Update by Per Schroeder to the
BMW 2002tii project car
Mar 27, 2012
It’s inevitable—when you tear apart a car and reassemble it from the ground up, you’re bound to run into issues. We have been driving our 2002 project over the past few weeks and we’ve encountered a few issues that were, thankfully, quite easy to fix.
The ignition system was acting a little funny despite having a rebuilt distributor from Advanced Distributors. It turns out that the “fake” Pertronix the car had was malfunctioning when warm. We replaced it with a real Pertronix points replacement system to solve our issues. We also added one of Pertronix’s rev limiters so we can keep the newly-built engine together.
The car was also running quite rich under low and part throttle conditions, but lean at fuller throttle settings. We found our problem in the throttle body. The eccentric cam that connects the actuation of the Kugelfischer pump to the throttle opening was quite worn in the areas that are run during cruising around—which makes sense, as that’s where you are most of the time—and this caused the throttle plate to not open as much as it should when you push the gas pedal down a little. We replaced the entire throttle body with a good used one from Rennie at Redline Performance BMW in Pompano, Florida.
Next up, we found that the car was running warm, both when stopped and while at speed. That was traced back to a loose water pump belt which was quickly fixed.
Now we’re ready to stack up some more miles—and hopefully our minor problems are behind us.
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