In for a penny in for a pound, don't lift mid-corner, and whatever other clichés you want to drag up. Long story short we took a car that had some value and reduced it to its component parts (i.e. ‘no value’) in a little less than 7 hours.

(sidenote: Apparently the car part removal gods read my thoughts a little too literally since the first thing that was removed early Sat. morning was the plastic piece that controls the tail gate on my truck, it exploded into non-working plastic pieces. You could get the tailgate unlatched with a pair of big channel lock pilers, I considered for a few moments not fixing it but I didn’t own channel locks big enough and I already get a ration of sh!t from Clay et al. on the crack in my windshield. Seriously what engineer or accountant said, “Hey on a Heavy Duty work truck lets make the tailgate handle out of plastic. People will never break that.” Oh and insult to injury the component parts to fix $83. Steve D. just looked at me as I explained, “And that is how DTOM writes itself”)

Clay likes to brag that all his employees are racers. DTOM likes to brag that all its ‘employees’ (i.e. unpaid volunteers) are mechanics, well with the exception of Craig and I. In fact even the camera guy we convinced to show up to help ‘memorialize’ the event was a mechanic, but only on Volvos so we didn’t let Brian actually touch anything. Seriously what is harder to find, someone to race / drive your car or someone to work on it? Try this little test, go to a race track and yell out “HEY anyone want to race my car for me?” see how many offers you get. Then go back the next week and holler “HEY anyone want to come work on my car for me?” and compare the two results.

Everyone wants to be a race car driver, we got that part licked, very few people find it exciting doing real work for nothing. In spite of that, and due in part to my amazing capacity for bull sh_t, we managed to have the usual suspects in attendance for the big tear down – Ted, Brendan, Jason, Craig and Myself. However - we also had two late additions to the line up in Steve DeVinney and a guy named Mo. I never caught Mo’s last name but he was of significant assistance since he worked at a dealership and gave a lot of much needed guidance to removing the dash and some of the trickier bits. Mo if by some chance you happen to read this – Thanks! Steve D. also showed a tremendous capacity for tearing things apart, probably as an outlet for his ongoing arguments on the Spec E30 forum.

In case you ever find yourself needing to tear a 2006 330i BMW apart here is a pretty good list to help guide you:

- Get your head checked before you go to step 2.
- Remove windshield front and rear. In our case we have to reuse these so we paid a ‘professional’ instead of kicking them out with our feet, which would have been more fun.
- Remove doors, hood, and trunk for easy access
- Remove seats and interior
- Remove wiring
- Remove rear subframe and running gear
- Remove front subframe and running gear
BTW if you find yourself in the market for E90 parts let us know, we now have a substantial inventory of cr@p for sale. Email DTOM Racing at Gmail.com for more info.

There you go, nothing to it! Few other minor things you’ll want to plan for. Have a place to store this sh!t. We rented a storage spot, which we thought would be MORE than adequate. In fact it’s already full and we don’t have the engine, or rear subframe in it yet. During the removal process we had stuff strewn from one end of Jason’s shop to another – roughly 6000 sq feet of junk. The car itself was down to bare metal around 3:30pm; it took another 3 hours to sort through and move all the parts and determine what absolutely stayed, what could possibly be sold, and what we could throw out. Remember to ratchet strap the car to the lift, thankfully Brendan thought of that. Turns out when you remove everything but the engine from a car it gets a little nose heavy, you don’t want to have a car nose over 6 feet in the air.

