Tired of random pics of cups? The #ultimate #e30 #cupholder is almost here!
Prefer YT?
Prefer Insta??
Coming Very Soon!
The best thing to happen to the E30 since _____?
Tired of random pics of cups? The #ultimate #e30 #cupholder is almost here!
Prefer YT?
Prefer Insta??
Coming Very Soon!
The best thing to happen to the E30 since _____?
(Do This Instead)!
Anyone who knows me knows I’m not a stance guy – when it comes to my cars. But my mowers? That’s a different story! We don’t have any parts related to slamming your E30, but we do have a bunch of parts that can make your replica of God’s Chariot look great in other ways!
Here’s part two since I forgot YouTube Shorts have to be under a minute! We’ve got a couple new products coming soon so get on the email list, Follow, Like and Subscribe to find out as soon as they drop!
Hey! Just did a cow catcher bracket for tuck short! I see you guys goin’ in to the cart & not checking out with these! That’s OK – I get it – it’s hard to justify spending that 💸🤑😎 these days.
No worries, I don’t have anything taking up shelf space. As soon as your order comes in I’ll hit that print button though! If you need any help with your decision making, go check out Bracket for tuck short 0101. Part two is coming soon because we have some new products coming soon… and because I don’t know how YouTube works! So get on the email list so you’re one of the first to find out when they do!
Otherwise we obviously appreciate a like, a follow and a subscribe on all the socials to help us keep cranking out the new products. Every little bit gets us closer to getting you any part you can imagine!
After doing the “diving board tuck” mod myself a few years ago, I just accepted the increased gap between the diving board and cow catcher as an inevitable tradeoff. It wasn’t until someone pointed it out to me At The Vintage, that I realized it was a bit more of an eyesore than I had let myself believe. Then, in the middle of an oil pan job, it hit me. Why not redesign the brackets to eliminate the extra space? So that’s what I did!
The cow catcher brackets for “diving board tuck” 3part kit is for a popular DIY cosmetic modification. This infamous E30 modification releases the gas from the impact shocks that support the bumper. Once all the gas (or goo) is expelled from the cylinders, they are compressed and reinstalled. The result is that it “tucks” the front (and rear) US Spec bumpers of the Series1 E30s for a more modern profile. Unfortunately, it comes with the minor, but noticeable side effect of increasing the gap between the aluminum bumper and the cow catcher mounted below. Why does this happen? It occurs because both the cow catcher and the aluminum bumper have significant draft angles for easy mold release. When the metal beams are pushed towards the cabin, the narrower side is closer to the narrower side of the cow catcher. Thus increasing the space between them.
The good news is that E30 Update has the solution!
We now offer the E30 cow catcher brackets for diving board tuck 3part kit which includes the center, left, and right brackets. Designed specifically for those of us who have tucked our diving boards, now you will have the tightest diving board bumper tuck at the next cars & coffee! That is, until you tell all your friends about this kit, and they install them too. But then we’ll be really happy. And you and all your friends will be happy! And everything will be great!
This kit does not include the corner, and side-support brackets. If you already have your corner and side support brackets, they are not necessary for installing these tuck-mod brackets. They don’t have re-engineered geometry.
If there is demand, we will add the full seven-part kit. Let us know!
Growing fan base in Turkey?! 🤨🤗🤔
Over the past month or more I’ve been seeing an increase in views from #turkey 🇹🇷. Same person? Big #e30 fanbase there? #spambots? Let me know what you think! #e30life #turkishdelight
We’ve made some updates to the classic E30 Diving Board Bumper Strip! We’ve made it easier to mount, look better, and improve convenience. Go check it out!
I’ve always admired conceptual designers like Tobias Wong, Matty Benedetto, and Katerina Kamprani for their ability to come up with Industrial Designs which aren’t necessarily useful. In fact, sometimes these ideas are absurdly, and intentionally not useful.
Anyone who has known me for any amount of time knows I’m a bit of a jokester, but for some reason I’ve never been great at coming up with ideas for silly product designs. I suppose I’m just an all-function guy. But last summer it finally happened. I had that silly idea!
