Install the pads in the calipers and put the whole thing back on. Don’t forget the new pad wear sensor on the right wheel.
Cost breakdown
All parts purchased from Pelican Parts.
A new low-beam ellipsoid lens assembly runs for about $140, which I wasn’t willing to pay. A used headlight, complete with casing and both low- and high-beam lenses, goes for $150 on some web sites. With enough patience I found a guy who runs a junk yard on eBay, who was selling one full used headlight for $90. I offered him $75 and he accepted. I could have probably done better with more patience but the price was good enough.
Here’s how I replaced the broken headlight. The Flickr photo set is arranged in chronological order. Click on pictures to see photo annotations indicating the location of various components.
A lot of cursing and name-calling certainly helped.
I sure hope I don’t have to do this again any time soon. Stay away from my car. And if you drink that Champagne of Beers piss, stay away from me as well. All those who drink Miller High Life are douchebags. There are no exceptions.
I work a lot on my 1988 325 BMW; I do maintenence and replacement, I get dirty and bruised and I curse a lot. The car is like a piece of software in constant need of debugging. Why? you may be asking, why not buy something newer, more reliable? The answer is a simple one - because I love this car. It's a hobby that I didn't ask for, it just came over me. It wasn't a conscious decision, it just happened that I came to believe that the E30s - the 3-series BMWs built between 1983 and 1991 (more or less) - are the most beautiful cars ever designed. So I got myself one in 2005 for 1400 bucks and I put much more into it since. Sure, I love other cars too... but they don't matter, honey.
Despite the many things that need constant attention, my Bimmer has never let me down. The only days I can't drive it are when I screw up some replacement procedure and I have to keep the car on jackstands for longer than I had hoped while I wait for a part that I had accidentally broken.
There are many web sites with do-it-yourself articles for the E30 cars; I always try to learn as much as possible from others' accounts before starting work on a new area. But I found out that no web site or book ever covers all the little traps you can fall into when you attempt a complex replacement procedure. Therefore I decided to write my own car maintenance stories, focusing on the procedures that I found unexpectedly hard, the tools that didn't fit in narrow corners and the unexpected discoveries that happen when you venture in uncharted territory. Enjoy the reading! Comments are welcome.
Unfortunately it's only recently that I decided to take pictures with every repair procedure. In the world of car maintenance repair articles are worthles without pics, at least to amateurs like me. Sadly, much of my past work has remained undocumented. These are some of the procedures I'm proud to have successfully completed:
I have a 2000 Jeep Grand Cherokee as well, the first car I ever owned (Yes, I got my driving license and first car at the age of 27, a late bloomer if you will). My wife drives it now. It doesn't get my whole love and I am not dabbling with the engine, the suspension or anything else beyond the "easy", but I'm still trying to keep it in decent shape.
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Right-side front door latch replacement |
Should I change the name of this blog to carrats? No travel is "happening" anymore and since I cannot bring myself to blog about irrelevant details of my life or Saturday's night party, I'm filling it with maybe-less-irrelevant details about my one and only hobby left.
The new latch was $78.43 (how do they come up with these numbers?...) plus $11.80 shipping on eBay. He deserved his positive rating. The guy (airparkcjd) had more than 4000 sales and 100% positive reviews.
The Flickr set is arranged in chronological order. Click on the photos to see notes describing the location of various components referred in this article.
In the second installment of the E30 suspension upgrade story I continued with the front axle. Besides the Bilstein Sport shock absorbers and the H&R OE Sport springs whose counterparts I had already installed in the rear, I also decided to replace the control arms and the control arm rubber bushings. Only that being lazy and not wanting to deal with removing the tightly fit old bushing and squeezing in the new one (stories go that this is pretty tough) I decided to buy new “lollipops” with the bushings already installed. On bavauto.com a new bushing costs $12.95 while the whole bracket goes for $49.95. A waste of money, I know, but what the hell - it was Christmas. The next time I surely won’t be spending so lavishly; I’ll probably just upgrade to urethane or M3 bushings which are more expensive anyway. I also replaced all the self-locking nuts during this procedure, as the manual recommends.
Click on pictures to see the exact location of the parts and components referred in this article. Click here to see the full set of pictures.
Timeline:
I certainly learned a few things – I didn’t really have to change the control arms; the old ones looked good enough. But what the hell! ... In retrospect I bit more than an amateur like me could chew in one weekend. I’d recommend doing this in stages – one weekend the shocks and springs, the next the control arms, then the tie rods. Drinking on Saturday night may delay results. Even a professional mechanic, doing this on his own time, having to deal with wife and kids and grocery shopping, might find this job too much for one straight shot.
This is not a travel post, it's a car post.
In my crusade to fix, upgrade and polish the old piece of junk (1988 BMW 325) I finally decided to tackle the rear axle suspension, which had felt horribly loose for a while. Moreover I kept hearing squeaking and screeching noises coming from the left side of the back of the car while driving. Since my car is primarily a daily driver and will never see the track in its remaining days on earth I chose to upgrade the suspension with Bilstein Sport shock absorbers and H&R OE Sport springs. This combination is supposed to lower the car but not too much - about one inch - and the ride won’t become too harsh as it would be the case with stiffer lowering springs.
