So it was half off day at the Octopus Pick-Your-Part in Sun Valley. I decided to see what I could find. There were actually 3 Super ETA's there and this 535i.
This beauty was sitting on Bilsteins and H&R's but I didn't have the tools to get them off. I came back 15 minutes later and they were gone. My main objective was to find a few interior bits that were better shape than my car and find some 325i parts for the 1.3 motoronic swap. At the end of the day I found a 173 DME, and i intake manifold with TB, an automatic antenna, radiator plastic, a tail light, black speaker grilles, and a plethera of little interior lights and other switches that I helped myself too. ;)
Being half off day the manifold and TB were $15 with a $3 core! Generally about $60 on the forum. Same for the DME, $20 down from $40. The rest of the stuff was still kind of steep for half off. But $12 for a tail light I guess is decent.
My left tail was cracked so I replaced it with this bad boy which came from the brown doner above.
Found this in one of the Super ETA glove boxes. Might as well add that to the collection. Unfortunately my car didn't come with the original manual or service booklet.
Decided I would replace the cracked shroud that goes above the radiator. It was a $1.50. Can't go wrong.
I put the "official" R-134a stickers under the hood.
Moving onto the interior I decided to remove the fader switch and put in a blank since that does nothing anymore and I thought it would look cleaner. As clean as it can look next to that beautiful Clarion deck.
While I was in there I made all two of the lights behind the HVAC work! Oh 80s lighting!
Here's the completed new look with the blank.
The passenger rear window would not go up, but it would go down from the master switches. A simple replacement switch fixed that problem.
There was also a ton of left over wiring and accessories for some 80s cell phone. There was the hook up at the center console. A mic on the head panel and an antenna on the back window with an Apple logo over it.
I took the liberty of removing all of that while I was in there. I had to get under the dash and pull wires through. There was a ton of junk left over. It was very well wired though. Almost looked factory. I had to check 10 times before I cut a wire just to make sure it wasn't anything important.
Most of it ended up here under the back seat.
Free CD!
Weight reduction! That's gotta be at least 5 lbs! I also removed that lovely logo on the back window. I'm a Mac guy, but I don't need the sticker letting everyone know.
I turned to the other dash lights and the cluster. For the Autos there is a light bar that lights up the PRND123 lights.
They are not singularly removable. I took one out of another cluster I found that had all the lights working except 'D'. My cluster only had P and 3 working. So going from 2/7 to 6/7 isn't bad. I'm going to figure out how to solder new bulbs and get all 7 working.
I also got the headlight and fog light switch illumination to work as well. The fog light illumination is a little brighter. You can't really see the headlight switch illumination, but hey it works the way it was supposed to 25 years ago now and that makes me happy.
I picked up a black e34 leather e-brake handle and boot. I'm not sure if I like the look over the plastic but it feel better when you pull on it. Maybe I need to remove the brushes. Brushes and leather don't really make sense together.
The next project for the interior is going to be the rear speakers.
They actually don't sound that bad. lol. But obviously look awful, are house speakers, and will be a terrible liability in the event of sudden hard braking. I plan to put the original speaker grilles back there with some 6x9s in a box or something. Haven't decided yet, not much of a stereo guy. Stay tuned!
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