Tim's Mystic Blue ZHP Coupe

[timmo]

So we put the car in the air, and the first thing I did was look at all the work the shop did. Considering the price, I couldn’t complain about the quality – the underbody isn’t colour-matched but the welds looked fine and was properly protected from corrosion. The poly subframe and RTAB bushings were also installed properly, with lubrication.





However, I paid for OEM diff bushings to be installed, and the bushings looked… not new. The rear bushing was fine, but the steel outer sleeve was rusted. Furthermore, the front two bushings had significant cracks:







I was quite surprised that they weren’t replaced. I had a pretty in-depth discussion with the shop owner, and he knew I normally did all my own work. I emailed him about it, with no response. I sent a few more emails and called him a few times, and was eventually able to get a hold of him, and he said they somehow forgot to do it. After a bit more chasing, I ended up getting 1/3rd back of what I paid him for the entire job in the first place. It definitely wasn’t a pleasant experience, but I’m just glad not to have gotten screwed over – in fact, I ended up buying the bushings on my own and replacing them myself later on.

In the process of dropping the rear subframe one of the handbrake cables got twisted. I suspect the shop installed the nuts with a gun and overtightened or cross threaded it, so I added a new set of cables to my list of new parts to buy:



Rear subframe dropped:





Also took some stuff out of the interior, as we needed the space and things were going to get very messy:



Then I drilled the pilot hole for the front mounts from the bottom, poking through the top-most layer of the floor. Then used a holesaw from the top-side to allow access to the internal MIG welds (which weren’t cracked) at the top of the threaded insert for the front subframe studs:



Then started cutting the top-most layer of the rear section:



Had to do a couple of minor trims, before a test-fit of the bar:



All the grinding and cutting sure makes everything in the garage dirty:



Started removing paint on the areas that will be epoxied, and applied POR15 Metal Prep to prevent rust:









Then, epoxied and rivetted everything in place:









It ain’t pretty, but I covered all the exposed seams and remaining exposed metal with POR15:





Also got my new rear shocks, RSMs, and reinforcement plates in during reinstallation:



Managed to button up the car the last night of the weekend, and decided to fabricate the cover and clean up the car the next weekend. Turned out that pre-cut steel plate that was sent with the kit was too small, since I guess I cut the rear top-layer too big:



So I made a CAD template, bought some sheet stock, and re-made it:





Then rivetted the whole lot together and seam-sealed the seams:



Then POR15 all exposed metal and seam sealer. Again, it ain’t pretty, but it’s not something I look at every day:



If I could go back and do it again, I’d take a lot more time protecting the interior. I had a few cheap towels laid out, but clearly they weren’t enough. It took me forever to clean the carpets, and I now have permanent craters in the headliner and pitting on the interior of my windshield from the sparks:





Oh well, at least I shouldn’t have to worry about my RACP ever again.

[timmo]

Back in December 2016 I ordered a massive pile of parts, to take advantage of the end of year sales. I had them shipped to my friend’s place, since we were working on my car there anyways.


From VinceSE2 on M3 Forum (for my RACP reinforcement stage 2):
• Vincebar, Epoxy & Resin (Original design)
• Epoxy & Resin Install Kit

From FCP Euro:
• Cooling system refresh
• Belts, tensioners
• M3 engine and trans mounts
• E-brake rebuild kit
• Inner + outer tie rods
• Strut & shock mounts, reinforcement plates
• Bilstein B4 shocks & struts
• Oil pan gasket
• Diff fluid
• BMW Performance Shift Lever (correct one)

From ECS Tuning:
• BMW Performance Shift Lever (wrong one, so I had to return it)
• ZHP 6-speed shift knob
• URO Aluminium Water Pump Pulley
• URO Aluminium Power Steering Pump Pulley
• VANOS oil line
• S54 oil fill cap (because I had $$$ from the refunded shift lever)

From BavAuto:
• Viton OFHG

From eBay:
• POR15 starter kit (for Vincebar)
• Smoked front reflectors (to match the smoked side markers from the PO)

I also bought Araldite 2014 epoxy for the Vincebar, but forgot where I got it from.