Have a plan for what to do with a 500 lb. chunk of car shaped metal. I always acknowledged this was the weak point of my plan. Around 10am Jason said “What are we doing with this thing”. My reply of “I’m still thinking about it” didn’t inspire confidence. The debate was over leaving enough on the car to enable the wheels to roll or not. Leaving it as a roller would have required a lot of work later and we were trying to get this as close to ‘ready’ as possible, but would have been a lot safer. We opted for the build a dolly play. Basically this meant constructing a giant skateboard to sit the car on so we could roll it around. As Craig has learned from his numerous ill fated home improvement projects you’ll be required to make at least two trips to Home Depot. Our first one we scored the necessary lumber, then we needed some uber wheels for this monstrosity since rolling it around on a nice smooth concrete floor is easy, over a rough bumpy parking lot and up my trailer ramps requires something a little more all terrain so we went to Northern Tool. Only upon our return did we notice that we had neglected to purchase any means of affixing the casters / wheels to the frame. Craig borrowed Steve D’s midlife crisis mobile (aka 996 911 turbo) and went to get some lag screws. Since he is retarded he got some about an inch and half long instead of like 4 inches. More on that in a bit.

So we got to the point where the mess was cleaned up (sort of), the car was on its skateboard and strapped down securely, and my trailer was in the parking lot ready for loading. We rolled the chunk of metal out and started pushing towards the ramp. It gave a sickening lurch and stopped. The tiny screws on one of the casters had ripped out of the wood, this left our paperweight teetering precariously on a 3 wheeled homemade shopping cart. Craig affected immediate “repairs” and the ‘car’ was gently rolled onto the trailer. Then we had to affix the dolly /skateboard to the trailer. This (for me at least) generated a fair amount of anxiety since I had just seen one of the wheels collapse and had witnessed what was holding this entire rickety operation together. In this case I feel that a picture literally is worth a thousand words.



We were ready to set off. Now I’m not normally known as a safety sally like Steve D., who practices his exit drills from his various race cars on the weekend, but I think everyone noticed my distinct lack of enthusiasm about driving this Beverly Hillbilly setup down one of the busiest highways in America - in a truck without license plates, or registration (I had removed them to put on the car to drive over to Jason’s shop on Friday and forgot to put everything back when I left in the morning Sat.), on a trailer with no working lights. Oh, and on the car we had removed the VIN Plates, and I had no bill of sale or title. I told Craig “We’re doing this Smokey and the Bandit style. You stay glued to my bumper and if a cop comes by wreck into him and I’ll gun it.” With that game plan sorted out we started off towards Craig’s race car storage facility (aka his garage).

We had gone about two blocks on another very busy two lane road (41 for locals of ATL) and my phone rings. Its Craig saying “The rear ratchet straps are loose you need to pull over so we can tighten them”. I looked around and the next available option was a left turn. So I jumped over to the turn lane and sat waiting for the light. It turned green and I slowly inched up the hill into the shopping center parking lot. I am checking my mirrors when I see Craig on the back of the trailer holding onto the car and waving at me. Uh Oh.

I wish that we had caught this on film; unfortunately I’ll try to do it justice. Imagine this rig in a left hand turn lane. Craig in his pickup truck behind me gets out of the driver side door and hops onto the back of the trailer and starts tightening the straps, the light turns green and I take off (much to his horror.) His truck is sitting in the left hand turn lane with the door wide open and I’m driving off with him on the back completely oblivious. Brendan thankfully was in the passenger seat and hopped over and got Craig’s truck moving in time to run the red light. All this happens while about 5 people at the bus stop point, laugh, and shake their heads.

We finished the day by placing another non-running race car into Craig’s garage. This displaced his cherry 911 from its prized garage spot, this ’89 911 is so nice that you can’t even tell it was once wrecked at Road Atlanta on a warm up lap at a DE. I gleefully offered my now empty garage spot to which Craig reluctantly agreed. So to summarize - Craig has 2 partially running Spec E30’s, my trailer, and a car shaped paperweight in his garage, while I have a sweet 911 that I’ll drive to work in lieu of my pickup truck. I’m smarter than I look.

Programming Notes: We’re going to milk this one day of work for all its worth. We ran several time lapse cameras, and had a friend shooting a bunch of pics with a ‘good’ camera as well. Eventually Craig will get around to building the new site to host all this frivolity so stay tuned. In terms of next steps for the car, it goes to a media blaster to get paint, etc removed and then to BimmerWorld HQ for the cage.

Labels: Coni build, Pics