Just in case you’re not familiar – “blinker fluid” is an old car gag of mysterious origins, whereby a car enthusiast prankster would attempt to convince an automotive novice that s/he needs blinker fluid. The prompt is generally when one of the turn signal bulbs in the car of the soon-to-be-pranked burned out, or when it’s time for routine maintenance such as an oil change or filling up the washer fluid.
The joke eventually settled into the fabric of the internet from car forums to social media replies. I always thought the gag was missing a crucial element; Where does the blinker fluid actually go? YouTuber ChrisFix went viral a few years ago with a very clever 4/1 video where he demoed adding the blinker fluid directly in to the blinker bulb housing. While it was a well edited piece, I felt it a bit of a conceptual stretch.
So when I had the idea last summer I knew I had to do it. Yes, the blinker fluid gag is a little overplayed at this point. However, as a hardware guy, I figured I could bring a new twist to an old car joke. First, different manufacturers have different ways of engineering things. So it’s easily conceivable that BMW would have a fluid tank where Ford might add it directly to the unit. Second, With the E30 having that extra space in the engine bay it was a great spot for the tank, and lends an air of “credibility” to the story. And finally, since I don’t naturally come up with ideas like these very often, it was literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something fun & silly – so I couldn’t resist!
Hope you enjoyed this bit! If you have an old BMW – or any car really – that you can’t get parts for anymore, please reach out and maybe we can get you that impossible-to-find part. And heck, if you like what we’re doing and you want to support our startup, but we don’t have a part you need yet, we’ll print you a blinker fluid reservoir!
You might be shocked to find this out, but I have a serious thing for cars. To the point that might be an understatement. And slight character flaw. In middle school and high school I dreamt of becoming a great car designer, constantly doodling cars instead of doing my math homework. Although being the pre-internet days, I didn’t really know who any of the designers were other than the father/son Porsche legacy. The generic car books generally didn’t attribute the designers other than the passing mention of Bertone or Pininfarina.
My first car was handed down to me by my pop when I was 17. A 1974 Karmann Ghia droptop in Saturn Yellow. In the mid 90s it was a bit of a joke to my friends, but I loved it. I had grown up in the back seats of aircooled VWs mostly, so it was a familiar mode of transportation to me. And I thought it was cool, which is said, is all that matters. But I can’t say I knew who the designer was other than it was someone employed by the Italian design studio Ghia.
But that’s the way it is in most industries in fact. Heck, I’ve designed several things that are in tens of thousands of peoples homes and nobody knows who I am!
But an elite few designers rise to the very top of the industrial design field.
When one thinks of BMW, sure, many might quickly gravitate to some of the latest offerings, namely, their technically impressive ///M cars and SUVs. Others might celebrate or lament the E60-86 creations from the peak of the Bengal era. However, it’s impossible to understate the significance and timelessness of the automobiles produced in the 1980-1999 era of BMWs under the design direction of Klaus Johannes Luthe.
Born on December eighth, nineteen thirty two, Mr Luthe would have been 91 today. I won’t rehash his career (or tragic personal life) here, as many bloggers have already done fine jobs of that. But suffice to say, he worked his way to the top starting with busses, contributed to the design of the original Fiat 500, and surely at least commented on the development of the E36/7-8 and E46. Pretty cool.
This is after all, e30update.com, so I want to focus on the masterwork itself. What makes it so great?
First I want to get a pet peeve off my chest. I absolutely loath automotive styling cliches. Trends are one thing, and BMW – until recently – hired designers who were masters of translating design and styling trends into sophisticated transportation packages that reflected a focused design and engineering philosophy.
Cliches on the other hand, are the recycled, and rehashed, stolen, overused, and stolen again styling details that are obvious ripoffs of styling details from competing manufacturers. And it’s almost always totally cringe. Think tail fins in the 50s. Although some of those were pretty rad (I’m looking at you 1959 Chevy Impala)!
I get it. you’ve gotta stay relevant. You’ve gotta keep up with the times. Sure. And everyone’s guilty of it. Heck, my Ghia has tail fins. And not even very good ones by the time ’74 hit. Speaking of which, that reminds me of another cliche pet peeve: ginormous tail lights. Happened to the Ghia. Even happened to the E30.