I also paid a quick visit to Walmart to grab some car wash supplies, as my car was (obviously) in dire need of a wash:



Much better, feels good to get all the road trip grime off:





Installed my smoked reflectors:



I wasn’t very happy with the fitment, as they’re flatter than they should be, so the leading and trailing edges stick up a bit. Unfortunately I cracked one of the original ones taking them out, and I did get a partial refund on them due to the bad fitment. Given how the paint on my front bumper is original at this mileage, the reflectors are far from the ugliest part in that area, so I wasn’t bothered enough to buy higher quality ones.



I also had a flickering passenger’s xenon, which turned out to be a broken wire. Cut, soldered, & heat-shrinked the offending wire, and all was back to normal.



I then sprung a leak at the plastic neck on the radiator for the upper rad hose. Impeccable timing too, since it happened about a week before I was planning on doing my cooling system refresh. A small dose of JB Marine Weld got me through the week (and probably would’ve lasted a whole lot longer):



Unfortunately, I have no pics from my cooling system refresh. We did the following:

• Radiator (Behr)
• Water Pump (genuine BMW)
• Thermostat (Mahle)
• Expansion tank (Modine) & E30 1.4 Bar expansion tank cap (Behr)
• Both the primary & AC belt tensioners (INA) and belts (Continental)
• Expansion tank return hose (Rein)
• Power Steering & Water Pump Pulleys (URO Aluminium)
• OFHG (Viton, so hopefully it lasts a lot longer than stock)
• VANOS oil line

I didn’t intend on replacing the upper or lower rad hoses, since they were done in 2014 and still soft. To reuse them I bought o-rings and replaced those instead, which worked fine on the lower rad hose, but still leaked on the upper rad hose. So I just bought another upper rad hose anyways and left the lower one.

I then started stripping the rear end of the interior, in preparation for the Vincebar.
Crumbling sound deadening:



Score! Found some spare change under the rear seats:



I’ve no idea why I bagged the sound deadening (that I was tossing) so nicely:





I had a bunch of packing supplies leftover from all the parts I bought. For some reason, instead of removing the rear seat belt receivers, I left them in and wrapped them in bubble wrap to prevent them from rattling around:



My friend and I planned to do the Vincebar on a 3-day long weekend in mid-June (I forget what long weekend it was for) because we weren’t sure how long the whole job would take. So on Friday, June 16th after work, I pulled into his garage and put my car up on jackstands for the next 3 days.

[timmo]

I had a lot of car work planned for the 4 months I was in California. The last time I was there, I had spent 4 months helping a friend 2ZZ swap his MR2 Spyder, so I was able to use his garage, tools, and help this time around. Nevertheless, I still brought some of my tools with me, and was able to make full use of the space above the spare tire and under the trunk false floor:





My first stop was supposed to be Chicago, but I had visa issues and was held an extra night in Sarnia. Luckily things got resolved, so I’d still be able to make my 2nd stop with a bit of extra driving.

Crossing into Port Huron, Michigan:



12 hours later, and a lot of killed bugs:



The view from my AirBNB at Council Bluffs, Iowa:



Saw an actual cowboy en route to Denver:



Past Denver and starting to climb:



Went from fairly decent spring weather, back to winter. Surprisingly the Michelin PSS did fairly decent in the little slush I did encounter:



Made it into Utah!





Sitting hellaflush with all the weight in the rear:









Unfortunately, this is the only pic I have of my car at the Grand Canyon:



At a family friend’s house in Kingman, Arizona:



Stopped for a couple nights in Vegas (no pics, unfortunately):



Almost there!





Aaaaaand, made it. Of course, lots of carnage:



The best view I’ve ever had out of any bedroom, and I’ll have it for the next 4 months:

[timmo]

It’s now March 2017, and I’ve taken my car out of its 11 month hibernation. I had been planning a road trip to the SF bay area for some time now – I had an internship there for 4 months in the summer, and what better way to spend 4 months there than driving the canyon roads? So in addition to completing my oil change before even starting the car up for the first time, I also had a quick look at the rest of the underbody.

