Last week, I closed with the long-delayed E30 timing-belt replacement finally beginning in earnest. I decided to change the water pump at the same time, since the two repairs overlap substantially. I ordered a new Graf water pump, but when I took it out of its box and checked its bearing by grabbing the flange that the fan screws into and wiggling it, it had noticeable play—which was ironic, since the water pump I’d removed had none.
So much for prophylactic maintenance.
I returned the Graf —in spite of the shaft play on this one, several shop-owners tell me it has a very good reputation—spent a little more cash, and ordered a Hepu water pump instead. It arrived, mercifully, absent any slop in the shaft.
I installed the water pump, then did the timing belt. Since I hadn’t done one of these in twenty years, I took nothing for granted, and followed a combination of the procedures in the Bentley manual, the one listed on Bavauto’s blog, one on YouTube, and several on E30 forums. I paid very careful attention to verifying the location of the timing marks on the crank and the cam.
Once I had the belt on, I tensioned it per the instructions from my friend Tom Jones (a pro): “When you can twist the longest run of the belt 90 degrees, the tension is correct.” I gave the engine its requisite two full rotations by hand to verify that nothing was binding up, then took the following picture and posted it on Facebook. I didn’t think that I’d done anything wrong; it was just my usual shameless self-promotion.
To my surprise, two eagle-eyed E30 guys, Jeff Hollen and Christopher Kohler, saw the picture, looked at it carefully, and chimed in that I appeared to have the correct new-style cast cam gear at the top, but still had the old-style stamped intermediate-shaft gear at the bottom. They posted a link showing that this stamped intermediate-shaft gear has a history of fracturing, allowing the belt to loosen—and detonating the engine. They strongly recommended that I buy and install the newer-style cast sintered gear before I buttoned things up.
Well, then.
The part was only about twenty bucks from the dealer, so I ordered it. While waiting for it to arrive, I started to take the old gear off.
That, however, proved challenging.
To take the old gear off, I had to immobilize it so the bolt on the front could be removed. I couldn’t figure out a non-destructive way to immobilize it, and I didn’t want to rely on the brand-new timing belt itself to hold it still, as I thought that this could damage the rubber teeth in the belt. Finally I decided to take off the new timing belt and put the old belt back on. I tensioned it, and used that tension (with the car in gear and the handbrake on) to hold the gear still. With a little bit of heat, the bolt came right off.
I pulled the old belt off and changed the gear on the intermediate shaft. I installed the new gear, put the new belt and tensioner back on, double-checked everything again, and rotated the engine two more times by hand.
Then I started to button things up. And this took more time than I expected, for a number of reasons. First, with the intervention of the Suburban’s brake lines, it had been about six weeks since I’d taken things apart. I don’t live and breathe E30s, so this wasn’t exactly an I-can-reassemble-it-in-my-sleep job for me.
Second, the instructions I was reading all said, basically, “Assembly is the reverse of disassembly,” and this is never how things really work. The upper timing-gear cover seemed to want to make a fool out of me. I installed it and couldn’t figure out why it didn’t sit flush against the head.
It took me a while to figure out that I had simply forgotten install the engine-hoist attachment bracket, which goes on first. Before I figured that out, I posted the question and the photo to the Facebook NE30 page, and two guys chimed in saying, “I did that, too!” I felt like I had passed the E30 Newbie Fraternity pledge.
Then I had to pull the cover back off, because I hadn’t first snapped on the rubber dust shield on the left side, which is much easier to do before installing the cover. And it took a while to figure out how to correctly route certain wires around the front of the upper cover; they seemed to want to snap onto the cover, but I couldn’t easily find photos of them online, because, it seemed, many E30s had long since lost these.
Finally, the belt-tensioners for the alternator, power steering, and compressor belts use toothed brackets with castellated nuts. The nuts were all missing teeth. I’d seen that and ordered new nuts, but when I began assembling things, I found that some of the brackets were missing teeth as well.
But back together it went.
When it came time to put the fan and its viscous clutch and the radiator back in, I looked at their stamped date codes and found that they all were the car’s original components, now nearly 30 years old.
I paused.
On nearly all of my vintage cars in which I plan to drive long distances to events, I do a full cooling-system sort-out—water pump, radiator, hoses, thermostat, expansion tank, everything. The exception was the Bavaria; I bought it after it had slumbered in a warehouse for a decade, and as an experiment, I did only a micro-sort, chancing the 1600-mile round trip to the Vintage, and encountered a bum radiator which caused hot running the entire way there and back. So I can’t exactly say that the experiment was a stunning success.
But since I’m not immediately planning on driving the E30 long distances, and since these are parts that are easily replaced without major disassembly, I decided to take the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach. Note that during the 50 miles I’d already put on the E30, I’d encountered a sticky thermostat and replaced it. And when I took the E30’s cooling system apart to do the water pump, I pulled and inspected nearly every hose, judged them to be okay, scraped the corrosion off the aluminum coolant necks, and re-installed the hoses. And the water pump was being replaced prophylactically. So I wasn’t doing absolutely nothing, I was doing what I felt was appropriate.
But for a second opinion, I posted the question to some of my car buddies. The consensus seemed to be that the plastic components in the E30’s radiator and the expansion tank were much stouter than in the E46 that came after it. I shrugged and put the original radiator, fan, and viscous clutch back in.
With the whole thing reassembled, I changed the oil and filled the cooling system. I charged the battery overnight. In the morning, I gave everything a second look, girded my loins, and turned the key.
Vroom.
As I write this, the first major snowstorm of the season is bearing down on the Northeast. Boston is predicted to only get grazed, but with the thorough salting the roads have received, it will likely be awhile before the E30 gets out of the garage. I’m gratified to know that, when the roads are ready, so is the car.
Unless I decide to tackle replacing the steering rack first.—Rob Siegel
