Sri Lanka It's Happening

August 29, 2006

After wistfully looking at a couple of fives, I finally settled on a 1997 BMW e36. It's a pretty good car. Much better than my old E30 in many ways. It has to be. The E36 is a complete new design while the E30 was derived from the E21. However the e30 (at least my 316) is miles ahead of this E36 (a 318) in one aspect. Speed.

My friend who bought my old car hasn't collected it yet. He want's to fix the AC, add a coat of varnish and fix a couple of niggles in it before he takes the car home. So yesterday, I drove it to the AC workshop and really floored it, even touched 100Km/s in the midst of Colombo's notorious traffic. At 5000rpm the engine makes a wonderfull sound which is very audible when the shutters are rolled down!

The 318 I just bought, doesn't seem to accelerate equally well, even though it should. The previous owner wasn't one of those old codgers who buy BMWs for prestige. However he seemed more concerned about the price of petrol than the number of seconds to go from 0 to 100. As a result of that, carbon might have built up around the injectors. If a couple of days of hard driving doesn't fix things, Milory is going to have to clean up the injectors.

The new car (if you can call it that) has a few things to fix. The beading around the rear windscreen has detoriated (this is a known issue) but I am leaving it untouched for the moment. The trims on the A-columns needs to be fixed up. It's coming off, which is another known issue. Then the ball joints may also need doing up. Other than that the car is in excellent condition even though it has 68098 miles on the clock. Heck with my e30 the odometer was stuck on 110,000+ km when I bought it five years ago.

Posted by raditha at August 29, 2006 11:43 AM