Right before storage I had the brake pad warning light come on, but I still had tons of pad life left. During my inspection I found this:



When I first got my car, it needed pads and rotors to pass safety inspection. The PO took it to a generic shop, so I guess they just didn’t tuck the wire behind the dust cap for the bleeder. I quickly fixed it with a brand-new sensor I found cheap off some guy on kijiji.

I also realized that my driver’s mirror cover was pretty loose. All the retaining tabs were broken, and it was held in with black butyl tape. Removed the cap, epoxied zip-ties to the inside of the cap, and had the zip-ties come through the holes for the tabs.

Another thing I found was this:



Remember when I took my car to my highschool autoshop when I first got the car? I thought that split seam in the left rear wheel well was just compromised seam sealer, and was probably something I should take care of. Doing a lot more research, turns out cracks in the sheet metal are not the only indicator of a failing RACP, but the split seam is a result of the RACP actually starting to come apart and fall down, away from the rest of the body. At the time I was quite shocked and disappointed, as repair costs are a decent chunk of the vehicle’s value. But I decided to look into it, as I planned on keeping the car as long as I can. Normally I’d DIY everything, but I was still in school for another month, and there was no break period from end of school to my road trip. Luckily I found a shop that was vetted on the local forum by multiple people, and their pricing was unbeatable (though there was a small conundrum that was peacefully resolved later on). After discussing with the owner of the shop what exactly I wanted done, I was confident that this was the right shop to trust my car with.

Things that were done at this time:

• Repaired the existing crack (stop-drilled the ends, then welded it closed + grinded flush)
• Welded Redish Motorsport V2 plates in
• Welded separated seam in left rear wheel well
• Powerflex Yellow subframe bushings (while we’re in there)
• Powerflex Black RTABs (while we’re in there)
• New OEM diff bushings (while we’re in there)
• Replaced fuel pump with VDO unit (I was going to take care of this on my own, and had the part. But they said they’d do it for free since it takes 5 minutes with the tank out of the car anyways. Very kind of them!)

Crusty subframe, ugh I hate Canadian winters:


Crack I found:







Plate welding in progress:



Repaired seam in left rear wheel well:





With stage 1 of RACP repairs complete, I then took my car to the dealer for the driver’s side airbag recall:



Ooooooh shiny new badge:


Throughout the winter I was also keeping a close eye on eBay for reconditioned steering wheels. There are a couple well-known sellers within M3 Forum, but their prices were out of my budget. But then, a relatively unknown seller popped up, and they had only sold 3 or 4 wheels at that point. The pictures showed a wheel as nice as the ones by the more well-known sellers, so I decided to chance it and went for it, knowing I had eBay buyer’s protection in case things went south. Contrary to what most people like, I decided to stick to black instead of tri-stitch, I think it just looks much cleaner.

The wheel arrived before I took my car out of storage, and man it was beautiful. I held off installing it until after the RACP repair and airbag recall, to keep it clean.





Aaaaaaah much better. And it was only $220 USD!


I think I held onto my old wheel for about a year, before I found a buyer to recoup some of the cost.

With the RACP repair, airbag recall, new steering wheel, and the car inspected with a clean bill of health – it was now time to drive to California.

[timmo]

After driving my car with that crusty, ripped alcantara wheel for a few months, I decided it was time for a change. Being the budget-conscious student I was, I wasn’t willing to buy a new leather wheel, and I didn’t want to go back to alcantara. These were the days before DIY sewn-on-covers from China, so my research led me to buying a napa cover from Redline Goods. So while my car was in storage, I removed the wheel and installed the cover:







I’d like to say I’m fairly decent with my hands, but this is probably one of the hardest DIY jobs I have done. There’s just a certain level of finessing you need to get the fitment to an acceptable standard, and I was never truly satisfied with the fitment of the cover. At that point in time though, that’ll have to do.

Come the start of 2016, my car was coming out of storage (in the winter!) for my second co-op job. In January, BMW Canada finally approved rust repairs on my car, for what would be the final time since the 12-year mark was approaching that April. As mentioned before the rust kept coming back with resprays, so this time they decided to cut out both rocker panels and replace them:





Suffice it to say I did not want rust coming back, so since then I have not driven the car in the winter.

