We were tasked with creating a display that would not only garner attention at first glance, but keep people intrigued and thinking about it.
Due to my passion for cars, my first thought was to put a car into the store. I had a 1991 BMW 318is that I was currently not driving that we were originally going to use, however due to the dimensions and the need to basically total the car which I wasn’t willing to do, a Google Chrome window popped up with Craigslist shortly thereafter.
I found a couple contenders, but with the BMW E30 becoming even more of a cult icon than it already was, we were pretty set on finding an example that was clean enough for show but not BringATrailer-clean.
The specimen ended up being a 1991 BMW 318i convertible. The fact that it doesn’t have a roof works great in two ways:
- Cheaper as enthusiasts desire chassis rigidity
- More clearance to fit the unibody sideways through a small doorway (wait, I didn’t mean to give away the surprise)
We drove the car back from San Jose to my house in Monterey and proceeded to procrastinate chopping it up for about a week. A convertible towards the end of summertime is just too good to pass up.
Eventually the E30 made its way onto jack stands as the disassembly began. The hood and everything mounted to the core support were first to go as this would aid drivetrain removal. Piece by piece, the car was stripped down to the unibody with care and fastener management in mind as we had to reassemble it a few days later. The silver lining of the reassembly being that it’ll be in a climate-controlled retail store rather than my ice cold driveway.
Once the classic 80s convertible was down to a carcass, we worked on building a frame out of wood along with casters and wall insulation as cushion. With the use of an engine hoist and a regular floor jack, the unibody was safely strapped down to our DIY frame. We pushed it into my garage and awaited the 7.5 liters of fury and a UHaul trailer piloted by another friend to bring it down to Cannery Row. At around midnight or so, we successfully not only got the unibody out of the trailer, but we were ready to squeeze it through some rather small double doors.
Once the car was in, we called it a night. Over the course of about a week, every night and a few all nighters later, we got the car in one piece just in time for one of the clients to view the car in all in glory inside the shop.
Everyone was stunned once we ripped the paper off the store windows and it brought people in as the hero of the store. It was featured on local news along with many, many photoshoots and a few involving Snoop Dogg’s son and father.
Unfortunately, about a year and a half later, the store closed and everything had to be out in one night. We had already done nearly irreversible damage such as cutting brake lines and deleting the wiring harness, so I suppose it wasn’t much of a loss in the end. A saw-zall and about 7 Diablo blades from Home Depot later, the car was in pieces and was able to be taken away in the dead of night.
The unibody was toast, but I was able to recoup a lot of cost by selling the individual parts. If you consider labor free, we probably broke even. And lest I forget, I procured a clean M42B18 out of it that ended up going into my own personal E30 about 2 weeks after the convertible went into the store and was subsequently sold. I miss both E30s a lot!