Sometimes it’s regulations I’m sure, but did the original Lincoln Navigator really need tail lights that big? I mean, they literally looked like translucent toboggans. Totally horrendous. But I digress; I’ll do a separate styling cliche blog post some day because those only scratch the surface of my list.
Luthe was certainly fortunate to have inherited an in-place styling platform with a refined set of cleverly thought-through and developed cues. I’m obviously referring to things like the kidney grilles, Hofmeister kink (which yes, was a styling cliche…), sharp, full-length body crease, quad-round headlights, and long (but not too long) hoods. However, one need only take a look at todays raft of BMW offerings to see how this seemingly straightforward set of guidelines can be grotesquely implemented.
But grotesque wasn’t Luthe’s thing. He was of course an old-school German designer, no doubt influenced by the Bauhaus school of design, Dieter Rams and the Northern European “less is more” philosophy of design. In fact Luthe coined his own phrase for his distain of over-baked styling cliches calling them “optical environmental pollution”. Which I’m sure sounds awesome when spoken in German.
Although styling cues such as horizontal creases, four round headlights, forward-slicing window lines, or even two vertically mirrored grill openings weren’t exclusive to BMW, it was the combination of those stylistic elements and the consistency across models that made BMW styling so distinctive, then and now.
The other, and arguably more important factor of automobile design is proportion. Don’t believe me? Look at the difference between the VW Rabbit and Ford Gremlin. Sure, that’s an extreme comparison, but it can also be seen in the transition from the E21 to the E30. Not to say that the E21 is an irreparably hideous catastrophe of car design, but there is a special proportional balance in the E30 that simply doesn’t exist in the models that came before it. Or perhaps after.
And that takes incredible skill and talent.
To this day the E30 is still one of the first models that comes to mind when the letters BMW are mentioned. Yes, the Neue Klasse models like the 2002s brought BMW roaring into the second half of the 20th Century. But even those are pretty obscure today. The incredibly popular E39 5series is perhaps what most might visualize, but to be fair could almost be mistaken for an E36, if not an E30.
The BMW 3 series manufactured from 1982-1992 lives in this magical realm between the minimalist restraint of the mid 20th century, while simultaneously revving up for the 21st. In my opinion it really wasn’t until the 2010s that the E30 even looked that dated. Which interestingly is right about the time the values started to climb. And not all cars values start automatically moving skyward after 40 years. That reward is saved for the ones that are well engineered, well built, and of course, well designed.
So here’s to Klaus on his birthday; the incredible talent behind “God’s Chariot”. Hopefully some day not too soon, I’ll get to hear him say “optical environmental pollution”.
Hi, Michael here! Time for a long personal story about fuse pullers that nobody asked for! That probably sounds ridiculous for something as inconsequential as a fuse puller, but it’s a big part of the E30 Update journey!
I grew up in the back seats of air-cooled Volkswagens and eventually my first car, which I still have, was an air-cooled VW. If you know anything about the old “air-cooleds” (and other older European cars), you know about the old-school, “pill” style fuses. If you don’t (and I’m learning that some people do not), they’re little pill-shaped pieces of plastic (the OGs were ceramic) with thin, hourglass-shaped metal strips which extend the length of the pill structure and are then formed over the ends. They snap in to the fuse panel like an AAAA battery. They are very easy to replace because you can just pinch them with your fingers and pull them out. Not only that, it’s easy to tell if they’re blown or not because you can easily see if the metal strip is totally charred or not.
Why they decided to change that design, I’ll never… well ok, FINE I understand why, but the downsides weren’t THAT big of a deal……. In My Opinion!
Whatever… what was I gonna say? Oh right, eventually I got a car with modern fuses; a 1990 BMW 325 is! Holy Crap! I was only three years out of college and driving a dream machine! How did I pull that off?!?! I’ll save that story for another time. Before getting that car I was still super skeptical of BMWs in general, but my mom’s 2001 E46 wagonstarted to change my perception a little. Besides, I loved the look of the older models so I figured I’d take a chance.