Come April 2016, I was going back to school for the summer, then ended up landing my third co-op in the SF bay area for the fall. I would’ve loved to drive there, but would not want to drive back in December. Then I was back in school for winter 2017, so the next time my car was out of storage was March 2017, 11 months later. It was at this point, 2 big things were coming up – the first stage of my RACP reinforcement, and a road trip to the SF bay area for my fourth co-op term.

[liam821]

Thanks! It's actually Mystic Blue, nevertheless all of the BMW blues seem to be really nice (Estoril being one of my favs). The ZHP really is an excellent daily, but the S54 is a totally different animal!

🤦♂️ Yeahh... It was late and I was thinking about my old car which was Interlagos. Sorry. Either way, its beautiful! And yeah, the ZHP makes for a great daily.

[timmo]

Alright, here comes the one stupid moment I had with the car, it comes down to bad timing and bad judgement. I was late for work and stuck behind a garbage truck. It was a 1 lane road with a solid yellow, and there were no other cars in sight. The truck started to pull to the shoulder with no signal, and there were houses with bins lined up by the curb. So I (wrongly) assumed he was stopping to pick up garbage, and crossed the solid yellow to go around. Unfortunately this was a case of him just signaling at the last minute, to turn left into a driveway. As he started the left turn I was too far gone, and his left front corner tagged my rear quarter panel. Quite a bit of carnage:



As I’m sure many of you are aware, insurance lowballed me and tried to total my car. I took it to the best collision shop in town, which caters to high-end exotic cars (more on this in a bit). After a bit of back and forth, they put out their final evaluation, and told me to get my own to prove the value of my car. So that’s what I did, and the appraisal came back for much more than I had purchased the car. Of course this was biased as the appraiser knew what was going on, but it did the job, as after 2 or 3 weeks of sitting repairs were approved.

As it’s the quarter panel my car is now tainted, but there was no way insurance was going to pay for a full quarter replacement (plus, 2 years down the line the other quarter panel got damaged, due to a drunk driver – again, more on this later). The quarter was pulled as flush as possible, then a skim coat of filler was applied. A donor door was sourced and fully stripped for paint. There were no LKQ mirrors with shadowline trim available, so the entire passenger’s assembly was replaced. The whole lot was then painted:









After another 2 weeks, repairs were complete:





And as an added bonus, I salvaged as much as I could off both doors. You don’t realize it when you’re just swinging it on its hinges, but jesus christ that sucker was heavy. My door card was swapped over so I have the door card off the donor, which I ended up selling online, amongst other things:





Immediately after taking delivery of the car, I noticed this:


Which, under more revealing lighting conditions turned into this:



So, of course I’m like WTF? They didn’t even touch the roof when painting, and the roof is Opti-Coated! But then, I remember walking into the body shop still shaken up by the accident, and seeing an employee drying the car. He was using some kind of foam squeegee to dry the cars, which explains why the swirl marks aren’t “swirly”, but rather straight. Well, given that half the car is coated and half is not, and that the whole thing is so messed up, time to break out the Harbour Freight DA I had recently bought. After some trial and error, that above spot turned into this:







A few lessons were learned with this accident (only had one more due to a drunk driver, 2 years later), including the fact you really have to do research into body shops, and that perhaps I’m too fussy with paint. Definitely wouldn’t have expected a body shop of that calibre to cause that much damage. Anyways at that point I was hogging my parent’s garage too much, plus it was insanely hot. So with the paint mostly corrected and protected I kept driving it until the end of August. At which point my co-op term ended, and it was time to go back to school. It was pretty odd putting the car away for storage when there were still 2 more months of relatively nice weather, but I lived a 5 minute walk from campus, was super-busy managing school and FSAE, and would save a bunch of money on insurance.

So I gave it one final detail, swapped on the winter tires and pumped them up to 50 psi, plugged the exhaust tips, disconnected the battery, brimmed the tank and added fuel stabilizer. Then threw a car cover over it, and said goodbye for 4 months.

