Well, a comment poured into the mailbag last night, reminding me that I haven't updated in a while.The big news is that the Z3 did pass state inspection and the emissions inspection in late December! The final failure to be repaired was a failed control arm in the front suspension.
Of course, for nearly every other car in the world, I would have said a failed ball joint, and just replaced that component. But on BMWs of the Z3's vintage, the ball joint was permanently attached to the control arm, and the only way to fix it is to replace the entire arm.
I forgot to take a picture with the part on the bench, but here's the relevant image from the superb BMW online parts catalog, www.realoem.com. (EDIT: I now use www.penskeparts.com - it's much easier to use and has more up-to-date prices.) It's actually more clear this way, anyway:
The relevant parts are numbers 3, 6, 10 and 11. 3 is the control arm assembly, and 6 is the big bushing it turns in. Actually, when I ordered the part from Faulkner BMW, I got 5 and 6 together, in an assembly that apparently is called "the lollypop," for obvious reasons. 10 and 11 are single-use locking nuts - you never want to reuse those, especially in something as critical as a major suspension component, and they are cheap anyway.
Soooo, then I studied the Bentley manual, and surfed the web for tips, on how to get the thing out! The issue was nut #11. It is seriously inaccessible on the passenger side, and no combination of extensions, sockets and/or regular wrenches in my toolbox would come close to it. More web searching, which let to a tech article on www.pelicanparts.com. They had rated the job as difficulty level 3, but then I noticed this screed in the comments:
The correct difficulty level for this job would be at least a 7 or 8. 3 is ridiculous. Nothing is easy. The inner balljoint nuts are extremely difficult to get at go from above. I broke a sledge hammer trying to get the bushings on the control arms tip: sand the arm rods & bushing sleeves first, put arms in freezer & bushings on the fireplace for a few hours, use dish soap and the correct size socket and a big hammer and pound like hell while using every curse word you know. Also the struts must be unbolted from the steering arms to access the outer balljoint nuts. It took me the ENTIRE weekend to do this job on my 1993 325is, about 20 hours of work. Don't even think of attempting this without a good impact wrench!
In the end I just wimped out and had Jack, of Jack's Auto and Aero, replace the part for me. Even in his well-equipped shop, and having done it hundreds of times, it took 3 of his $90-per hours to get it done. But he also inspected the car and put those coveted stickers in place!
And then... I drove the car home and parked it! Why? Because of the next big project: replacing the radiator. I had mentioned previously that it was leaking, and by the time I got to Jack's shop, it was actually spritzing water over the engine. He gave me a 50/50 chance to get it home, but improved my odds by putting on a lower-pressure radiator cap. I did make it home, and am not tempting fate by driving it until I get around to that project.
It will actually be a big project, because if I'm taking that much away from the front of the engine, I'm going to do the entire cooling system, all the front belts and (maybe) idlers, and do a complete tune-up. Also, I'm going to replace the valve cover to get rid of the nasty oil leak. And while the car's laid up, I'm going to install this:
You may remember that two of the warning lights were for the ABS brakes and the DSC traction control. They are both controlled by the ABS mechanism, and when Jack pulled the codes on that first visit, it pointed to the ABS motor. Now, it could be just the little black box (the "module") on the front, and there's actually a company that rebuilt those for 150 bucks, but Jack had a cogent observation: if the motor is bad, it probably toasted the module. Put a repaired module on a bad motor and... more toast!
Let's steal another image from realoem:
What we're looking at here is #1, which is the assembly of the motor and the module. It lists for... wait for it... $1,906.77! Yikes! That's why I started a nationwide search for a good used one. Found it in Delaware, for $210 including shipping. That's more like it.
EDIT: in the original blog from which this is re-posted (due to the demise of Posterous.com), I continued with notice of the purchase of a garage building. Turning that dump into a nice shop took months of my time, during which no real work progressed on the Z3. But now I have a nice shop, and much more work has progressed, including the radiator and ABS work - read on!
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