Man was I sold.
I was a little bit intimidated though – now remember, I came from air-cooleds, so I didn’t even know the ins-n-outs of a liquid cooling system (more on that another time). One thing that drove me absolutely NUTS though, was that extracting fuses was a total nightmare! WHY I thought to myself… the HELL… would ANYONE… design something SO… HARD…. to get OUT?!?!?!?!
Then one day when I was at my grandfather’s, who was a big inspiration for me to work on my cars myself, went to check a fuse, and popped out a little fuse puller out of it’s little nook in the fuse box. DUUUUH! Fuse puller! Of Course! First thing I did when I got back to my car was check for the fuse puller, which naturally, was missing from my fuse box. Damn car had it’s original flashlight, but not the fuse puller. Because of course it didn’t.
So I forgot about it and kept pulling fuses by hand finger. Ouch. So ouchie was it, that, I have to admit, I got a bit lazy about checking fuses…
One day I noticed I had a headlight out. Well, I thought, who knows when those things were replaced last. So I got all four headlights because they were on sale at BavAuto – Remember those guys? After procrastinating replacing it (got a written warning for having my brights on) I finally popped the new headlight in… Still no light. After scratching my head for a few seconds, I did the next cliché thing that one does after scratching one’s head: facepalm.
THE FUSE! NO! NOT THE FUSE!!!
Yes. It was the fuse.
I sheepishly went to the auto parts store after consulting the user manual (another original item the ’90 had other than the fuse puller) and got the appropriate fuse. After painfully wrenching it out with my fingers and popping the new one in, the headlight un-miraculously worked again.
I blame it all on not having a fuse puller and I’m sticking to my story!
After “Isis” was tragically totaled, I drove several other cars. E36’s, E46’s, I drove an SMG for the first time which was pretty rad, but the car was a junker and they wanted WAAAY too much for it. After several months, I was finally able to find another E30 to look at during a family reunion in Memphis. After only a couple minutes in to the test drive I knew I was back in my automotive home. Even though it was an es, rather than an is, It nevertheless sank in: there really is something special about the E30. They don’t call it God’s Chariot for nothing.
After taking delivery (yes, the guy drove it across the state for me(!!)) of Isis’s replacement, I naturally started doing a deeper dive. “Oh! Hey! It has a fuse puller!” I noticed. Of course, after 4+ years I still haven’t needed it… not that I’m hoping to.
Another thing my ’86 has is heated seats. I haven’t done a bunch of research on this, but I think there was some kind of factory, or possibly dealer option for heated seats. However, I’m 93% certain the upgrade on this car was probably done long after it rolled off the dealer’s lot; probably at the same time the front seats were reupholstered (in vinyl 😞).
The drivers seat heating element was operational when I purchased the black, 1986 coupe, but the passenger’s side was not. This time I remembered to check the fuses. After poking around the fuse box a couple minutes I realized what that mysterious box grafted to the side of the fuse box was… a mini fuse box just for the heated seats. Lo and behold… Pill fuses!? One of them was obviously charred to oblivion. “Well that may explain why the passenger’s seat heat is inoperable” I thought to myself. A quick trip to the auto parts store will fix that problem… so I assumed.
Now, I know you’re thinking “why is he veering off topic talking about heated seats”? Don’t worry, it’s about to make sense!
As I scoured the fuse section I was amazed at all the fancy, light-up fuses, the tiny mini fuses… almost an entire aisle’s worth… but no pill fuses?!?! I wandered back up front to find an associate. “Do you have any of these?” I asked incredulously. “What’s that?” the employee who couldn’t have been much over twenty asked. After a few seconds of awkward silence I stuttered “wuh.. ahf.. a.. fuse?”…
I’m not sure anything has yet made me feel quite as old as his reply:
“Huh……. I ain’t never seen one o’ them before”.
Then again, I’d never seen a fuse puller until a couple years prior, so I’m not sure which is worse 😅.
Either way, if your fuse box is missing this finger-saving little accessory, here’s a cool replica. Only from E30 Update.
NO AI WAS USED IN THE CREATION OF THIS CONTENT