cracks in them, along with a pretty terrible light output.
As much as I'd like to mount the smileys and clear turn signals today, I'm going to wait until my PDR guy can come by, because he recommended having some of the front components off in order to take out that large dent on the passenger side fender. That being said, nothing was stopping me from installing the taillights, so I did:
It really freshens up the look of the car, in my opinion. Depo did a pretty good job of copying the Euro tail lights, these look pretty OEM as far as cheap-ish eBay lights go.
Unfortunately my rear bumper can't seem to keep those black trims, they keep crumbling apart and falling off. One of these days I'll get annoyed enough to where I'll just buy a new set of Euro trims all around, but I'm not quite there yet.
1995 525i 5-speed - Thread
The beige makes more sense in the desert background than elsewhere. Car looks great!
"Past its prime"? Please... that shit made used diesel oil look like vodka. And it's quite incongruous with the state of the internals; those are Clean! The sparkplugs - ancient, but correct - also fit the theme of good maintenance, a long time ago.
Your wood trim looks like older E34 straight-grain stuff. I thought all newer ones had burl in one shade or another?
One of the first features I deleted on my E34 was the brake sensor circuit. Needless complexity and expense, in my perspective. Simply connect two wires in one plug on the gaugecluster.
Yeah, while the parts I’ve removed have been old, they were good quality parts whenever they were installed.
So fun fact, my interior isn’t original to the car. This was a value pack car originally, so vinyl seats and no wood trim. Bits and pieces of the interior were swapped by the previous owner, using a combination of parts from a 95 parts car and a 92 parts car. The passenger seat is a 92, the back seat is from a 95, the front door cards are from a 95, the shifter surround trim is from a 90, etc.
I do have a full black interior from a 95 that I’ll be swapping in at some point, with the only exception being the non-airbag dash from a 90. So it’ll be mostly cohesive at that point.
1995 525i 5-speed - Thread
This is looking great, keep it up
I will be interested to see more pics of the car with clears on it, as I have been of the opinion that the clears do not look good on the beige, and that the amber just works well. I can tell you all about how to make these cars sound AMAZING with some ebay parts and welding. If stuff is dried out enough to see those failures around the intake, I would recommend you change all the seals in and under the intake soon. Also grab an injector rebuild kit of amazon that has all new seals and filters (run the injectors through an ultrasonic if you have it). I also have to tell you to just clean the engine bay and not run any waxes or coatings. New valve cover and clean parts always looks way better.
I’m so glad I found this thread! I picked up a clean (besides the interior) early model 1990 525i for $500 previous owners cared for it well with all service receipts in the car, even have the paper that was in the window at the dealership! It runs great for 260k. It’s also an Arizona car but alpine white. I’ve only been to the Nevada pick a part and couldn’t find a single e34 I was wondering how often you find them in your area? I only live a few hours away from Tempe and desperately need a gauge cluster! Anyways man I’m definitely gonna be following this thread and can’t wait to see more!!!
Thanks!
I'm digging the clears so far, but we'll see how the rest looks. I've always been a fan of clears on pretty much any BMW, it's just a cleaner look in my opinion.
I do plan on going through the manifold at some point in the near future, as the engine does have a bit of a rough idle on cold startups. I'm not going to go crazy though, because this M50 will eventually get replaced by the 95k mile S50 that I have sitting in the shop.
Oh wow, an M20 car. Those are getting less and less common these days.
I find E34's somewhat regularly at the yards here in Arizona, in fact here's an M20 car that I pulled a bunch of interior stuff from that's currently in a Phoenix yard: https://row52.com/Vehicle/Index/WBAHC2313LBE25909
Last I checked, that car still had its cluster in it, since I have no use for a super early cluster.
1995 525i 5-speed - Thread
This update's going to be a big one, you've been warned!
First on the agenda was replacing all the motor + trans mounts, along with fixing the shifter to sit less stupidly. For reference, this is how the shifter sat in neutral before I started:
While the motor mounts appeared to be in decent shape, the transmission mounts at the front of the transmission were looking a bit sorry.
The rear transmission mounts were also awful, no surprise. Also note the backwards giubo bolts, why do people do that?
The exhaust and driveshaft came out without too much of a fight, and I was left with this on the transmission output flange. I was a little puzzled as to how those bolts had been put in backwards when there clearly wasn't any space for it...
...until I checked the transmission output flange and noticed it was quite loose, with the nut being very loose. Looks like it was just the driveshaft keeping the output shaft in place, amazing.
After that I reinstalled the output flange with the giubo bolts facing the correct direction, properly torquing the output shaft nut with a deep 30mm socket to the torque spec that I found in my old Chilton manual. Moving on from that minor debacle, here's what the shifter assembly looked like before I took it apart:
Yep, the rear shifter carrier bushing was both installed upside down and had a piece of hose replacing the long-perished bushing. Quality work! The front of the shifter carrier wasn't much better, with a loose bolt holding it in place as opposed to the correct clip, sigh.
