Back Off The Road

Couple of weeks ago, when I was getting the car to the shop, a tire was pretty low on pressure. Filled it up there, drove the car home, and had a nice weekend home.

Woke up on Monday and was going to drive to uni. This time the tyre was truly flat. Two others were also starting to look pretty low. Off to the tire shop to learn how to diagnose stuff like this and how to use soap water. Turns out air was gushing out from between the lip and center parts of the threeparter rim, and also from underneath the bolts that hold the rim together. No choice but to take the wheels off, tires off the rims, and inspect.

Long story short and after some studying how BBS 3parters actually work, turns out the German restorers who worked on the rims had done a rubbish job of sealing the parts.

That is their silicone seal. In some ways it's correctly done but with a few buts:

• Really, you're supposed to seal the parts between each other... Not outside the meeting surface like that. Though I will admit, this method is used a lot, because of how easy it is to do, I guess.
• You're in no event supposed to use silicone, it doesn't grip enough.
• The whole process had been botched, the seal was very uneven and flaking off.

When I ripped it off, it provided almost no resistance, it was like peeling a banana. No wonder it held no air.

Also of note is the fact the bolts were part hex and part double hex. Apparently the restoration included changing some of the bolts but not doing all of them while they were at it. And no, I didn't think to check this when I received the rims and put rubber on them.

The bolts were really loose, nowhere near the 26Nm of torque which is somewhere in the ballpark of BBS rim bolts.

So, my solution was, in chronological order:

1. Take off the silicone seal.
2. Remove silicone remnants, oil, etc
3. Let dry overnight
4. Apply new seal in the same fashion using Sikaflex. It was ugly but I was sure not to leave any gaps where air could escape.
5. Let dry overnight
6. Loosen and retorque bolts to 26Nm in crisscross pattern
7. Let dry for a week

End result:

Did it work?

No.

Tried to put tires on the rims, they were still leaking like crazy. Better than with the silicone but no choice but to admit defeat and either get someone to disassemble the rims and do the seal properly, or if it looks too expensive (like hell I'm paying more than a 100 for it) just sell the rims. Either way I won't be using the BBSes now. Remains to be seen whether they become my summer wheels. I'm now looking for winter rims.

Anyway, after all that, the car had been sitting outside for a couple of weeks. While I was running around hammering my head against the wall with the BBSes, the car had the Aeros on it which of course were summers.

All the while, it was snowing like hell, and occasionally in the +'s, which made the snow heavy, and I was rarely home to clean the car up. I was really worried the hood, roof or trunk lid were gonna cave. Luckily they held.

Luckily, a friend was in possession of a set of 16" "Kanaldeckels" with some correct sized friction tires so I was able to borrow those to get the SEC into warm storage, and to and from the shop. So off I went to put them on.

Only... One of the Aeros is stuck. More specifically, one of the bolts just went round and round.

I was able to limp the car in warm storage on 3 Kanaldeckels and 1 Aero.

My knee-jerk reaction was that the bolt was rounded, but that wasn't actually the case... Drove the car to the shop for them to have a go at removing the offending the bolt. It came off real easy with the lug gun. Turned out the bolts for the Aeros were falling apart. The offending one had already lost most of its thread and the remains were in the opposite thread.

Some cold sweat and a thread cleanup tool later we had 4 Kanaldeckels on the car. Time to trash those bolts...


Such are the joys of owning multiparter wheels.

At this point, since the car was in the shop for a change, it was time to continue to project for a little bit (on borrowed time):
* Put in the correct air recirculation switch which I was able to source used.
* Diagnosed the one "dark" cylinder. Only this time it was somehow a different cylinder than the last time. Well, spark was good. Did a compression test. No good compression. AFAIK, and according to what the mechanics said, this can only be caused by a bad head / valves. So the car will be going in for another pretty thorough engine rebuild next Tuesday...