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Some more pictures before conversion. The Pirelli tires looked brand new, until you got close and could see the cracks in the rubber.
And the date codes on the tires showed that they were expired.
The car looks in great condition because it was stored for 15 years and it only had 49,000 miles on it.
The paint looked in really good condition, but again getting close you could see the roof was faded and there were nicks and scratches in the paint.
The day the 320i came home from the shop that de-ice (internal combustion engine) the 320i. On a cold day the first week of January 2014. Click here for the vehicle delivery video. You will see the guys at the shop pushing the 320i in from outside the shop. That is because we needed to turn the car around for the car carrier trailer so the car would go into my garage engine bay first. Great thanks goes to my friend Mark Shufelt who's trailer and truck were used to get the 320i home.
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Removing the Internal Combustion Engine
After several tries (all thwarted by snow storms) the 320i was transported to the shop and the EV conversion was started. The car had to be towed because I ran out of gas trying to run the gas tanks down. In addition to the ICE being removed, the exhaust system and gas tanks/fuel system were also removed. The 5-speed transmission was also removed and will be used in the EV conversation. All of the work was done at Henry's Automotive by the mechanic Mark who did a fantastic job. I went with an autoshop for the removal process because I do not have the resouces in my garage for this process. The removal only took a little over 5 hours to complete and went very well with no real issues. This old car has very few connections to the motor which made the removal easy. The gas tanks proved to be the most difficult as the fuel delivery system had to be disassembled and the remainder of fuel had to be pumped out of the tanks. On this BMW there were two fuel tanks, one either side of the drive shaft, directly below the rear seat. That area will be used to mount batteries in the EV conversion. The ICE motor should be a valuable item to someone that is restoring a similar vehicle. Only 49,000 original miles on the engine.