Sunday morning I found myself standing between rows of non-functional European cars thinking to myself, Those parts would work but they wouldn't be year correct for my BMW. Then I slapped myself for thinking that. Hard.
I'm not restoring my E30 to concourse condition, it's a track beater. I'm buying the parts necessary to install a function bumper that doesn't look like ass. Nobody at the track is going to give a flying fuck if the side markers are from an '85 car when, clearly, my car is an '87. Yet there I was, having a serious debate in inner monologue about it.
In the end I wound up taking the parts I needed from an '87 325i, the same year as my car; not because I actually cared they were year-correct parts but because they were the parts I could actually get off the car. The '85 E30 had rust issues making its bumper trim off not worth the effort.
On both Saturday and Sunday mornings I made the trip to the Pick-N-Pull yard to spend quality time with broken down Bimmers, work on-call duty be damned! (Had my lappy and hotspot with me, was totally willing to work from the salvage yard.) I needed parts and they had 'em! Cheap!
Among the issues my BMW has (had, now) was that it didn't have bumpers. In its life one of its owners decided they wanted to fit a fiberglass body kit. Rather than finding a body kit they liked that would work the factory bumper hardware they ditched the bumpers from both of the car and hacked off front tow-hooks. I'm not a fan of this kind of thing, I like having stuff like tow-hooks and bumps on my cars, especially when I'm flinging it around a track with twenty other cars! Last year I'd replaced the front with stock front bumper/tow-hook, I figured it was time to restore the rear of the car to it's more natural from the factory rear hardware, too. That's what had me out at the Pick-N-Pull arguing with myself about the shape of side marker lights.
I found two pre-plastic bumper E30s that hadn't been stripped of their rear-gear sitting right next to each other on the lot--the only E30s that still had their rear-gear. One was an '85 325e, the other an '87 325is. I wanted to cull as many parts from the 'is' as I could because it was the same model year as my car, unfortunately the physical bumper bar on it was hosed. In the ended I took the bumper bar from the 'e' and the bumper shocks from the 'is'. Unfortunately I'd not brought right tools to pull the bumper trim off, too meaning I'd have to come back the next morning.
That's why I found myself having an internal debate about the correctness of trim parts on a track beater in a salvage yard at 8am on a Sunday morning. While the 'is' trim would have been year-correct they'd been stripped of their side marker lights, the 325e's trim hadn't. If I took the 325e's trim I wouldn't have to source new side markers even though they wouldn't be quite correct for my car. In the end--after slapping some sense into myself about the purpose of my old BMW--I chose the trim the from the 'e'. Only that was full of fail. The nuts holding the bumper trim on was so rusted that the landings disintegrated when the socket wrench on them.
Now I have a full set of year correct rear bumper trim for a 1987 BMW 325is not because it's year correct but because of some rusted hardware on a junker car. Oh, and an order with Pelican Parts for shiny new OEM BMW rear markers lights to fit into that trim.
Moral of the story? Sometimes you can't help but to come correct. Or something like that.
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