[timmo]

I used to own a 2005 330i ZHP sedan and it was one of my most favorite cars I've ever owned. It was such a great daily. Love that Interlagos blue!

Thanks! It's actually Mystic Blue, nevertheless all of the BMW blues seem to be really nice (Estoril being one of my favs). The ZHP really is an excellent daily, but the S54 is a totally different animal!

[liam821]

I used to own a 2005 330i ZHP sedan and it was one of my most favorite cars I've ever owned. It was such a great daily. Love that Interlagos blue!

[timmo]

Brought the car home and a few pics under my new ownership:






Crusty BMWP Exhaust (that I somehow didn't get around to cleaning until 4 years later...)



I brought the car to my highschool autoshop to do the oil change, because why not take advantage of using a lift. But more importantly I wanted to remove the rear rotors to investigate why the handbrake wouldn't work. I don't have any pics, but there were chunks of friction material missing from the shoes. I actually bought the handbrake rebuild kit 2 years after this point, and even to this day still haven't gotten around to replacing it. For now I've been parking in gear with no issue.

Additionally, there were traces of rust here and there:






I didn't know it at the time, but the above pic came in very handy when diagnosing the RACP!

The previous owner was somehow able to take advantage of BMW's 12 year rust warranty. The warranty technically only applies for perforation, and the fine print says that you have to go back to the dealer every so often for inspections. So the car has had a couple partial resprays and blending done, but it kept coming back. The previous owner and I managed to put a case in with the same guy at the same dealer all the previous repairs were under, so we crossed our fingers and waited for BMW Canada for approval.

Throughout the summer of 2015 I didn't do much with respect to mods and maintenance. Looking back through my maintenance log I did an oil change, coolant flush (pulled the drain plug on the block), and trans fluid. I also did my best to keep it clean with regular 2-bucket washes. But I mostly just kept driving - putting 400 km every 2 weeks driving between Toronto and Windsor, man the ZHP is such a great road trip car. I was also part of the Formula SAE team at my school, so a few weekends I'd also drive there for summer testing.





At some point I also bought a cable for PA Soft and changed the hexadecimal values to make the coolant temp gauge more linear. I distinctly remember driving back from work and after 5 minutes, the temp gauge was at 12 o'clock. So, I revved it out and it sounded... stressed. More than likely coolant temp was juuuust at 75 deg C, and if that's the case, oil was likely at 40 deg C. Yeeeeaaaaah... again, I was young and dumb (which you'll see more of in my next post). As we don't have oil temp gauges nowadays I make sure to drive a minimum of 10 minutes after coolant is at 90 deg C, to make sure oil is more or less up to temp before giving it the beans. And I just bought a module from Germany that taps into the K-Bus and will display coolant & oil temp, battery voltage, and vehicle speed on my MK4 NAV!

[timmo]

As one of the few non-M owners here, I hope I'm still welcome to have my own build thread 😏. I'm not one to usually post a whole lot, but I lurked the old M3 Forum quite a bit, and aside from mostly engine-related stuff, there's still quite a bit of good info that applies to my car as well.

Current Mod List (August 1, 2021):

Exterior

• BMW Performance Grilles
• Smoked side markers & reflectors
• LED license plate lights
• Debadged

Interior

• MK4 Nav
• TCU
• TV Module
• Homelink
• Rearview mirror w/homelink and BMW Assist (so I have a total of six garage door openers, lolz)
• M dead pedal
• M door sills
• One-touch rear windows
• Napa leather steering wheel
• Cheap ebay aux cable to cheap ebay Bluetooth adapter (hey, it cost $5 total and works really well)
• Findway F518 3D floor mats
• A & C pillars in black alcantara, B pillars recovered with original fabric (I didn’t buy enough material, but the slight mismatch doesn’t bother me)
• Car-Solution eKombi Module (Numerical Oil & Water Temp, Battery Voltage, Vehicle Speed Gauges)
• Underseat First-Aid box
• Sparco Pro2000 w/ Brey Krause mounts on OE power slider (driver’s side)

