My 24 Hours of LeMons team has officially got ourselves a car! I paid out $350 for a 1986 BMW 325 4-door. The car starts but won’t idle properly (or at all, it just dies) so you have to keep your foot on the gas and the revs up to keep it running. However, we have $150 to get her running initially. Also, as a bonus, the car came with a stereo and an equalizer and some speakers in the rear. We’ll be able to sell that stuff on Craig’s List to get some extra spending room.
The body is in decent condition. It has some pretty bad passenger-side rear-fender damage and the passenger-side front-fender is a little dinged up, but other than that, the paint just looks like shit.
Right now we’re concentrating on fixing it before get the cage built in and add the race seats and other equipment. We think we’ve figured out that it’s a fueling issue as we’ve cleaned the O2 sensor and tested the AFM unit and are still having the same issues. So, we’re going to check out the fuel pressure regulator and see if that can’t fix our problems.
I’m going to try and keep this page updated with our progress. I’ll try to get some before and after pictures as well.
Right now the technical team consists of the following members (and I think it’s a pretty stacked roster):
- Myself (Software Developer, Decently-Good Driver)
- Nick Smith (Mechanical Engineer, Good Driver)
- David Lucas (Mechanical Engineer, Good Driver w/ some training)
- Chris Schult (Mechanical Engineer, Good Driver)
- Robby Podhola (General Contractor, general bad-ass w/ tons of experience in custom car work)
Of course we also have Jessica and Kate, who’s main job will be to be all sexy and stuff, probably wearing milk-maid outfits and what not. I guess it’ll depend on what theme we go with.
All of our ME members have different specialties that will be able to provide us a lot of smarts for working on different parts of the car and Robby has a lot of pratical car-building experience, so I’m pretty excited about the contest. If we can avoid getting hit and taken out, I like our chances.