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Restoration | |
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The car was given to me as a gift in the fall of 2002. The car sat
for 10 years, the last several of those years parked outside on a gravel
driveway. There was some surface rust at the base of the B pillars
which is very common for these cars. There were no rust holes and
no rust at all on the undercarriage. The air circulation and lack
of weeds on the gravel driveway had saved the car. That first
winter I replaced all the hoses, wires, brakes, fluids, etc. I
also did a quick repair of the surface rust by grinding it down and
repainting just the rusted area. The only mechanical damage from sitting all those years was that the fuel distributor has seized up and I was unable to fix it. I replaced the fuel distributor with another used one and the engine fired right up. Here are some pictures of the car from September 2003, just before I restored it. The car looks pretty good from a distance. The close-up of the roof shows the condition of the paint.
I have broken up the original restoration project into several pages due to the large number of pictures I have included. Click on the links on the left or below to see a photo gallery for each stage of the restoration project. A couple years after the original restoration, I purchased a new dash pad from BMW. At that time this dash pad was one of only 4 left on the shelf in Germany.
About the same time as the new dash pad, I added the larger tool kit from the E21 sport package. The entire tool kit was ordered new from BMW Mobile Tradition.
In 2008 I located a guy that had a grey market 323 he was parting out. He had already claimed most of the valuable mechanical parts for a 2002 project. I was able to get a German set of dash controls as well as the non-A/C center console.
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This site was last updated 12/29/09
