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Now I’ll need to spend a ton of money to make it right.

Earlier this year I bought a 1991 BMW 318i sedan to use as my track and autocross beater for the summer. Unusually for one of my project cars, it’s actually really nice, especially after addressing the few things it needed to be road legal. In anticipation of the hard driving I plan to do, I wanted to upgrade the brakes. Things didn't go as planned.

E30s are pretty light cars, especially in four-cylinder trim. So I figured upgrading the pads, rotors, and fluid would be more than sufficient. FCP Euro sent over kits to refresh both the front and rear brakes, which include new pads and rotors. I was going to start with the rears, but after I took the wheels off, I realized both the pads and the discs had recently been replaced. There were no lips on the rotors, and the pads had almost all of their life left. So instead of wasting virtually new equipment, I simply left the old stuff in and bled the fluid using a pump-operated power bleeder, then refilled with some Motul RBF660. To my surprise, the fluid came out clear. So far, so good. But things quickly took a turn for the worse.

I moved to the front of the car hoping the pads and rotors would be in similar shape, but I wasn’t as lucky. The rotors, aftermarket units with drilled holes, were long past their useful life, with the pads getting close to their backing plates. So I disassembled everything, replaced the discs, and popped in new pads. The most annoying part about replacing pads is having to compress the caliper pistons, but thanks to my pad spreader, it took just seconds to push the pistons back into their respective cylinders.

Where things went really wrong was when I tried to bleed the brakes up front. Up until this point, I had soaked every bolt, including the bleeder screws, with Liquid Wrench penetrating oil to help break down any rust that may have formed in the threads. It helped for removing the calipers and the caliper brackets, as those bolts all broke loose without complaint. But when I went to loosen the bleeder screw on the passenger side it just... snapped clean off. Whoops.

I’ve bled brakes hundreds of times, each with calipers displaying varying levels of rust. These calipers are rusty, but they aren’t the worst I’ve dealt with, so I figured there was no way the bleeder screws would fail like that. Yet, they did. Both on the passenger and the driver side, despite my being careful about where and how I applied force. While the calipers still hold brake pressure and work just fine, there’s no way to bleed them without drilling out what remains of the bleeder screws and making new threads. I could do that, but putting all that work into 30-year-old calipers with plenty of rust and worn-out seals probably isn’t worth my time. I’m better off replacing them with new ones. So that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

For now though, I’ll have to drive on the brake fluid that’s in the car. On the plus side, the new pads and rotors I installed up front feel amazing, with plenty of grab and stopping power. It’s only a matter of time until I get this car on track.