There's more to report (now that I've calmed down a bit). So, about a week after I had the Z3 back on the road, I was putting the roof down one sunny morning and thought uh oh, that sounded funny. What happened was that the zip had come apart in the top right corner of the rear screen. Hurrah!
Eventually I found a slidy bit that fitted in my sewing stash to try to un- and re-zip and of course the whole thing just unravelled completely. As I had spent all of my money on suspension bits, taking it somewhere to have a new screen fitted was out of the question. I did buy a length of zip from Amazon and a piece of window film from Ebay. Now I'm quite capable sewing stuff, so how hard can it be? Very, as it turns out. Cutting the new window using the old one as a template and sewing half of the zip around the edge was done in a matter of minutes. But then I spent many extremely frustrating evenings and weekends messing around with "speedy" sewing awls and portable sewing machines trying to attach the other half of the zip to the hood. In the end I sewed the whole thing in by hand over what felt like 100 hours and after the third application of black silicone it is now not very pretty but watertight.
Then about 4 weeks ago, more exciting things happened. I was driving along fairly late in the evening when I noticed that the car is pulling to one side and something smells a bit funny. when I pulled over I saw smoke coming off the left front wheel before even getting out of the car. When I looked, the brake disc was glowing red, because (you guessed it) brakes stuck on solid. So I sat in a lay-by in deepest rural South Oxfordshire, in the pitch black, in the drizzle, waiting for things to cool down a bit while imagining potential brake related horror scenarios in my head, before giving the calliper a prod and a wiggle with whatever tools I could find in the boot (mainly the big extension from my socket set) and driving home veeeeery slowly. Luckily a flush through with some fresh brake fluid and a clean and polish of the calliper sliding pins and bushes has apparently solved the problem. Phew!
All in all then business as usual in Old-BMW-world.
There's some good news as well though:
The rear suspension re-built was a big success. The rear of the car now feels absolutely stable and planted which has led to me driving around corners a lot more (let's say) confidently than before. I've also checked tyre thread depth and on the fancy digital read out of my calliper, the difference between inside and outside on both rear tyres is less than half a millimetre after 3000 miles. We'll just gloss over the fact that I evidently didn't put enough grease on one of the polyurethane bushes on the left side trailing arm, cause that's a bit creaky, and that I somehow have bent the heat shield, so at exactly 2500rpm the exhaust rattles against it like crazy.
Last week the Z3 and I went on another 1500 mile road trip across half of Europe, during which it did not miss a single beat. Driving home on Sunday, I went from Schengen to Reading, that's 403 miles (649km), on a single tank of fuel which works out as 6.75 l/100km (42 mpg). That's not bad at all, especially as I was not driving particularly slowly and years ago I had a 3 cylinder diesel VW Polo that also had a 45 l fuel tank and that only ever just lasted to Schengen, which is of course where you wanna stop for fuel and cigarettes because of the deliciously low tax rates in Luxembourg.
This week then because I still got the week off work and all the shiny new rear end stability has very much highlighted that the front suspension bushes are all extremely worn too, I got myself the whole set (inner and outer tie rods, wishbones, lollipop bushes, anti roll bar bushes and drop links, and strut top mounts). The last of which arrived Wednesday. As I had done this job before on my E46 I thought it's not that tricky and estimated to be finished by Wednesday evening when I started work after lunch. (Why oh why do I still keep doing this? I really should know better by now!) At least I managed to take off everything that needs to come off by Wednesday evening. Well, almost everything. There's this one ball joint, obviously the one that attaches to the wheel hub where I cooked the brakes, to which I spend several hours yesterday afternoon applying every method for removing stuck ball joints I could think of, including getting a bigger hammer, and burning it with fire until I threw my tools onto the drive (toys out of the pram) and walked away in a huff. I think I might need to drill that one out. wish me luck...
During all this, I couldn't help but notice that there is a bit of an oil leak happening, presumably from the rocker cover gasket, but nothing major, so that will keep for a bit.
Respect !!!