bigcoupe.com

+! to Raykoke. New donuts for the New Year! You are lucky as over the years, my mechanics couldn't be bothered to reinstall all the shields on my 6'er.

Take a look at where your rear shield rubs against the muffler. I think a screwdriver can give you the needed clearance.

Amazing what a few photos can tell us. Maybe part of a PPI is a bunch of pics shared with the BC community?

Happy New Year to all. I will be in South Florida for Q1 and am hoping to hook up with e24 and e32 (bimmerforums) members. PM me if you're interested.

--Ken

This afternoon I got a chance to meet up with Ed, the creator of the most excellent steering box fix, and fix up that butt ugly weld. Luckily he only lives about 15 miles from me! First order of business was to clean up area of the crap weld and grind down to bare metal once again. After that, he filled in the gaps left by the previous crap weld.
After it cooled a bit, we cleaned up the new weld in preparation for painting. I drove home later in the afternoon and cleanup up and painted the joint once again. Now I can put this to rest. Just so everyone can see the difference between a crap weld and a strong weld, here's a side by side. I think it's pretty clear. Big shout out to Ed and his fix. In my conversations with him, he indicated that he was thinking of making only one more batch of 100. If you haven't purchased this for your car already, I'd get a move on! There is no better fix out there. His email is [email protected].

What Song said. Every E24 needs this, either now, or eventually IMO.

Cheers,

Ray

To be clear, every E28 chassis E24 needs this

If you have an E12 series I based E24, you're in the clear

Song, nice that you were not only able to connect with Ed, but have him perform some of his magic on your 6er

Great guy, actually haven't seen him in a few years, I need to get over there and say hi as well

Song you have PM.

ron wrote: ↑Thu Dec 07, 2017 8:42 amSong you have PM.

Hey Ron, just confirming the PM. I've taken action and responded. I'll let you know how it goes.

Masked Man wrote: ↑Wed Dec 13, 2017 3:13 am Song,

I did the upgrade to Grace some years ago and it surely made all the difference! Keep up the good work.

Keep the shiny side up

Phillip

Thanks for chiming in. The fix has made a big difference in the handling of my car as well. A lot of the "looseness" and "whale-like" behavior that I have lived with for years has disappeared. Also, I'm not constantly fiddling with alignment as it actually holds an alignment well now. My car was constantly pulling off to the side before and I was madly adjusting the tie rods and never getting satisfactory results. This is no longer the case.

Again, huge recommendation to anyone who has one of these cars. Get this low cost fix and eliminate a bunch of issues.

What was the cost of the part and how do I order one? Thanks in advance!

Contact Ed Raether at [email protected]. He's the man....

Thank You! Will do.

Thanks for the writeup and info on the steering bracket fix. I just finished installing mine and will find a welder after Christmas. Love reading your story, as I have a daily driver 633, too.

JoelR wrote: ↑Sat Dec 16, 2017 6:22 pm Thanks for the writeup and info on the steering bracket fix. I just finished installing mine and will find a welder after Christmas. Love reading your story, as I have a daily driver 633, too.

Thanks for the comment Joel. I haven't been on the site in a while and just now saw your note.
My car is doing quite well the past weeks and I've not had time to update this forum as my job has been nuts!
There have been a few things I've done, but I wasn't sure it was worthy of documentation. For example, I got a freaking nail in my rear tire and decided it was a good excuse to get a new set of rears to match the fronts. I ordered the tires and am still waiting for them to arrive.

I discovered that I had a slight coolant leak. As it happens, the shop that did my head gasket, forgot to put the rubber washer on the radiator drain plug when they drained and refilled the coolant. I kept getting a tiny pool of coolant after I parked my car for a while. It's one of those annoying things.

Another thing that was bugging me to death was wind noise. My passenger window wasn't sealing well and I was getting a whistle above 65 mph. Well, I am happy to report that I found a 1/16" adhesive neoprene foam tape. I ran a strip all around the rubber door seal. It appears that did the trick! The last few days it's been a nice whistleless commute! I'll post again when I have more time.

Next, I am determined to refinish the flaking paint on the roof and replace the sunroof seal.

I've been doing nothing but driving the car in the past few weeks. Everything appears to be ok except for a rough idle. When I move off idle, everything is fine. The engine continues to perform quite well since the head gasket and top end job. However, I caught a nail in my rear passenger tire. I tried to plug it but then the valve stem practically fell apart when I was re-filling the tire with air! These were older tires on the rear so I decided to slap on the spare and order 2 new Continentals to match the front. Here's a pictoral record.

This clear re-enforced hose goes from the rubber fitting on the intake side to a metal tube coming out of the underside of the intake manifold. I can't really see where it attaches on the underside as it's so tight in there. I can feel it though. I used an 11" piece of fuel line as a replacement. It had a slightly smaller interior diameter than the stock one, but I figured for a vacuum line it shouldn't be a big deal. I was hoping this would help my rough idle. This didn't resolve my rough idle. It seems to idle a bit faster actually.

The other things recently were the rear tires. I simply matched up the fronts. It was $366 for 2 tires. These are 225 x 55 ZR16 tires. It's been raining a little bit here in California so I figured new tires would be a good thing to have. That white gunk in the picture is just sealant from the tire install. This picture was taken about 30 minutes after I picked up the car from the tire shop. I must say that these tires must have softer sidewalls than I remembered as my rear seem a bit loose after installing these. Oh well, I'll keep driving and solidify my opinion later.

My steering box mounting is still in good condition, yet I have always wanted to do this mod. Now that it seems that the components may not be available, I will be contacting Ed very soon. Thanks for the 'Heads Up'! Toph

Just got my repair piece from Ed. Just an FYI, he just got a new supply in, but they seem to be going fast! If you want one, I'd order as soon as you can.

