The 5 Year Restoration - E30 M3 Reborn

[CurrusDei]

More pics from last night





Vaporust bath for 24 hours
Before



After


24 hour simple green soak
Before


After



Messed up on the handles. Sanding to respray tonight.




Nearly there on trim. It's looking really good but revealing some of the imperfections in the metal (small dents, etc) hopefully I can tap them flat with a wood dowel or something this weekend. I'll need sunlight for that.




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[CurrusDei]

Ok I'm getting the hang of it now. Lessons learned: Evapo-Rust is really, really good for this. It takes off all the rust, most corrosion, and the old yellow zinc plating. Only thing it won't touch is grease or other sticky stuff.

So my new method is
1) 24 hour soak in Simple Green for degrease
2) 24 hour soak in Evapo-Rust (after tumbler if it's bad)
3) Bench polisher (not there yet)

Some pics

After 24 hours in ER (replacing the broken speed nut and corroded thin washers at the bottom)



After 24 hours in SG



Sanding + ER got all the gunk and rust off my rear subframe mounts, including the surface rust on the threads. Ready to prime and paint.



Door handles came out well. Need to beat out some dents in the external B pillar covers but they did well too.





Set up 2 tubs of SG and 2 of ER last night. Taking pics of each item going into each bucket and putting the plastic bags on top of the bucket to keep things straight. Can't put too many similar items in at once or it would get confusing.






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[CurrusDei]

More clean bolts...





...and an early Christmas present. I'm weird to shop for. The little guy in the top left is the same one that was asleep in the engine bay several pages back. Much bigger today!




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[TimeMachinE30]

I've soaked hose clamps, bolts and other bits in Ballistol. Cleans and protects. Even the cosmoline discoloration shed off after a soak of ~ 48hrs (garage is cold, and I didn't get to them any earlier).

[Shock(/\)ave]

This thread is turning into another xworks style "minor rust repair" epic rebuild thread, complete with the ridiculously unassuming title. ;D

Well done on the restoration so far, sir, and fantastic documentation of the effort. I'll be using a lot of your research and refined techniques when it comes time to finally restore some of the areas in the engine bay of my M3s (one was lightly damaged by a disgusting mouse nest, the other by shoddy repairs).

I'm looking forward to more updates, and seeing this car returned to the road. :D

[jhaurimn]

Nice on the new rad. Those things aren't cheap!

[CurrusDei]

2.5 Years In... M3 Build Thread...PAINT COMPLETE!

Car is almost done at Magnum. They had an ownership change so that transition slowed things down a bit. It's been good the car is out of the garage because painting and polishing makes a mess. Don't need any overspray or buffer wheel fly-away fuzz on the car. A few pics






Cleaned only



Polished



Comparisons





Some pieces cleaned up well, but are too pitted and are being replaced



Some pieces are turning into jewelry. I'm literally using jewlers rouge polish on some of these. Some would call that a problem. Not me!





The tool you see clamped onto some of the fasteners is called the Notchead. Some hot rod mechanics made it specifically for polishing fasteners and won some awards at SEMA for it...

https://youtu.be/v7udFPT-vi0

Lot more polishing then onto plating!


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[bradnic]

looks terrific. but a lot of that hardware is coated, so unless you re-coat the steel bits will rust.. guess you're going to re-plate using the zinc chromate kit?

[CurrusDei]

looks terrific. but a lot of that hardware is coated, so unless you re-coat the steel bits will rust.. guess you're going to re-plate using the zinc chromate kit?

Yep. Caswell Zinc electroplate with yellow chromate solution - will look like OEM when done. I have some zinc blackener as well for the black bits. All the box to the left of the buffer.

[CurrusDei]

Coming along












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[bradnic]

Great work
I am SO doing this.

[jhaurimn]

So after refreshing hardware for awhile, whats the best method or combo of methods you have found?

[CurrusDei]

2.5 Years In... M3 Build Thread...PAINT COMPLETE!

Funny you should ask. I just tried out Muriatic Acid...it's my new favorite thing. Basically I've been polishing the old zinc plating instead of the metal underneath. That's fine for the ones I've posted above, I'll just re color them, but going forward I'm doing acid.

If the part is degreased, you can just drop it in the acid, it hisses like an Alka-Seltzer, and rust, zinc plating (yellow and the silver base), and basically everything else, comes off in a few seconds. I've been waiting until it stops hissing, then dunking it in water/baking soda to neutralize the acid.

Then you can polish the underlying steel a bit if you want, then re-plate in new zinc, and re-yellow.

I tried the acid out on some parts I plan to replace and thus hadn't cleaned.







This bolt went in zinc plated with the yellow dingy and fading.




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[Alaska Ted]

I've used muriatic acid to clean the rust out of fuel tanks with great success. This build is incredible. Your attention to detail and your documentation is by far the best I've ever seen. Keep the posts and pics coming please!

[CurrusDei]

More goodies today. Copper stuff is for negative charge electroplating and the bmw part is the fuel door stop


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