Olympic 525i

[atl530i]

Recently picked up an Atlanta Olympic and wanted to make a progress thread for it. I've been looking off and on for one of these for a few years. I was in Atlanta during the 96 Olympics, helped build kiosks as a summer job at that time so I've always liked collecting 96 Olympic stuff. The knick-knacks take up less space than a car though . This E34 was corporate owned for nearly three years so it was probably used during the 96 Olympics but I have no way to verify that. I originally thought it was the first five years, read the report wrong. I picked this one up from another enthusiast in Eastern NC and trailered it home. The seller mentioned it has some running issues so instead of going full send like I typically do, I decided it would be best to trailer it home. It'll get cleaned up, manual swapped at some point, and gone thru. Best thing about this car is that it's all original and nothing is missing except a lower bumper grill (I lost that...) and the fog light glass. It even has the matching spare tire still.

It needs some easy stuff for now like an intake reseal, valve cover gasket, and some general maintenance for now. I've been slacking on my wagon project so yeeaaaahhhhh

I cleaned it up some since it sat outside in a yard for a while.

Body is in decent shape. Typical clearcoat failure on the horizontal surfaces.






Interior is all there, just dirty from sitting.




M50tu goodness.

[e34Croak]

That's neat you have that connection. That thing looks to be in pretty darn nice shape for its age. Looking forward to the progress!

[atl530i]

That's neat you have that connection. That thing looks to be in pretty darn nice shape for its age. Looking forward to the progress!

Thanks!

So this is probably the most original E34 I have bought in a very long time. I decided to do an intake reseal, oil change, valve cover gasket, plugs, and a few other things. The VCG was leaking into the sparkplug wells so it was the first thing to get done. I decided to throw some paint on the valve cover since the original finish was trashed. A lot of the stuff I took off the car was still original to the car, not really a surprise except the valve cover gasket. It still have BMW stampings on it. Spark plugs were stamped with BMW logos but they look like they were replaced at some point.



Nasty. I vacuumed as much as I could before removing the valve cover.


Top end looks nice. I tend to expect the worst so this was nice.


Threw some paint on the valve cover. I'll have to clean the rest of the engine bay up now. At some point, it'll get replaced with a new valve cover but this will do for now. I cleaned underneath and under the PCV cover too. Good enough for now . I have a spare fan shroud for it.


Intake off. Not a lot of surprises here. Just a lot of old stuff.


It drives nice but has some power delivery issues. It stumbles starting around 2k RPMs and evens out after 3k RPMs. After reading a lot of threads, it possibly either needs a VANOS rebuild or it could possibly have partially blocked cats. I've never had either of these issues so this should be a good challenge to fix. I have a spare set of cats from another 95 525i that I can throw on to test part of that theory. I'll try some simple things like a fuel filter also. Just started going thru this car since it's starting to cool off a little outside. I have a VANOS rebuild kit but no cam lock tools so I'll have to buy a set so I can do that too. Kinda surprised I haven't picked up a set after all this time with these cars.

Still managed to put a few miles on it and it rides nice. No shimmy which was surprising. Transmission shifts good.

Things I still need to do besides mess with the engine is fix the seats, throw on the Vogtland/Koni suspension left over from the M Sport, and clean it up some more.

[circuit.heart]

It stumbles starting around 2k RPMs and evens out after 3k RPMs. After reading a lot of threads, it possibly either needs a VANOS rebuild or it could possibly have partially blocked cats.

The last time this happened to me, it was because the harness was installed wrong - Vanos solenoid and a temp sensor had been plug-swapped. Vanos comes on soon after idle and turns off just before 4k IIRC, so I was reading the AFR gauge and it was scary (17:1 or higher in the midrange). Finally tried swapping the plugs and that solved everything.

[atl530i]

The last time this happened to me, it was because the harness was installed wrong - Vanos solenoid and a temp sensor had been plug-swapped. Vanos comes on soon after idle and turns off just before 4k IIRC, so I was reading the AFR gauge and it was scary (17:1 or higher in the midrange). Finally tried swapping the plugs and that solved everything.

I'll check that next time I'm at the car. It's currently with the M Sport.

09.17.2022 Update

Cleaned the interior up and fixed the seat twist. The seats were stuck all the way up and the interior looked like it had not been cleaned in a very long time. Not a detailer but I did manage to clean it up nicely and get most of the stains out of the carpet so I'm pretty happy about that.


Getting ready to fix seat twist. I usually don't bother with fixing twist since they're comfort seats (most of the time they get swapped to something else) but these are a little different so I fixed them.



Gross




During cleaning. I used TurtleWax carpet cleaner and got the carpet clean enough to where it doesn't look like the bottom of a trash can. The floor mats looked like they were never removed to clean under them so there's a nice outline of those in the carpet now.



I had a set of black floor mats extra so I threw those in there. The carpet is much nicer now though. Also cleaned up the console, dash, and the rest of the interior.




Cleaned the trunk out too. It wasn't terrible.



Two 95MY E34's that are cool in their own ways. Parked here for now in good company with other cool cars.

[401michael]

Looks good man! A nice car for sure when I get home from Tennessee I am gonna do the same and pull the seats and clean the rugs.

[atl530i]

Having more than one project is interesting. Since the Olympic car is not far off from being road worthy, I decided to bring it home and see why it's running like complete crap. I decided to perform a compression test to see if there were any head gasket issues or possible burnt valves. Compression numbers were all above 195 cold and hot so the engine is super healthy.



When I pulled the car out to test it, the idler pulley decided to leave permanently. It made a horrible metallic noise on startup and went away within seconds so it happened pretty fast. Luckily it didn't fail on the first drive to the storage place in September. The 5-rib belt now identified as a 3-rib belt. Luckily I had all new parts sitting at home so I went home and picked up what was needed to do a belt/pulley service at the storage spot. This needed to be fixed so I could drive the car home so I could start going thru the diag process.


Tested fuel pressure and found the fuel pump about 10psi under spec with erratic pressure when the return hose was compressed with pliers at the tank. I had a good used spare I was able to install. Didn't really fix it but it did improve a little. Start up improved a lot. The coil packs were all original so I decided to install some good used spares I had on the shelf. Either one or more of the coil packs were failing also. It would idle fine but when the throttle was pressed, the car would stumble and feel like it was missing. Honestly, the coil packs were a hail mary because the car was starting to piss me off .

Happy it's fixed so I can start messing with other bits of the car.