When to Get Rid of Old Parts?

Always a problem.

When I bought my first 2002, it came with a few boxes of spare/old/who knows? parts. And I added to that collection when I replaced the interior and did other work. Then I got Hoodlum and have been taking bits off of it at a fairly rapid rate.

So I am awash in old BMW bits, some good, some not so good. Some I'll want to keep for spares, some might bring in a buck or two, some are just junk. The problem is, it'll take me a full day or two to do a decent inventory and figure out which is which, and who wants to spend a who day doing that?

Telling myself that winter is fast approaching (despite yesterday's 98-degree high) and it'll make a good rainy-day project. In the meantime, thank goodness for storage space!

Old Car vs. New Car Crash Test

Early in the cars chapter of The Portable Dad, I wrote about how much more reliable new cars are compared to old cars. And they are - better built, better engineered, more reliable, more fuel efficient, less polluting - the list is long and impressive.

Of all the ways cars have gotten better through the years, crash safety has to be one of the biggest improvements. Watch this video of a 1959 Chevy Bel Air vs. a 2009 Chevy Malibu for some pretty dramatic visual evidence.

And buckle up.

Vintage Racing - Looks Fun & Expensive...

Ever since George and Daisy gave me Hoodlum, their old (and wrecked) 1976 BMW 2002, I've been plotting toward building it to be a vintage race car.

As part of that research, I went down to the VARA races in Buttonwillow over the weekend. Learned several things:
1) Damn glad I don't live in/near Buttonwillow.
2) Vintage racing is far more expensive than I feared.
3) It looks damn fun.

I knew it wouldn't be a cheap sport to get into, but when I met a guy who spent $60,000 on his car and trailer and assorted sundries this spring, I knew it wasn't going to be in my budget anytime soon. (Unless sales of The Portable Dad really take off...) Yes, it can be done for a lot less, but a lot less is still a lot.

What the trip helped me decide were next steps. My original plan was to build the car for autocross now and try not do do any upgrades that would have to be redone for full racing - so, for instance, don't install lowering springs and sport shocks now and have to replace them with a full coilover suspension later. This weekend showed me to worry less about later.

I'll build the car to be a good autocross and track-day car, but still street legal and enjoyable.
If the budget ever allows for a full-on race car some day in the future, (like this '02 in the photo) I'll build another car or rebuild Hoodlum then.

In the meantime, I've got work to start...

Progress!

From this...

To this...

To this.

I Love it When a Plan B Comes Together...

One of the things I've learned over the years is that the right tools make jobs a lot easier. Projects go faster and often come out better when you have all the right tools.

But there are times you won't. The tools listed in The Portable Dad are the essentials that'll get you started, but there will always be that one dang tool you'll need that you just don't have or can't afford.

For me right now, that's a mig welder.

Some of the work I'm doing on Hoodlum, my project BMW, is filling in big holes, the kind where welding in a new steel plate is the best fix. In the absence of a mig welder, however, there have been a few Plan B's.

In the nose of the car, one Plan B was a good epoxy - two-part glue that holds the new metal plate to the existing sheet metal. (These are 3-inch patch plates, not whole fenders or anything. Although, as an aside, large panels of many new cars are held together with similar glues.)

A second Plan B in the nose - which was mashed in in a low-speed accident, was rivets. There was a ridge of crumpled sheet metal just beneath the hood that looked bad. Because I decided not to replace the whole nose - or weld in a clean section cut from a different car - I cut and shaped some new steel to cover the old and present a clean line. Can't epoxy that in place, but aluminum rivets (which don't rust) hold it in just fine.

The rear was tougher. I had three holes to fill, pockets where the bumper used to mount, but no way to position a plate behind them. With a welder, it would have been a simple job of cutting patches to fit neatly in the holes and carefully welding them in place.

Instead, I ended up making fiberglass plugs to fill the holes, then glued those inside the pockets and covered them with Bondo. Still have final sanding to do, then I can start the whole-car sanding to prep for paint. Pix to come when things look neater...

What's the Street Value of a Cat?

Turns out, there is one.

Got a call from Frankie last evening, who was in a BART parking lot trying to get home. But his truck sounded loud. VERY LOUD.

He'd already looked under it, found a couple of bolts, and noticed the foot-long gap in his exhaust pipe just before the muffler. He wanted to know what was going on, and more importantly, what to do about it.

I felt like Click and Clack, listening to his described the engine sounds and other details, and this one made sense pretty quickly: Some jackass stole his catalytic converter.

Cats are anti-pollution devices and they're made with platinum. They get super hot and burn off exhaust pollutants before they leave the tailpipe. I'd never heard of them being stolen and sold for the platinum before, but I also live in a sleepy mountain town where we don't have a lot of cat thieving.

He'll be out $300, and I told him to have the muffler shop tack-weld the bolts after installing the replacement so it won't be so easy to steal next time.