£1500 Z3 CHALLENGE
Preventative maintenance is essential to keep an old car reliable and useable, and whilst our Z3 was clearly quite well maintained by its previous owners, there were still a few things that needed addressing. Front dampers are a fairly common wear item and although both of ours had been replaced, they looked grotty enough to warrant removing and cleaning up just to make sure.
Apart from the steel brake pipes on the rear trailing arms, the factory brake lines on our car were the 1998 originals and were still good enough to warrant cleaning up and smearing with protective grease – not the usual MoT advisory horror to hide the fact that they are rotten, but cleaned back to good metal and given a light coating of grease to preserve them. The front brake pipes are known to rust just behind the front arch liner on all Z3 and E36 cars, and you really do need to remove the two plastic 10mm nuts securing the ABS sensor wiring junction box to the inner wing and pull the arch liner back. The pipe can be very rusty where it clips into the plastic pipe holder, and bad ones must be cut out back to good metal and a new pipe spliced in. However, ours were OK – the passenger one was perfect, and the driver’s side needed just a quick scrub up with coarse emery