Powertrain

• GAS DISA
• BMW Performance Intake
• BMW Performance Exhaust
• S54 Oil Fill Cap
• BavAuto Viton OFHG
• URO aluminium water pump pulley
• URO aluminium power steering pump pulley
• E30 expansion tank cap
• M3 engine mounts
• M3 transmission mounts
• ECS 88A poly diff bushings
• BMW Performance shift lever
• CDV delete
• M3 fuel pump baffle
• Flipped underhood positive battery jump post

Suspension

• Redish V2 RACP reinforcement plates
• Vincebar Epoxy & Rivet (original design)
• Powerflex Yellow subframe bushings
• Powerflex Black RTABs
• Ground Control Double Adjustable Koni dampers, Eibach springs (440/900 lbs. F/R)
• Ground Control Hybrid caster-camber plates
• Ground Control Street rear shock mounts
• Front strut reinforcement plates
• 17 x 8.5” ET40 TRMotorsport C2 (street)
• 245/40/17 Continental ExtremeContact Sport (street)
• 17” x 8.5” BMW Style 68 (track)
• 245/40/17 Hankook RS-4 (track)
• Motorsport Hardware 78 mm wheel studs, black acorn nuts
• Condor Speed Shop Street Brass Caliper Bushings (front)
• Zimmermann Rotors
• Hawk HPS Pads (street)
• Hawk DTC-60 Pads (track)
• Stoptech SS Braided Brake Lines
• ATE Type 200 Fluid
• ST Suspensions 30 mm M3 front sway bar
• Custom front ARB reinforcement plates (epoxied with 3M DP460)
• Custom power steering reservoir catch can

Thought I'd start a thread on my car, after just over 5 years of owning it.

A bit of back story: Like most here, I'm a car guy inside-out. I grew up collecting model cars, eventually working my way up to a $200 AutoArt Koenigsegg CCXR. I was always a fan of JDM cars, that is until I got to high school autoshop. Unlike most autoshops with a donated Cavalier, my autoshop teacher was building an E36 racecar. Like most projects, everytime he said it would be done by so and so date, it wasn't. So for two years I had my hands dirty with that car, swapping out the M50B25 for an S52B32, Moton dampers, Megasquirt ECU, the works. He also had an 328is for the street, and working on both those cars combined sparked my interest in older BMWs.

Fast-forward to March 2015. I needed a car for co-op, as my first job was in Windsor, and I lived 400 km away in Toronto. I was initially looking at WRXs and Foresters, but they were all beat up or out of my price range. But then a clean E36 323is popped up on Kijiji, so I decided to check it out. Unfortunately it had massive lifter tick, and although clean inside-out was priced too much for what it was worth.

Then, one night I was laying in bed browsing Kijiji, when a 2004 330ci popped up. It was high mileage at 303,000 km, but had the ZHP package (which I wasn't too familiar with at the time) and was Mystic Blue on Black. More importantly, at least through pics it looked like it had half the mileage it did. I lost a bit of sleep that night thinking about it, especially because I knew about the "subframe" (RACP) issue, and that it was more than double my budget. I stayed up doing a bit more reading to learn about the E46 platform, ZHP package, and the RACP issue. It seemed that the consensus with cracking RACPs were limited to pre-LCI cars (ha, ha........ words I will eat 2 years later). So the next morning I decided to pay a visit. This was the first picture I ever took of the car, and the first time I ever saw it when we parked next to it:



The seller and I got along really well, and you could tell he took good care of the car. He wasn't even planning on selling it, as he had brand-new Michelin PSS fitted to the rear, and a full paint correction + Opti-Coat a few weeks prior. Turns out he found a good deal on an E92 M3, and decided to upgrade - we even took a joyride in that car during the viewing!



After 3 hours looking over the car and talking, I made an offer he immediately accepted. Looking back on it I was young and naive, and could have easily bought it for >$1000 lower than what I paid. However I really needed a car, and to this day it still puts a smile on my face everytime I take it out, so I don't regret the purchase.

So as of April 5, 2015 I was the new owner of a 2004 BMW 330CI ZHP.