April 2002 - Driving, but not in an '02 :(

I've started working on the car again now that weather and work permits.
We also went down to Arkansas and met up with Bo Black and his friends from
Tulsa to take on the twisty pavement of Northwest Arkansas.

Ok, I started gutting the other shell to get read to go down to bare steel and wanted to document taking all the doors and windows apart. Here's a shot of the window regulators. If you've been here you know what a pain they are to get out.

You can see that underneath the carpeting the floor pans look good. There is no rust underneath the floorpans even starting. There is minor rust here and there that's common to cars this old in places the factory forgot about.

Where you find rust is in interesting places. Here behind the outside window chrome where the door panel sits flush, you can see where it hides from you until you get it into daylight!

Ok, Bruce, Steve and I headed for Arkansas to try the good weather on the Arkansas Pig Trails, rated one of the 10 best roads by Car and Driver with other 2002 owners. Since I'm without a working '02, I've taken the '91 318is, the great great grandson to the 'tii.

From Tulsa, it was Tom Clark in the '72tii, Stacey Gabbard and Trent Fowler (as "navigator") in the '74 2002.

This Stacy Gabbard's 74 is a daily driver from Tulsa.

Back view. Nice sounding exhaust, I drove behind this car most of the way.

Tom Clark's 72tii had some cool Recaro seats that look liked the Turbo's.

We stopped several times... ignore the cans and the barrels!

Looking the other way... Bruce's blue 76 and Bo's 74tii led the way.

We stopped way down in the twisties for a group shot. I'm the in the contemporay E30 white one, next time maybe Stella will be here!

Back view showing the 25mph twisties ahead. We saw lots of those!!!

Group shot down in the state park area... Patriotic??

Bruce and Bo tanking up on 91 Octane. The weather was awesome!

Side view. Steve gets lots of compliments on his 13" wheels by the way.

And then there's that double wide crap that just spoils your whole drive!!!

Ok, Bo took this one... They said my car was smoking so I got down to inspect the fact that my one crisis of the drive was when 10 miles from home the tranny drain plug some how came out and dumped all the Red Line MTL on the highway and onto the exhaust system. Jim Blanton saved my butt at the 11th hour with fresh MTL and a drainplug at 7pm at night... Thanks JIM!!! 700 miles of driving and I'm still burning that funky smell off the catalytic converter...