Quote:
Originally Posted by Heel n Toe
Very cool... what's your story on how this E28 found its way to you?
(Happy E39 owner here)
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I’ll give you the short-ish version.
Started looking for an E28 at least 6 years ago. The cars were dirt cheap then, I found decent-ish examples for $4-5K. I went to some 5’er meets, got to know a restoration wizard who took me for a ride in his E28 with coilovers, it cornered flatter than my 911 and burned rubber for 100 feet.
A little old lady who worked in my building had a perfect one. Blue 535is, one owner, driven by a UBS financial advisor since her younger years (when she was a pistol, I reckon), now did the 1 mile daily commute from her expensive condo’s garage to her downtown office building’s garage. She promised to sell it to me when she retired, and as she was then in her late 70s I figured all I needed was to be patient and keep in touch with her.
Fast forward a few years to early 2021, I do my annual check-in with Patty, and learn that she had had an accident and totalled her car. My car. After freaking out, I re-started my search. Now really clean E28s were $15-20K cars, I’d cost myself a pretty penny by sitting on my hands. Found a car, 1986 535i, one owner since new, who’d taken it to Dubai during his expat decades (it still has the Emirates windows decals) and back to the US, then delivered it to a restoration shop in 2019, gotten it back in late 2020, promptly put it up for sale, and eventually sold it to me for less than he’d spent on the bare metal respray etc.
Sounds weird. So as we’re getting to know each other, all long distance, I dig and research, hunt down info on him, and figure out what happened. He had restored his baby as a present for his youngest boy, who was in his 40s or 50s by then. In December 2020 his son died of cancer. So he was saying goodbye to his son and his car.
I was hooked. A car with that much love in it, not common. I got a PPI, had a call with the shop about what they found, and a long call with the restorer about what was done. Reports all came back A-OK. Hook set. Bought it sight unseen, it’s taken months to find a transporter and get it from VA to here. I’ve had it for all of 18 hours, preliminary verdict is not 100% perfect but close enough. Have a few things to iron out but the E28 guys online tell me they are trivial ones.
More pics later.
Most important thing is I took my wife for a ride last night and even in the dark, with the interior lights and locks flakey, she really likes it. I gave her my speech about how I buy cars at the bottom of their depreciation curve that go up in value blah blah. All she cares about is the car’s story, that it is more comfortable than the Porsche or Vanagon, and that we can take it on roadtrips (I hope). That’s good, because I bought it without telling her (ahem, vash).