Here's all the old crap removed from the car, next to all the shiny new bits. I went with OEM bushings for everything except the rear shifter carrier bushing, which I got from Garagistic. I also got brand new exhaust hangers for the middle and the rear (not pictured).
Everything went back together pretty happily with all of the new parts. I can't overstate how wonderful it is to put everything together correctly, it's such a good feeling.
I cleaned the filthy transmission crossmember and realized that it wasn't the correct crossmember, since it was missing the holes for the alignment bumps on the new transmission mounts (which were the correct style for a 525i/5). A quick visit to the drill press fixed that nicely.
Everything all back together correctly... it's amazing how much higher up the transmission sits when the mounts aren't junk.
Moving onto the motor mounts, I decided to replace them even though they looked okay visually. I'm glad I did, because the driver's side mount was completely split apart! No wonder I kept breaking brake booster valves, the engine probably had a ton of movement from the bad mounts. I went with stock-style Rein mounts, so we'll see how long those last.
The last thing to replace were the forward transmission mounts, and you can see how bad they were once I started taking things apart:
Cleaned the area up and installed the new mounts, much better.
Throughout this project, I cleaned everything I touched, which I think I'll be doing from now on. It's a nice gradual way to clean up the underside of the car without taking a whole week to do it.
The shifter sits a lot better now, and feels 1000x better. I can actually tell where the gears are, and I don't need to use two hands to force the shifter into reverse. It's still not 100% right since the selector rod is still the wrong one (the guy who swapped the car says he just grabbed a random one from a pile). That'll be something to fix in the near future, along with the front selector rod bushing and the leaky selector rod seal.
------
A few days later, one of my customers came in with a 525it that had a Dinan muffler; being an older fellow, he wasn't a fan of how loud it was, so I arranged a trade for my stock muffler. I just swapped the whole back section of our exhausts to make everything a simple bolt-on affair.
Before:
After:
Note how high up the muffler sits with four brand new exhaust hangers... I almost forgot how the muffler is supposed so sit, since seemingly every E34 has old, stretched-out exhaust hangers. After installing the Dinan muffler I gave it a quick cleaning:
I'll have to get some sound clips soon, but my initial impressions were very positive. It's very throaty and gets to a good volume when the engine is being pushed, but is also quiet and drone-free when cruising around. I'm definitely a fan of it.
On a side note, I was very impressed with how nice the catalytic converters looked while I had the exhaust split apart. For being an original exhaust system at 221k miles, they're very intact!
As y'all may have seen from the pictures above, my rear bumper is in pretty poor condition, with a large crack on the top and some chunks missing out of the bottom. Well as luck would have it, a 1995 525ia showed up at the yard the other day in Cashmere Beige. I ran over to the yard and picked up the bumper which was in excellent shape aside from the paint being equally bad (which just makes it match my car better).
Here's the how old bumper looked before I removed it:
Here's the car with the "new" bumper and some more intact trims that I also grabbed from the yard:
No more cracks and it fits neatly all around, whereas the old bumper stuck out on the driver's side.
Later that day, I went on a little cruise with some good friends:
My friend set up his camera on a tripod and did some wonderful long-exposure shots with his DSLR and a flashlight. One of these is my phone's wallpaper now, so happy with how these two came out.
I'm happy to keep fixing up this car and modifying it in small ways, it's been an extremely satisfying project so far.
1995 525i 5-speed - Thread
I really like this car! A clean E34 showed up on Craigslist a few months ago and I definitely stared at it hard before deciding I didn’t need it.
Anyways, to answer the question about the guibo bolts, the reason is that BMW says in their technical literature that all bolts oriented axially are required to have the heads facing the front of the car. It makes it a pain in the ass for certain bolts, like the transfer case mount bolt on xDrive E90s, but I guess it retains the bolt better in the event that a nut backs off.
It doesn’t really matter to me, but I’ve got a former coworker that’s an airplane and BMW nut that was furious when he discovered that the control arm bolt on his car was installed the “wrong” way to ease installation.
My guess is that the previous owner that did the install was just trying to mimic what they did at the factory.
Good to see this car getting fixed up. Makes me love the Gold color. Perfect in AZ.
Looking very clean!!
Always wished I did the clears on my e39
Any updates on the 530it?
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05 330i Alpine White
Past:
02 330i Titanium Silver
R56 MCS
00 540i6
Interesting point! I never thought of it like that, especially since every single giubo I've seen had the bolts facing the back of the car. Good to know that there's at least some reasoning there.
Thanks for stopping into my thread, Dane! Nice to see other local E34 people on here (aka I bothered/inspired Dane to start a thread for his car... he's always hanging out at my shop so I figured he should post!)
The 530it sold a little while back... I just couldn't justify having two E34's, especially since the 530it was an auto and not particularly engaging to drive in its present state. I had been planning to 6-speed swap it and eventually put in an M60B40/M60B44, but I decided it would be smarter to just keep the car that was already a manual and focus my finances on keeping my shop going. It's up in Las Vegas now, the guy that bought it has a few other E34's so I'm sure it's in good hands!
1995 525i 5-speed - Thread
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