1989 e30 Touring... this is Betty

[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]

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.

[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]

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

[Vivek]

Why did you remove all the sound deadening?

[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.

[leegf]

amazing work! what an education.

[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.

[Todd Black 88]

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

[shaferbm]

Ah lets see more of that hardtop vert!!

[dude8383]

so many bettys on this board. Next person with a schwarz car needs to come up with a new name that starts with the letter 'b' :d

lol!

[BavarianAddict06]

omg. betty,

[MC Hammered]

I did not see any point in having the factory bungs be in place if I plan to lay down a couple of layers of sound deadening on top of them.

It would make the job a lot harder to fix if the bungs decided to rot away in the future so I decided to have them all removed and holes sealed up.

So I had the shop fab up some aluminum discs to sit in the hole and then used some automotive body sealant to set them in place. Self etching primer as then applied on top and now I am deciding if I want to apply a layer of por15 on top or not.

The leaking plug was removed and hole sealed up, the layer of Dynamat that the PO used in the engine bay as a heat shield was removed and proper head shield material as applied.

Rubber undercoating was sprayed on the outside of the hole locations to protect them from debris.

[MC Hammered]

When I removed the rear washer fluid bottle I noticed that there was a rust spot




So I borrowed a tool to help strip away any rust so I can treat it with por15 and forget about it for a while



After a quick hit of the wheel you can see the body sealer flake off exposing the rust underneath



I took a peek underneath and it did not look bad so the rust did not eat its way through the panel




So I kept working away at the area stripping as mush of the old sealant away as possible so I can make sure there was no more cancer hidden underneath.

Looks good so far as it is nice to see shiny metal!



I was not convinced so I kept stripping away the sealant and then saw another patch of rust




I picked away at the old sealant and exposed quite a bit of rust.. but then I noticed I could see the concrete floor!



Nice shot of all of the rust that fell on the floor while I was grinding away on the inside of the car



Looking underneath you can see where it has rusted away as the seam and left a nice hole the size of your finger.

I do not know how to weld so the car is going back to the shop to have that section cut out and new metal welded in place, por15 and then sealed up.

[downernsp]

Damb that looks bad,but nothing is unrepairable..

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