I'm not as thorough as you. My Bonneville squawked a CEL for emissions system issues so I quit driving it for a while. (Weather was nice so I spent some quality time with the GXP). When I got back in the SSEi the CEL was out so I took it in for the smog test and was able to reregister the car. Now I don't care for another year.

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Resident Tightwad

Screw you, Photobucket.

Lol. Gotta love the self healing feature.

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95 SLE... a keeper. 241k miles. Low and Slow.
97 BMW 528i
98 Infiniti vq35'd i30: 13.3@104mph, 30MPG Hwy (RIP)
02 Jag X-type
03 BMW M5
05 Chevy Cobalt LS
07 Infiniti G35s 6MT (Sold)
07 Ducati Monster S2R 800 with DS1000 swap
83 Yamaha IT175K
72 Yamaha DS7: '74 RD250 swap, JL chambers

Info on dropping a 92-99: Here.

I was asked to fix some accident damage on this car. The fender was pushed in pretty good, rocker sheet metal taco'd and the driver side bumper mounting was broken. I pulled the fender and rocker some and zip-tied the bumper until I could do more. I kept tabs on the 3 Harry's U-Pull-It yards in PA for for any silver E39s but none showed up. Also keeping tabs on Ebay, I saw a decent bumper and fender popped up locally at Prussian Motors. They were cool enough to work with me on price if I picked up both parts. The bumper wasn't completely necessary but it's definitely an upgrade.

The paint on the replacement parts is 99+ Titan Silver instead of 97-98 Aspen Silver but and this point we're in take what you get territory. The whole front end and front passenger door are now TiSi. The bumper/trim is also LCI. I tried re-using the pre-LCI outer trim sections but the 3 sections are slightly different lengths with the pre-LCI having a wider center section. So if I mix/matched there would have been 1" gaps from the old outer trim to the LCI center section. Most probably won't do a double take on it.

I did what I could with the pulling the rocker and used what I had on-hand for paint. The car would need to be on a lift to cut/weld a new section it and properly tie it into the jack pad area. This will live like this since I've got about 5 other things I need to borrow a lift for and only time for a couple of those.










It would be cool to see this get to 200k. When I got it in 2019, there was 168k on the clock and I gave it back at 169k. There's plenty more I would do to this car if I owned it but alternatively, it could have been scrapped 5 years ago.

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95 SLE... a keeper. 241k miles. Low and Slow.
97 BMW 528i
98 Infiniti vq35'd i30: 13.3@104mph, 30MPG Hwy (RIP)
02 Jag X-type
03 BMW M5
05 Chevy Cobalt LS
07 Infiniti G35s 6MT (Sold)
07 Ducati Monster S2R 800 with DS1000 swap
83 Yamaha IT175K
72 Yamaha DS7: '74 RD250 swap, JL chambers

Info on dropping a 92-99: Here.

The cartoon cracked me up. Then I realized that's how I am with all my cars...not so funny now. LOL!

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Resident Tightwad

Screw you, Photobucket.

Lol. Its definitely the case for everything I either own, have owned or am currently responsible for..

_________________

95 SLE... a keeper. 241k miles. Low and Slow.
97 BMW 528i
98 Infiniti vq35'd i30: 13.3@104mph, 30MPG Hwy (RIP)
02 Jag X-type
03 BMW M5
05 Chevy Cobalt LS
07 Infiniti G35s 6MT (Sold)
07 Ducati Monster S2R 800 with DS1000 swap
83 Yamaha IT175K
72 Yamaha DS7: '74 RD250 swap, JL chambers

Info on dropping a 92-99: Here.

It's a curse.

_________________

Resident Tightwad

Screw you, Photobucket.

I had to do some more repair work on this recently. It had a coolant leak where it lost about a gallon somehow but I couldn't get it to actively leak when I went to go look at it.. Even by adding fluid. The only place that looked like it was wet was at the overflow tank. Although I already replaced it 6 years ago due to it being a common failure point, I ordered it again with a new cap. The cap could be faulty it led to a boil over.

After getting the new parts in, I go to start the car so I can try and get the air out of the system. It starts but sounds terrible and dies. It definitely wasn't running on all cylinders. My first thought is BGH but I keep starting it and eventually get it to idle so I can diag. I pull coil plugs to see which cylinders weren't firing. Pulling Cyls 3 and 5 netted no change so I knew those were the issue. I figure, I'll swap coils between 2 and 3 and if the problem follows, I'll at least know it's a dead coil. If not, it's compression or fuel. After swapping those coils, it starts and runs perfectly, including Cly 5, which I did not touch. The only way I made sense of this is there's a ground strap that was on one of the Cly 3 coil bolts. I'm thinking corrosion wasn't letting it ground properly and coil swap gained back a ground for those two cylinders. Either way, much better than fixing a fuel issue or junking the car over a BHG. For the record, the oil looked fine too.

Bleeding the system took much longer than I remember. It took a lot of hand pumping on the coolant lines and driving at speed to finally get heat from the heater core. I didn't have an issue when I did the water pump a few years back and my M5 last winter was easy in comparison. It was 30* out but still.

It's been about 6 years now since I put this thing back on the road.

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95 SLE... a keeper. 241k miles. Low and Slow.
97 BMW 528i
98 Infiniti vq35'd i30: 13.3@104mph, 30MPG Hwy (RIP)
02 Jag X-type
03 BMW M5
05 Chevy Cobalt LS
07 Infiniti G35s 6MT (Sold)
07 Ducati Monster S2R 800 with DS1000 swap
83 Yamaha IT175K
72 Yamaha DS7: '74 RD250 swap, JL chambers

Info on dropping a 92-99: Here.

I hates it when you do some work on the car and something completely unrelated craps the bed for no apparent reason. At least fiddling with it made it magically go away, so you got that going for you.

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Resident Tightwad

Screw you, Photobucket.