Today, I spent a long time redoing my driver bottom cushion. What started all of this was that one of my seams was coming apart. I order to fix that, I had to take the cushion off and remove the leather cover. I figured while I was at it, I would fix a few more things.

Power headrest and recline BIts:
The power headrest and recline wasn't working I had heard that the reason for this was that the cable shortens over time as it twists. One of the more clever fixes I heard about was heating the ends of the cables to remove the ends and then removing about 10mm of the sheathing. That effectively makes the cable longer. Here's a picture showing how much of the sheathing I removed. Putting the metal end back on is easy. Just heat it up and slide it on. This worked a charm!
Bottom Cushion:
My cushion seems like it wasn't doing much anymore as my butt could feel the wire supports. When I removed the cushion, I could see that the wire supports had cut into the rubberized horsehair padding. So I sacrificed an old office chair and used it's foam while also using some fabric lined foam headliner material I had laying around. I used spray adhesive to put it all together. On the bottom, I used a piece of leather to prevent the wire supports from cutting into the foam again. This black leather was from the sacrificial office chair I had in my garage.
Seat shaping - wire bits:
I don't know what these are called, but there are pieces of wire that are encased in a cloth loop and then hog ringed to the seat. These give the seat some shape and prevent it from being just a big rounded foam shape when you put the leather over it. My seats had seen better days as the cloth loop had basically disintegrated over the years. This was the toughest part of the projed because I had to do a lot of hand sewing. I used a nylon strap from an old trade show badge and repurposed it for the new loop. I re-created the loop on one side of the pad while re-enforcing the older cloth on the other two sides. This step took a long time. I'm not so great at hand sewing. I did use a tool called a "Speed Awl" that I got a while back. It did very well.

Oh, also in this step, I repaired the split seam that started all of this. It's difficult to push a needle or awl through two layers of leather and a plastic piping. I had to go about this rather slowly
Reinstalling Leather cover:
This was a very difficult step as well. With all of the new foam, I had to stretch the leather back into place. The leather had also shrunk from age, so this part took a lot of tugging and pulling and generally made my hand hurt. Here's a picture of the topside (right) and the bottom. On the bottom, you can see how I use a piece of leather to prevent the wire supports in the seat frame from cutting into the foam again. Also, you can see that I used some wire coat hangers to create a frame on the bottom to complement the cloth encased wire loops on the topside. Using zipties, I attached the wire frame to the wires with cloth loops to pull down areas of the cover to give it shape. Make sense? This should be a pretty permanent fix and last for a long time. I didn't want to use the hogrings as I didn't have hog ring pliers and hog rings are generally a pain in the butt.
So at the end of this project I was working in my garage and it was dark. I did install the seat in my car and it looks and feels really good. The final stretching took out any wrinkles. I'll commute to work in the newly cushioned seat tomorrow and get a picture of the final product in the light. It was too dark to get a good shot after I re-installed everything. All in all, this ended up being a 6 hour project! One day I may have to tackle another similar project and there are other seams pulling apart - what a pain.

Song, you are amazing, and an inspiration to us all.

hornhospital wrote: ↑Mon Jan 29, 2018 3:57 am Song, you are amazing, and an inspiration to us all.

LOL, I got a quote for $1000 to fix the split seam and the drivers cushion and I thought, "No way - I could do that!". So I did.

Very well done!

Cheers,

Ray

Song,

As many other forum members stated "well done". You'd be a good match for "MacGyver".

Suggestions for the next seat repair. When I repaired my seats, I removed the leather and took it to a upholstery shop, I had areas that required new piping on the drivings side do to wear. I had the shop re stitch all the seams and add new piping as required, cost $150/seat. I used steam to aid in the leather reinstall, steam allows the leather to stretch and then shrinks, pulling the leather tight.

I reduced the cable sheathing the same way as you did. Youtube was my source.

Roger

rhanley 635csi89 wrote: ↑Mon Jan 29, 2018 1:36 pm Song,

As many other forum members stated "well done". You'd be a good match for "MacGyver".

Suggestions for the next seat repair. When I repaired my seats, I removed the leather and took it to a upholstery shop, I had areas that required new piping on the drivings side do to wear. I had the shop re stitch all the seams and add new piping as required, cost $150/seat. I used steam to aid in the leather reinstall, steam allows the leather to stretch and then shrinks, pulling the leather tight.

I reduced the cable sheathing the same way as you did. Youtube was my source.

Roger

That's a great idea. That's a whole lot better than the prices I'm getting for replacement leather covers and repair work. I know that parts of my piping had cracked (they are plastic) and my hand sewing isn't quite as straight as I would have liked. I'm having mixed feelings about the additional padding I put on the seat. It's not the feeling, the seat bottoms feel good and firm. It's the way it looks. I didn't think about the fact that there's a bit of an upward bulge on the bottom cushion because of the added padding. In this picture, you can see what I'm talking about. Also, the seam that had split was the one closer to you in the picture. If you look close, the piping has cracked in several places near the right side.
Here's the finished cushion in the car The passenger side bottom cushion has a nice shape and is nice and flat. The driver's side is now fully stuffed, but you can see the bulge upward and it doesn't match the passenger side. Oh well, in the scheme of things it's fine. I guess I'm being picky.

I wonder if a leatherique treatment would have helped the reinstall process. I have also seen a plastic shopping bag used between the leather and the padding as a "slip sheet"
Ken

The casual observer is not going to notice the seat appearance difference.

Cheers,