E30 MHW home made :P

[AbsorbantNut]

So happy I bumped this. Lets go Justin B!

[Justin B]

Yea, thanks. Its a good full weekend project basically. On my end, more pictures will come in a day or two. Taking a break to gather supplies like that paint. Will report back either late tonight or tomorrow...

[Justin B]

I have a new can of the nite shades at home, but im on a mission to napa to check out their paint selection. I need something reflective, and black (two separate paints, ive given up on the black ch rome idea..i see how its done). I also spent about 20 minutes on the band saw cut ti ng out a good inner lens. Theyre complete. Ill probably use some liquid nails to reseal them unless I find something I like better at napa. Ill report back...

[Justin B]

After a date wth a rag and some acetone, and some masking the tails are doing with a fresh coat of shiny sruff.
The two small sections, and next to the turn signal reflector will be painted black.

Uploading the picture. . . .slowly.

[Justin B]

Okay, here they are minus lens tinting. You can see everywhere that I painted black to help the smoked look. While taking these pictures I noticed I forgot to black out the silver sides above the middle lens since it was masked off...so that ought to be black too. I may not tint that section of the lens though by its appearance already compared to the pics above, it seems to stand out a little anyway.

[Justin B]

Alrighty, I'm done except for gluing the halves back together. At first I masked off that reflecting light and sprayed the reverse light section, and the other two a little lighter. Turned out like this... So I unmasked it and gave that reflecting lens a couple quick passes of the can along with another couple amongst the other two that had some tinting already, and came up with the 3 final pictures. Good learning experience, could probably do it better next time.

[dzidziusbmw]

Good job buddy, even paint the lamp shade and paint the black space above and below the reversing. Refine my recipe and it will be great.

[thornado327i]

I was really looking to re-create this in my "mod everything" days. Now it's back to stock (on the outside that is) for me.

Looks decent though. Especially given the price of used MHWs regardless of their conditions :)

[dzidziusbmw]

My reworked lamps

[dzidziusbmw]

[dzidziusbmw]

[Jozi]

Any pics of the light in the last few posts with them on a car or compared to stock lights? I started this in the summer, of last year :roll: , and got as far as splitting lenses from the backs, need to clean it all up and paint

[lbreevesii]

Since the original post is awol now, i'm missing a little something here.

At the end it looks like you've just separated the inner from the outer parts, then gluing them back together, but whats all the cutting and ish about a couple pages back? I'm missing the point of that part of the process.


I get the MHW look, but i'm not a big fan. I just had my tails done..all red then lightly tinted. You get a tiny bit of amber at the edge when its lit up due to how it was tape maksed, etc, but it looks fine. I may geta set of NOS hellas and do them straight red kinda like the banner car on e30tech though. I thinkit may fit my theme better.

[Justin B]

The reason all the cutting was done back a few pages ago by me was to illustrate how I separated the lenses from the backs, which unfortunately kinda requires two sets of lights. There are also different options to tint the different sections, I was in a rush building my e30 a few months ago but still tricked a couple people the first time they saw my tails. There were a few spots I should have painted, or done so better in mine but I'm quite happy with the end result. This is a pretty informative thread now for anybody brave enough to split some tails open.

[lbreevesii]

^ gotcha. I figured thats what was up, but I wasn't quite clear.

My tails are a bit dark, but they still look nice. I will want to go straight up red eventually, but I don't see the need for me to go this route.