98. Installing sport seats in my E36

I have been searching for sport seats for a very long time. Vader seats are a bit too expensive for me, and electrical seats as well. But, I did manage to find a cheap set for my E36. I paid 100$ for the whole interior.

Take  a quick peek at the next photo - you'll find out why I wanted new seats:

This is how the 'new' seats looked when I brought them home.

Believe it or not, you can pack the complete interior into your E36. And you'll still have room for one passenger. :) Well, the first thing was to take out the old interior. The front seats are held in place with 2 16 mm bolts and two 16 mm nuts each. You have to slide the seat forward, and then backward to take them out. Before that, take off the plastic covering caps with a small flat screwdriver. Seat belts are fixed to the seat with one torx screw on each side. And, the passenger seat has a passenger occupancy sensor which has to be disconnected. Note: Disconnect your car's battery before disconnecting this sensor. Wait about 15 minutes for the system to discharge.

After that, you can pull out your rear bench. And, I really mean 'pull out'. Pull the bottom part upwards, and then pull the backrest towards the front of the car. Open both rear doors to pull it out.

How to remove rear headrests on a BMW E36?

This was the most tricky part of the job. I tried to pull them out, pry them out with a crowbar, and I tried to knock them out from underneath. And they didn't pop out. Well, the trick is to raise your rear shelf for just a couple of centimeters. Under it, you'll find safety pins that hold the headrests in place. Take them out, and that's it. Take a look at the picture to see what I mean:

And that's pretty much that. Install everything back in the reverse order, and you're done. You should finish the job in under an hour. I also vacuumed my car, since it was like it has seen a world war or something. :)

Here are some more pictures...

79. Go-Drift.com Grobnik SNOW track-day

Somehow, I decided to take my E36 daily driver (1.6L engine) to a track day.
The weather forecast was promising snow, and that meant that I had some chance to have fun on a real race track. Well, I know I don't have a LSD on my daily driver, but that didn't bother me much. I wanted fun, not record-breaking performance. :)

The night before the track day, I decided to mount a bucket seat into my E36. That's because I didn't want to find myself flying around the car, while drifting. (If I can call it that)... :)

So, here's a picture of the seat mounted...

The mounting process was really straight-forward. The mounts were already made to fit an E36, so I practically had to take 4 bolts out, replace the seat and put the bolts back on. Well, so I thought. Somehow, when I wanted to test-drive my 'upgraded' E36, I found out that I forgot about the seat-belt buckle. Original seats have them mounted at the side, but bucket seats don't. After a minute, I decided to take the rear-seat, central buckle and mount it to the racing seat. Well, it worked. But that meant I had to take the seat out again, mount the buckle, and put everything back in the car.

Moving on. The next morning, I woke up and saw that the snow was really there. :) But, I didn't expect THAT much snow. Well, here are a couple of pictures of my trip to the race track:

 

Well, I don't really have to tell you that I had so much fun driving on a snowy road... And, the whole 60 miles of it were completely empty! It was sideways all the way! :)

...

When I came to the track, I saw this:

The access road to the pits wasn't plowed. :( And, I was the first to arrive... Well, there wasn't really much to do, except to wait...

And then, other enthusiasts started to show up:

We decided to make our own road to the pits... A couple of 4x4's went ahead, and made way for our little RWD machines... But, it didn't go smooth as we planned. Our little (mostly BMW) convoy stopped every 200(or so) meters, to dig someone out... :) Team work all the way! :)

  

Well, finally, here are some shots of the track, and cars that were there. Unfortunately,  there was too much snow to have fun in our BMWs... But, it was a really great day, nonetheless.

This beauty had to sit this one out:

Wow! I realized it's already 2011! Huh... how time flies... it feels like I started this blog yesterday... :)