Do you name your car?

[owreet]

As a BMW expert of some 6 weeks standing, I'm sure that some affectionate tag must be passed on to the beemer. As I acquired the 5 for £0 as spares for the 3, it is now known as BOGOF. I've spent a fantastic day applying three lots of tcut and some red wax....it looks better, but now you can see all the defects. I know Frank never cleaned the car...he had it from new when he was a high flyer, so some minion may have cleaned it at some point, but he certainly did not.
I do know that a few years ago one of his neighbours cleaned it for him as they were embarrassed having it parked next to their house, but there wasn't a shred of clean paint work left when i picked it up...it had faded to a sort of rusty orange.
I split then welded a 2.5" pipe around the only hole in the exhaust and sprayed black waxoyl over all the brake pipes. Cleaned out and waxoyled the holes in the front and back sills!!!! (I hope these are supposed to be there.. the front ones had a plastic plug in them and the rear ones were just open into the sill).
Finish the interior tommorrow, perhaps clean the engine and do all the black, then book it in for MOT.
Took my daughter for a spin in the 3 with the roof off down to the beach in between and found dreaded damp had crept under the carpet in the drivers side footwell towards the centre. This must be coming from the runoffs inside the engine bay. I thought they were all clear, will investigate tommorrow.

[unixnerd]

A neighbour of mine when I lived in Aberdeen had a rust free E28 525e in white and green. The green was a thick layer of tree sap and fungus! I always joked I'd make clean patches on it to annoy him one night on the way home from the pub

E34 tourings are a real bargain, a mate had a four wheel drive one. Bits for them are stupidly cheap on ebay, you can buy a used set of alloys and tyres for less than the cost of one new tyre!

Our last E34 was called Pixie as she had an Irish plate beginning PXI... The E28 M535i is called Megalodon after an extict pre-historic shark.

[owreet]

Hurrah! the fuel flap hinge came today...only £13 for a bit of plastic! MOT on Wednesday at 9am...fingers crossed. Finished all the black today and repaired the boot lock. Only the glass rear window opener broken now, but that wont matter for the test. Fired some silicone around the 3, so hope its watertight now...nearly set it on fire by drying the carpets out with a hot air stripper. Lodged the carpets up with a piece of wood and left the stripper running on low underneath...then promptly forgot about it while I did something else....ah well.

[Matt Cheshire]

Classic Cars need names. If they had no names we couldn't attribute faults to "personality". And if we aren't attached enough to dream up name we should just be sensible and drive pandas.

I have an M6 named Gunter- needs to sound pretentious like Germans who like polo neck jumpers and weimaraners. I have a 1972 six pack Charger named Chuck- that was from the previous owner but changing it would just confuse it. And a White V70T called Moby obviously.

But Americans have a hang up with Beemer and Bimmer- Beemer apparently is only for bikes. But Bimmer sounds too pretentious, even for blokes with polo necks and big dogs......


Cheers,

Matthew Cheshire.