Parts and tools:
Click on images for better-resolution photos.
Partially remove the trim in the trunk to expose the shock mounts. Bending the trim is not an easy affair; it’s relatively rigid and hard to peel off and snap out of the grooves where it’s tucked in. That’s when I noticed that the right side shock mount had to be broken – there was a 2-3 millimeter gap between the upper cupped washer and the rubber piece. What do you know!
The Bentley says to disconnect and lower the rear part of the exhaust system from the brackets that support it, to allow for more room when the trailing arm is lowered. I did just that, but in retrospect I think this step didn’t help much. I supported the exhaust by hanging it with zip-ties from the upper brackets.
I had also ordered the reinforcement plates that were recommended by other people and by Bavauto. These metal plates are supposed to go inside the trunk between the body metal and the shock mount nuts, but they didn’t fit on my model. On one side of the body plate hole for the shock mount, the body plate has some sort of reinforcement bar which is about a quarter of an inch high. The shock reinforcement plate is too wide and goes over that bar; as a result, it doesn’t sit flat on the body and the lock nuts can’t be tightened against it. Useless!
After working on the rear suspension all Saturday I was planning to tackle the front the next day. But when I woke up I was in so much pain after the previous day-long workout that I had to schedule the front axle adventure for the next weekend.
Working Time - about 8 hours, with breaks. With more experience and better organization (the right tools always at hand, more space in the garage, etc) this could take significantly shorther, even for an amateur.
Difficulty - technically not too challenging, but it involves a lot of physical work.
When I was traveling through South America, seeing the ridiculously low prices of fruits and vegetables I ranted on this site about our own grocery stores back home and the exorbitant prices they charge us for the same stuff. The only possible explanation for this rip-off is that it’s not a rip-off at all: we are subjected to a first-world standard-of-living tax that generously flows into an altruistic aid program that subsidizes the mom-and-pop grocers of the third world. Right?
It turns out that it doesn't have to be this way; the first-world sucker tax is optional. Upon our return, Angela has been struck by a sudden, lasting attack of anal-retentiveness and decided that grocery shopping needs to be done by a meticulous plan which will result in significant savings. Thus, for the last few months we have been shopping at the “Asian” grocery markets in the International District. I mean “Asian” in the blatant “most people who work there look vaguely Chinese” way. In those nondescript stores along and behind Jackson Street you can find not only the familiar fruits and vegetables sold by the ubiquitous Fred Meyer, Safeway or QFC, but also others that may require an advanced course in exotic foods before you can figure out what to do with them. The quality is nothing to balk at but the prices are the best part – everything is much cheaper than at the mainstream chain grocery stores. You spend 10 bucks and go out with three full bags. I took some pictures of their convincing price tags – and these are winter prices; in summer, the numbers are half.
Unless these guys get all their produce straight from China like Walmart or grow them in their basement closets under halogen light bulbs year-round they would have to buy from the same producers like the big stores. They charge lower prices and obviously manage to stay in business and survive the tough competition. This begs the question, why don’t the major stores sell at comparable prices? The answer is, beyond any economic theory bullshit, because they can. For a variety of reasons, the average white American doesn't shop in Chinatown. If you live in the suburbs you have no choice or you just don’t know better – the Asian groceries are confined to a 5-block stretch along Jackson Street, a small and not too interesting neighborhood south of downtown. However the backbone of the American nation, the soccer moms and baseball dads of Seattle, don’t shop in the I.D. because the place is obviously unclean, unhygienic, unsafe and full of foreigners with dreadful accents, who might as well be terrorists. That leaves the minorities, a handful of liberal hippies and the expert-level white people who – like me – have embraced ethnic diversity. Of course, only as long as it comes to cheap food.
It’s no surprise that a blog called “Run the Equator” gets the majority of its hits from people searching the web for something or other related to the Equator. I run a counter on this site which enables me to see how many people have reached it and where the clicks come from, within the limits of geographic IP address mapping. Don’t worry, the counter doesn’t tell me your name, phone number or email address, but it’s very good at measuring stupidity, and there’s no better dumbness-gauge than the words people use in web searches. Words? No, it’s entire phrases and personal questions that people ask Google these days.
The undeniable fact that Google has indexed and catalogued the entire world of online information has led certain of us to believe that the sum of human knowledge is at their fingertips and no effort is needed to retrieve it. Once upon a time it used to be that you needed to read the manual first in order to be able use a tool. If you wanted to get a book on a certain topic from the library, you had to know how to use the index cards or explain your concerns to the librarian, and later on, when you had the book in your hands you actually had to spend some time reading it to get to the information you were looking for. All this sounds pretty darn complicated, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, in the age of instant gratification all these time-wasting efforts have been made obsolete by web search. Who needs a brain when you’ve got Google?
