Classic Tails
Andrew Everett explains why he has stopped trying to save cars.
Andrew is still traumatised by the experience of pouring heart and soul into a car, only to see it subsequently ruined within a year. That’s why he’s keeping his current BMW.
Looking through some old photos recently, I chanced upon one I took outside my then-house of a 1993 BMW 318iS Coupé. This was a car I ‘saved,’ only for someone else to wreck it. This is why I no longer save cars.
We’ll go back to the beginning in late 2010 when, having just purchased my garage workshop, I found myself with space to actually do stuff properly. No more working in the street in all weathers or trying to do big jobs in rented council lock ups.
L980 PWU was a dog-rough 17-year old 318iS in Alpine white with cloth trim. It was only £200, and what I should have done was remove the (very good) engine and a few other bits and weigh the rest in for scrap. Instead, I embarked on a restoration. So the ruined front wings were replaced by good used ones (one was virtually new). I had these painted locally, and a perfect match they were too once I’d polished the rest of the car with a mop and compound. The equally ruined front suspension was binned and replaced by stuff that was either new or with minimal mileage. With the wings off and the struts removed, I lovingly cleaned and repainted the inner wings so that when it was all reassembled, it looked like new. With the front end all done, I did pretty much the same at the back, overhauling the suspension and brakes and tidying up the tatty rear arches – grind the rust back, a bit of Kurust, a smear of filler and a carefully executed paint job with rattle cans that looked pretty good. The horrid wheels were binned and replaced with much better ones, and with an MoT it was on the road .
And very well it went too. Then of course came that period where ‘it could be better.’ After painting them in an oven, I fitted the optional plastic sill covers that later and better models had, but you know – those rear arches really want doing properly. So a local bodyshop took it in, ground all the filler out and found that the driver’s arch really was knackered. The passenger side one had new metal welded in, but the driver’s side got the full arch, skilfully welded in, blended in with plastic filler and painted again, along with the rear bumper. I’d go round the car touching in chips, and I’d scour eBay looking for original E36 unused spare wheels so I ended up with a set of perfect alloys. New number plates were a given.
The interior was still a bit rubbish, but from somewhere – I can’t recall where – I obtained a black leather trim that went in one morning once everything had been cleaned and detailed. The underside had been cleaned and painted, and I’d power washed the engine and spent some time replacing seals and gaskets. The end result was a car I was almost too scared to use, despite it only being worth £1500 on a good day. On the weekend when my local BMW dealer launched the new 4 Series Coupé, I was invited to drop my car off so that it could be displayed in the showroom along with the new model, one of which I had the use of for the weekend.
The following year – 2013 – I decided to sell it and the BMW went to a mate in exchange for a paint job on another of my needy fleet. Away it went, but it wasn’t long before he moved it on due to that perennial ‘too many cars’ problem. Then of course came the inevitable decline. There it was on Facebook, bigger wheels fitted and being caned around the Nurburgring. After a quick face-palm moment, I remembered that it wasn’t my car any more. As long as it was maintained and looked after…
But it wasn’t, of course. I’m not sure how many owners it had after that, but suffice to say it ended up with a bigger engine fitted after that jewel of a 1.8 M42 was mullered somehow. The end came when it finished up in a field after an ‘incident’ – such is the lot of an old BMW and some of those who own them. All that work and it was ruined in not much more than a year. Why did I bother?
For the past 17 years I’ve had a 1989 730i, a rare manual gearbox version that I bought as an original, unmessed with car and have slowly brought up to something like show standard despite its 315,000 miles (110,000 of them mine). Every time I think that I should move it on, I think about what would happen to it. It wouldn’t be garaged and cherished like it is now. Within a year it would be sporting big spurious wheels, some rubbish ultralow suspension so it would be dragging itself over speed bumps (slammed or bagged, Man) and would end up a sorry wreck after 17 years of care from me. No, it’s staying. Consider it saved.