Expanding Our BMW Family
 

Hello, We recently picked up a '98 Boston Green Metallic on Dove 318ti with 99,000 miles on it. It has M3 bumpers and heated leather seats (not a single scratch and real leather). I'm unsure if it's an M-Tech model or not. It is sadly an automatic, but my wife really wanted a compact. The only compacts available were going for the same price, one being a manual with 210k in poor shape without the M3 bumpers, and the other being this car. The car was not without faults. It had a pending camshaft sensor error (P0340), a SAP leak error (P1423) which I've fixed by replacing the failed rivets with nuts and bolts, and a long term fuel trim error (P1174) which I'm hoping is a vacuum leak I have yet to discover. It also had the radiator fan issue where the radiator would only run with the AC on (seller INSISTED he was too hot and needed the AC on both times we test-drove, should have known). I have found this error's cause to be the fan switch, and for now have simply jumped the low-speed wires so it is always on. Luckily I was monitoring coolant temps via OBDII so I noticed it climb to 220F before the needle moved from 12 o-clock, and shut it down. At idle in traffic even with the high-speed circuit jumped the car climbs to 213F which seems rather high to me, but never goes higher. With the car about to turn over 100k miles and 20 years, I know I need to get to the cooling system soon. I personally have owned an E46 330ci for 6 years and know that BMW cooling systems are fragile. At 274k my car has now had 4 new cooling systems preventatively installed, but has never needed major work done (i.e. head gasket). My wife is driving 5 hours round-trip today, and I am worried about her cooling system. Hopefully it will make it without incident. We plan on swapping to a manual transmission soon, and she will use it to learn to autocross. I have been tracking and autocrossing my 330ci for a couple years now, and she recently tried in her manual Subaru 2.5RS and had a lot of fun. After she gets fast enough to need more power we will look into engine swaps, likely an aluminum block M52B28 from a Z3. Sorry for the long intro! Thanks for reading!