Don't meet your heroes - E30 Vert

[Senor_Taylor]

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Taylor show. In today's episode, we have a cheap E30 convertible. 

I've been looking for an E30 vert for cheap in my quest to own the different E30 variants and I found this one listed for way too much money. I was the first to look at the car and snagged it yesterday for quite a lot less than he was asking. Apparently he bought the car to learn how to work on things, realized he was no good at turning wrenches and then his wife made him get rid of it so it'd stop being a smelly eye sore in their nice neighborhood. 

1990 Vert. White on Blue. Pre Facelift. 164,000 miles.

The photos showed some fender rust, but he also didn't mention in the ad that he had a shop professionally fix the rust over the winter. Doesn't seem like a smart way to sell a car, but his loss is my gain. Of course there's a shit ton wrong with the car and trying to make this into a "clean" E30 would be a completely stupid idea as it would cost many times the value of the car. What the car does have is potential. The motor is probably the smoothest, most quiet, and strongest M20 I've felt and the trans shifts very well. It also is well optioned, with sport seats (standard in all verts) but they're heated and it also has an LSD. It also doesn't seem to leak any oil (but it does leak gas). 

That's where the "good" stops and the bad begins. There's a lot of hacky shit done that I'm going to clean up, and the thing is REALLY dirty. A lot of things will be fixed with some simple rewiring, lubricating, and cleaning, so it'll be a fun little project for now. I have a new timing belt on the way and will knock that out some time before the weather gets warm. In the mean time, I'm going to see how much use I can make of the E30 network I've made for myself through my time buying and selling and see if I can cobble together some used parts to make this thing better. I'll take some better pics once I get the car cleaned up a little.

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Oh, and this is titled "don't meet your heroes" because a vert E30 isn't as cool as I thought it would be. A Miata is probably a better convertible.

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