E36 318is question

I have been casually looking for a car to replace my 98 Chevy Prizm for a couple of months. I would like something a bit more interesting and a little bit less of an appliance. I was browsing Craigslist and stumbled across an ad for a 1995 BMW 318is.In the ad the owner says the car recently had some head work. Should I be worried that if he neglected the cooling system, he probably neglected other things? What do you guys think of this car? Do you have any sugestions for a different car in the same price range. Other than a Miata.

for 173,000 miles.. that interior is in amazing shape. The coupes and sedans did not have the most robust of interiors, the door panels tended to delaminate and fall off.

as for the head work. the 95 should have the M42 engine. I think by 95 they all had the profile gasket fixed?

I've only seen a small handful of 318tis, and they all had the front chassis rails rotten away where the front swaybar was supposed to attach. The creepy thing is the rest of the car would look great. Investigate a clunking in the front end, and turns out it's because one side of the swaybar is free to flap about and the other side isn't too far behind.

Not sure if salt state problem, or if stresses there make the body flex hard enough to crack the paint off and allow corrosion to take hold. The relative awesome conditions of the rest of the car makes me think the latter.

Have a pre-purchase inspection to have a shop that is experienced with BMWs look for busted rear shock mounts, leaking power steering items, rear trailing arm brackets, and the guibo and center support bearing for the driveshaft. My 328i that has less miles and is a few years newer is valued less than that by Kelly Blue Book, so I would only offer him $2000 for his 318i.

You should also look at a first gen CTS, a Miata, and an E46.

If you decide to persue . . . I would ask about the recent head work. The M42 doesn't like to overheated.

Profile gasket failure is usually around 50k miles, so it has probably been done. The m42 is generally a very reliable engine. Mine has almost 300k miles on it, 60k with a turbo, on the original bottom end.

Here is what he had to say about the head work. "A valve lap job, 2 new valves, new head gasket and head bolts, new hydraulic cam chain adjuster, and verification of all components in good shape. A piece of plastic was sucked into the intake and got wedged under an intake valve causing no compression in that cylinder. Thought is was a head gasket blow, so I removed the head and found the foreign object; played it safe and replaced both the valves in that cylinder and since the head was off, I did a valve lapping job on all valves. I damaged the hydraulic cam chain adjuster while taking it off so I had to replace it. All cylinders compress to about 210 psi and are consistent. Engine runs great and doesn't use oil."

That guy sounds knowledgable about his car and seems to take good care of it. I'd still ask about the cooling system and see if any of those parts have been replaced recently. These cars don't have as bad rep in terms of the cooling system, but things will still break after 175k miles. I'd probably shoot to buy that car for $2000 and save that $500 towards anything that will break in the next year.

Sounds like he is knowledgeable enough for me to not be too worried. Those tensioners occasionally come apart when removed, so he may not have even done anything wrong when he pulled it.

Get the 325 instead