1989 e30 Touring... this is Betty

[shaferbm]

Ah lets see more of that hardtop vert!!

[Todd Black 88]

I loled hard here at Starbucks and the barista just stared at me.

[MC Hammered]

It's pretty warm these last few days, so while driving around in the sun I am sweating to death since I can't roll down the driver side window.

I couldn't figure out why the power window just stopped working, so I attributed it to something shorting out when I had water entering the cabin.

While I am baking away in the car today I look down and see a couple of plugs that look just like the window switch plugs... then I remembered Cale mentioning in an email about making a mistake using the wrong window switch plugs.

So I pull over, swap over one of the switches into the plugs, try it and the window rolls down.

[leegf]

amazing work! what an education.

[MC Hammered]

Why did you remove all the sound deadening?

I just like to know the condition of the older cars I own so I strip them down, see what needs to be fixed/repaired and then put them back together. This way I have peace of mind knowing that I am working with a clean, solid base.

Removing the sound deadening needed to happen to find any areas of hidden rust which need to be cleaned and treated.

Once everything has been cleaned up, I plan to apply por15 on the floor sections, apply Dynamat and Dynaliner as replacement sound deadening before reinstalling all of the carpeting and new interior.

[Vivek]

Why did you remove all the sound deadening?

[MC Hammered]

I was getting burned out with work so I decided to take a Friday off an do something fun... like remove the factory sound deadening!!

I read a tip about using dry ice to do the task, instead of using a heat gun, so I went to Praxair and picked up 20lbs of ice



I put a few pounds of ice in a couple of old pillowcases, placed them over the old sound deadening and waited 10-15 minutes. As the cold ice works away shrinking the sound deadening you can actually hear the adhesive pop as it detaches and the sound deadening crack



After 15 minutes I moved the ice to a different spot and proceeded to remove the sound deadening, as you can see it just breaks off in pieces



Found some hidden surface rust



Working on the sides



Found a nice sport of rust that needs to be cleaned and treated before it eats through



So to go from this



to this took about 45 minutes.



The tip I will pass along now is the longer you let the ice work the easier it is to remove the sound deadening.

I thought I would speed things up and only let the ice work for 10 minutes instead of 15 minutes, and the extra 5 minutes is the difference between the sound deadening just breaking loose in big pieces vs. having to chip it off with a hammer and chisel, or in my case a flat blade screwdriver.

Started work on the rear seat section



You can see the frost on the section where the ice was put on top of



Yes… I even removed the deadening that is hiding under the wires on the side.



Working on the spare tire zone. You can see clearly here the sound deadening cracked from the cold.






To get all of the sound deadening off took 30 minutes



I took the 3 pillowcases and emptied off of the remaining dry ice into 1 pillowcase and proceeded to work on the sound deadening by the brake handle



The air was humid so you can see the frost as the ice gets things pretty cold




After 15 minutes the sound deadening just breaks into pieces





Moving the ice forward





Now I do not know if the long term exposure to the heat from the transmission tunnel changed the adhesive, but it was very hard to get off and required much longer exposure time to the dry ice.

The sound deadening in this location would chip off and the pieces felt very similar to obsidian




So about 6 hours later here is 20lbs of sound deadening

[MC Hammered]

Now that the interior is all out I decided to poke around to figure out why water is leaking into the passenger side footwell.

So I started picking away at the foam that was stuck to the sealant in the odd circular shape.



I then started to see an outline of a circle when a plug just flops over and you see the black backside of the Dynamat sheet.



We can see now that the plug was not sealed in place very well and it came off with very little force. Now I do agree that the smear of sealant is not from the factory and was applied when the car was rebuild by the PO.



The PO decided to use Dynamat Xtreme as a heat shield and I do not think it took well to the heat radiating from the exhaust headers. I took a close look at the Dynamat and saw that some light was coming through a gap in one of the sheets.

I poked a screwdriver in the gap and sure enough it come out the other side into the cabin




So the Dynamat was peeling off the firewall and created a small pocket which would catch rainwater, which in turn seeped past the plug and into the footwell.

After I remove all of the OEM sound deadening I plan to seal up all of the OEM floor openings so I never have to deal with them again.

[MC Hammered]

Took advantage of a rare sunny day to complete the removal of the rear interior trim pieces






I decided to yank out the rear wash fluid bottle as I do not foresee using it much and it is a problem waiting to happen if it eventually leaks which means rust

First i had to suck out all the fluid since it was quite full




And removed!



It is always nice to find hidden areas of surface rust. These areas be cleaned up and por15 applied to stop it from spreading.

[Roysneon]

Thanks, Hammered! I like the look of the rear headrests but rarely have rear seat passengers and want to keep the functionality of folding the seats forward as easily as possible.

[MC Hammered]

The plan is to remove the existing drain panels and see if they are cracked as they are leaking at the same spot on both sides.

If they are cracked then replace them, if they are not cracked then I have to figure out why they are leaking.

[cbouchez]

Let me know how you fix the sunroof drain!

[MC Hammered]

Wow, great work being done here. I do have a couple questions, though.

What exactly is the trick to removing the rear seats? I have everything else out, but I simply do not see how they come out.

The bases are held in by a pair of spring pins, fold the base forward and on the back there are 2 finger opening, squeeze together and the pins retract.

To remove the seatbacks, just above the flip forward lever there is a spring loaded pin that you need to push in and then lift the seat back out. You can see the white bushing on the left hand side. I broke the right hand side one when removing that seat back.

How do the rear headrests affect folding the rear seats forward? Looks to me that unless the fronts were all the way forward you'd have to remove the rear headrests to fold the rear seat backs down.

You have to remove the headrest in order to fold the rear seat forward. You can store the headrest between the floor and the rear seat when it is folded down.

I am reupholstering my rear seats and deleting the headrests as I find them useless.

[VANOS714]

everything on the e30 looks great, one day I sahll owne one.

[Roysneon]

Wow, great work being done here. I do have a couple questions, though.

What exactly is the trick to removing the rear seats? I have everything else out, but I simply do not see how they come out.

How do the rear headrests affect folding the rear seats forward? Looks to me that unless the fronts were all the way forward you'd have to remove the rear headrests to fold the rear seat backs down.