E34 540i V 2.0, The Clean Edition

[YoungCR 1161]

Well good news and bad news

bad news is the car got backed into friday 🤬 Took it out of storage earlier last week to get a few miles on before heading up to Door County. Got a phone call from the guy who backed his flatbed into it around 11. What sucks is its not even the guy that parks next to me, but two spots over and he "thought he was backing into his spot". I even parked the car as close to the opposite side to allow more room. Working with a body shop and the insurance, we'll see what happens. Haven't gotten the full qoute yet but the door and fender are toast Luckily there is a black door/fender off another 95 540i in Cali I'm working on sourcing as well. That might be all that gets "repaired" since the whole car needs paint anyways.

That kinda killed the buzz on cleaning the car up for the Badger Bimmers Door County Rally. Finally threw the good bumper on and called it a day since I just wasn't happy. Saturday was a blast though. Put about 300 miles on the car which doubled what I've driven so far this year basically. Besides the few little maintenance items on the list the car performed great as always. Great day driving with the windows down, beautiful scenery and good company!

 

[B C 5210]

Flatbed driver

[Rekpoint 534]

Nice Boston M3

[straight6pwr 2359]

aww that is a super bummer! hopefully it can be fixed up easily. be careful handling/removing those trim pieces just above the rockers, they are NLA as I recall. 

[wasnt m3 1284]

Bummer! Sadly, insurance will probably write that one off as a total loss.

[YoungCR 1161]

6 hours ago, wasnt m3 said:

Bummer! Sadly, insurance will probably write that one off as a total loss.

Here's a same spec car for $11k with 30k more miles. 

https://www.lapinmotorco.com/vehicle-details/133c5a5d93a445489c580feab08b3265

Brand new door and fender are $1200 from ECS, was gonna a be about the same shipped from cali for used. The pair I was looking into got scrapped though. There is a couple options on co-part as well 🤷‍♂️

[YoungCR 1161]

Good news! Insurance payout came late last week, Not Totaled! They didn't even put up a fight after I denied their initial value and took my word on the current values, so glad this didn't turn into a nightmare battle like I've read about for others. The current auction price insanity on anything old and manual sure helps.

All the parts new were available from BMW to repair this, the fender was the only part that needed to come over from Germany but I still hunted around for used parts. It didnt make too much sense to just paint a new door/fender when the whole car needs paint. Car-Part was a joke and prices were premium as well. LKQ pick and pull has a great CURRENT website for listing inventory so I scoured that around the country. There were at least 2 black E34's and several other colors as well among the Los Angeles area yards so I took the gamble on the parts I wanted being there.

Luckily a side job gave me the opportunity to drive a 2020 F350 out west. I ended up going to 3 different LA LKQ yards and pulled the front doors off one and a fender off another, all perfectly rust free in Schwartz II. The fender does have a good dent towards the nose but paint isn't cracked and should be PDR'd easily. Bought a driver's door too since the door stay was ripped out when the car was bought. $150 total for all the parts was crazy cheap.

Gonna wait to install these come spring as it's cold and I still have remodeling projects to tend too. I also want to rust proof each fender while off and clean things up.