You can get most of what you’re looking for to come willingly to your web browser, depending on your level of skill in manipulating search keywords, but no amount of search and indexing will redeem some of the lost souls who land accidentally on my blog. For their lack of common sense they deserve house arrest without access to the internet and an interdiction to procreate.
Most people get to my blog looking for something simple and objective, which can be expressed in simple queries: visas, information about a certain country or place I happen to have visited and blogged about, hostels, vaccines for the tropical world, travel information. These boring internet surfers seem to have read the manual and don’t expect the web to be able to cure AIDS and slice bread.
A few clueless dweebs, exhibiting a fair degree of anonymous honesty admit that they don’t know where or what this equator-thing is. Fair enough – in this day and age, operating a computer doesn’t require any level of formal education, like going to school. These guys seem to be struggling in a desperate quest for trivial knowledge. Unless they are 8 year-olds, they have already lost the battle and will soon land a job flipping burgers for the rest of their lives if they don’t already do so.
The frosting on the cake are those who have thrown all gray-matter from the skulls into the trash can and would rather be plugged into the Matrix than exercise their atrophied brains, the part of the population whose cortexes have been leveled with a clothes iron by the digital age. These guys ask Google the kind of questions you would ask of an oracle. One who has all the answers to all the riddles in the Universe, or at least to everything involving the Equator. Let’s take a look at the existential problems these monkeys are struggling with. Some questions require algorithmic answers, which reveals a certain complexity of the problem they are trying to tackle, but the mere fact that they ask the search question in raw, human form reveals their total lack of common sense with regard to technology and its limits. Some of them are merely stupid, others completely nonsensical, more appropriate to the prior category, many are just brilliant. The grammar belongs to them.
Those queries come from the activity logs of the last month only. Too bad I didn’t save the rest. I wanted to make a top-ten out of it but I can’t decide which one deserves the Darwin Award...
For all of you internet-indoctrinated morons, get an atlas! Google maps would do just fine.
"What was your favorite place?"
I get this question all the time and it irritates me like a knitting needle stuck in my ear. Sometimes I think you ask it just to annoy me – but you’d have to be too devious for that, so I’ll go with the more reasonable assumption: that you’re opening your mouth only to ask the most predictable question because you don’t have anything to say, really. It’s a stupid question. I’ve been to 26 countries during my year-long trip; there wasn’t a lot that they had in common except that I had to eat, shit and sleep wherever I went, and the other tourists annoyed me equally everywhere… but I hardly think that’s a solid basis for a top-ten rating.
I don’t ask you if you like steak more than ice cream. Or whether Scarlett Johansson is hotter than Angelina Jolie. Or whether you prefer beer or coffee. Those, along with the one you keep asking me are stupid questions and do not deserve to be answered. Whatever the answer may be it doesn’t communicate any relevant information and is not going to advance the conversation in any way. It’s just meaningless chatting for the sake of it.
There’s a gazillion of reasonable questions you could ask, that may lead to a funny and interesting conversation. Let me help you a bit:
But no, you all prefer to ask me the same inane question, one that doesn’t even have a relevant answer to boot. Look, I liked all the countries I visited and I hated some of them at the same time – sometimes for the same reasons. You could figure this out on your own if you paused to think for a second before opening your mouth, but since you’re so narrow and you lack any spark of imagination you keep asking me what my favorite place was as if I were 16 and I had to have a favorite movie, a favorite band or a best friend.
I should throw the nearest wireless mouse at you when I hear that question, but I’m medicated well enough so I usually restrain myself. Instead, if I suspect that the person I’m talking to has a bit of a brain left and would be able to see the error of their ways with a bit of help or if I believe that the question was just a momentary lapse into stupidity on the part of an otherwise clever individual (don’t we all?) I’ll say that the countries I liked fall into two distinct categories: those that you fall in love with at first sight, as soon as you get off the plane - like South Africa or Greece or Spain - and those that have to grow on you, like India, Laos and Bolivia. Aside of this coarse classification each country strikes you by one or more dominant attributes that make it unique: it can be the picture-perfect beauty of nature, the ethereal strangeness of the landscape, the good time you had with people you met, the rotting garbage lying in the open, the permanent harassment you were subjected to, the beautiful wild animals, the breathtaking diving on the coral reef, the raging night-life, the hot topless girls on the beach, the soaring snow-capped mountains or the delicious exotic food. You may prefer one or the other in certain situations but no single one tops the rest; I’d have to just pick one out of my ass. Not that you would care. You want clichés? Here’s one for you: stop asking me to compare apples with pears!
Even if I had a favorite country… how would it advance your knowledge of the world if I told you anyway? Stop asking me dumb questions just to be nice. If you don’t have anything to say, just shut up. Man, I hate people.
You want a list? I got one! You order it, stop asking me.
I was going to call this one “Ten things that pissed me off around the world” but once I began to think about all the times I was annoyed, pissed off or wished I had a shotgun to blast someone out of their idiotic useless existence during the course of this trip I couldn’t stop counting and soon I used all the fingers of my two hands and took my socks off so I can start counting using my toes. Hence the current title.
