Tweeters, Shocks + Struts, Oh My!

Happy Friday! The sun is finally back out today after days and days of gray skies and rainfall. Please note that there will not be a Cruise-In this evening. Stay tuned for future events and gatherings – we’ll be sure to announce everything right here on the blog as well as on facebook and twitter. Let’s jump right into some of the goings-on here in the shop this week, shall we?
Reggie installed tweeters in the Baur the other day. Here’s a look at what he did and how he did it. Ok, I know what you might be thinking…starting off with an “after” picture?! Well, Reggie had already installed the driver’s side tweeter by the time I came to photograph what he was doing! Alas! We can take a look at the passenger’s side!

Reggies MotorWorks | Repairing BMW, Audi, Mercedes

Euro-spec 318’s were not wired for tweeters. In a nutshell, Reggie ran some wires and plugged them into the wiring harness:

After getting the wiring in place and connected to the Baur’s wiring harness…

… it was time to solder the ends, add heat shrink tubing to insulate and protect the wires, and apply some heat:

After all the wiring was complete, it was time to check the sound…it works! There is still some work to be done to get the quality of the sound system to Reggie’s liking, but this will do quite well for now.

While he was working on the Baur, he re-glued the passenger side door card and replaced the scratched passenger side window.

This 1987 BMW 535i came in to the shop for new upper strut mounts.

The upper strut bearings had been purchased and replaced 2 times from an online reseller. Two of the three bolts had broken off the first set of non-OEM bearings, and one bolt broke off of the second set. It’s difficult to see it in the photo, but the number of ball bearings in the OEM part (below, right) is greater than the non-OEM bearing (below, left), which has only 7.

Note the broken bolt on the far right:

We met the owner of this next cabrio at Carmel Artomobilia back in September. He was ready for his 1992 BMW 325i to have a bit lower stance. We can certainly help with that!

In addition to lowering the ride height of this bimmer with e90 spring perches and trimmed front springs, she got an an oil change, a valve adjustment, a new valve cover gasket, replaced missing or damaged front spoiler clips, replaced throttle body warm-up regulator gasket, including breather hose and air mass meter boot. The air intake boot was cracked and had been previously repaired. She also got a new air filter and the control arm bushings were replaced.

The owner also wished to install an “is” rear spoiler. Done! Jason created a template from this deck lid as a guide to drill the holes in the cabrio’s deck lid:

Last week we showed you the new engine that will be going in to the 2001 BMW M3… before installing it, the old one needs to be carefully removed:

M3 engine bay sans engine:

Once the engine is out, Reggie and Jason got a closer look to see if they could find anything that could have caused all the trouble:

And sure enough, this is what they found:

This is a chunk of an exhaust valve, that must have made contact with a piston (pictured above), which then came into contact with this spark plug. This was the first clue to the internal damage of the engine: