Hey! I’m Jim, my mate and I have recently bought ourselves an old z3 as a wee project car after being inspired by late brake shows Johnny smith and his series on the lands end trial. We’d been eyeing up an mx5 or similar (basic requirements we wanted were convertible, manual, rwd & under a grand). Anyway after only seeing rust bucket after dust pile of mx5s for that money a friend of mine stuck up for sale his z3. so naturally I dropped him message and after some back and forth on the price we agreed to drive an hour or so up to his and likely come home with it, bare in mind at this point hadn't even seen the car let alone drive it! 96k miles, pretty mint all round, brand new set of ditch finders, brand new battery, no MOT and a fresh service including plugs.
anyway the next day I rocked up with my mate and after a poke about under bonnet we very quickly we agreed she’d be coming home with us! The car is pretty mint for a nearly 30 year old machine, everything works (almost)! She started on the button and purrs wonderfully.
we arranged an mot for the same day in order to drive back home which she promptly failed on emissions and a seized caliper so we sorted those bits over the next few days and the next weekend barely scraped through mot (emissions again! despite a brand new first cat, supposedly oem but knowing what we do now I highly doubt it!
since then we’ve been enjoying it and have done a few bits like polishing headlights and she’s booked in for a new clutch next week as it’s riding pretty high.
for the money we paid I’m super happy and she should be a great basis for a trials car once we get some light mods done such as rear rack for spare wheels, changing alloys to steels, raising suspension and a fabricated skid pan underneath.
my main question right now is how best to go about raising the suspension height. It’s on stock suspension currently but it’s hard to find info out there on raising this among the million and one pages on lowering. Any advice in this area specifically would be greatly appreciated as we’re far from knowledgable about this although confident enough on the spanners to swap out when we know what we need to be buying. I will look to turn this into a bit of a project thread as we progress but still learning what we don’t know at the moment!
anyway the next day I rocked up with my mate and after a poke about under bonnet we very quickly we agreed she’d be coming home with us! The car is pretty mint for a nearly 30 year old machine, everything works (almost)! She started on the button and purrs wonderfully.
we arranged an mot for the same day in order to drive back home which she promptly failed on emissions and a seized caliper so we sorted those bits over the next few days and the next weekend barely scraped through mot (emissions again! despite a brand new first cat, supposedly oem but knowing what we do now I highly doubt it!
since then we’ve been enjoying it and have done a few bits like polishing headlights and she’s booked in for a new clutch next week as it’s riding pretty high.
for the money we paid I’m super happy and she should be a great basis for a trials car once we get some light mods done such as rear rack for spare wheels, changing alloys to steels, raising suspension and a fabricated skid pan underneath.
my main question right now is how best to go about raising the suspension height. It’s on stock suspension currently but it’s hard to find info out there on raising this among the million and one pages on lowering. Any advice in this area specifically would be greatly appreciated as we’re far from knowledgable about this although confident enough on the spanners to swap out when we know what we need to be buying. I will look to turn this into a bit of a project thread as we progress but still learning what we don’t know at the moment!
