DailyDrivenClassics
Member
Hello and welcome to the restoration thread for my father’s and my restoration project: a beautiful BMW E9 2800CS, which, if I recall correctly, is a 1970 model in Agave Green. The car was a one-owner vehicle all its life until the passing of the previous owner (may he rest in peace). Now it’s our turn to bring the car back to its former glory. I bought it in August 2024, but my other projects took up too much time and space, so I had to finish those first.
Before starting the full restoration of every component, I wanted to hear the engine come back to life after 41 years (the car hasn’t been registered since 1984, if I remember correctly). I removed the spark plugs and used engine oil and spray oil to rewet the cylinder walls, prior to which I inspected the cylinders with an endoscope. Unfortunately, I discovered flash rust in almost all of them. There also appeared to be slight scoring on some cylinders, but I’m not completely sure since the camera quality was quite poor
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After that, I removed the valve cover to oil the chain and valvetrain. There was very light surface corrosion on the cam, but nothing serious. I bypassed the fuel tank by disconnecting the hose from the mechanical fuel pump and running an electric pump from a jerry can to supply fuel. Surprisingly, the ignition coil still worked after all these years, and the spark plug cables worked just fine despite being brittle. Nice!
Since the cooling system wasn’t attached, I only ran the engine in short bursts of 1–2 minutes. After a few starts, the engine stopped smoking and settled into a really smooth idle. BMW straight-sixes are truly something special.
Here is a video of the first start. the subsequent starts were a lot smoother. Also, there is no exhaust attached as you can hear If you want to see the video of the car coming back to life or more in depth than this forum post, heres a link to the youtube playlist where everything will be documented as well:
