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**TriggerFish** · 11-17-2014, 01:11 PM

Anyway, now things start to go down hill.

I can't remember what prompted this, but I stripped the boot carpets out to see what's what.

At this point, I wasn't too bothered, so continued fixing the car. I took the seats out and managed to fix the broken reclining mechanism - they'd just jammed up. Some WD40 later and they're fine again. The gas struts are dead, but they move up/down with some help.

While they were out, I started to remove the carpets, see how things fared.

The footwell rust:

Passenger's:

You can see the tracks of the water from when it rained here. One being pointed too by the screw driver, the other by the socket. There's a third running down the mastic from the previous repair too.

At the source of the ingress.

Driver's:

Wiring looks fun.

What's that hanging out underneath?

Oh. It's another hole. :unsure:

Then off with the body kit:

This grey section, as denoted by my fingers (and the same on the driver's side too) is all rust. If I punched that, it would fall out. Passed an MOT though...

Driver's side:

Front wing:

Passenger's side:

Looks quite 'stanced' here in a weird ratty way, oddly.

In this section, there's clearly replacement metal, but no visible welding. There is mastic however. Lots of mastic. I'm beginning to think this car is mainly made of rust and mastic.

And behind the rear bumper:

Where these bumper bracket arms touch the paint (out of shot) there's some surface rust, but nothing bad.

So, in summary, sills are dead. Front wings are fixable (as the body kit hides the rusty areas), but I'll likely buy new ones and get them sprayed up so that when these do fail I've got spares ready.

The rear valance bit is mostly OK, but there are some bits of surface rust around a couple of bits, and some more severe stuff under one of the brackets (which I can't get off as the nut has been destroyed).

**TriggerFish** · 11-17-2014, 01:27 PM

So, at this point the plan was to take the car to a friend of my dad's who restores Austin 7s (the car that spawned the cheap people's car in the UK before the war - some photos below. A licensed version of this was also the first ever BMW motor car too!) so that he could do the welding, and then take it somewhere to get it sprayed up.

So, while annoyed but too put off, I drove it over and left it at his unit. This is where the next batch of photos come from.

Anyway, some progress - helped along by some little helpers.

With all the holes opened out:

And filled and primered (not the neatest welds, but meh):

So that's that done. There's one more hole that'll need welding from the wheel arch as the welding torch won't fit behind the arch and edge of the boot/wing panel. And of course the fabrication of the new inner arch.

Some digging in the passenger side of the boot revealed this - more mastic!

Looks like Mr. Mastic has made a new 'arch' (rear of the rear arch) and just mastic'd it into place. Quality job as ever.

Sorry for the photo quality, I forgot my SLR. Still, it was slow progress, but it was progress nonetheless.

Another day at it, and the rear driver's arch is as done as we're going to get it. There's still this hole, which I'll leave to a body shop for fear of damaging the 'outer'/visible skin:

I had some fun poking around the floor with good, and bad, news.

In good news, the massive hole is actually a removable panel - so I need to buy two more of those from BMW:

In bad news - it turns out mastic hides a multitude of sins:

^ That's the passenger's side - yet to be opened out.

This is the driver's side, only semi opened out:

http://i660.photobucket.com/albums/uu325/TriggerFish91/E30%20-%20RDZ9203/_DSC0701.jpg

That perfect circle hole has another removable panel to drop in, so no panic there!

While I was there with my camera, I also grabbed a couple of shots of some of the old Austin 7s up there. They also did 4 seater ones too, but they're not as interesting! I've driven one like this around Silverstone circuit, and it's amazing how far cars have come, and how scary it can be driving at such low speeds!

I think that's one piece of ali for that body work!

This gets raced:

As does this:

They can reach upto 90mph, apparently. I've driven one and found it semi-scary at moderate (30mph?) speeds. I imagine doing 3 times that on drum brakes would be terrifying!

I ordered some new sills with the plan of fitting them:

and a load of anti-rust stuff:

By now, I was starting to wonder about going elsewhere with the car, and progress was slow, and I wasn't 100% happy with the quality of the work being carried out (and we didn't fancy doing the sills ourselves). Below is a copy/paste of my findings from back in June from another thread. I dunno how easy it is to get this kinda thing done in the States, but it seems that in the UK, if it's not just a new sensor or set of bushes, most places just don't care.

"I had this morning off work though, so went in search of classic car restoration places to ask about getting the sills done.

I tried three places, with three different results.

The first place clearly didn't want the work and quoted 'about a grand'. (Plus paint)

The second was a lot more helpful, and had done the job to his own E30. He reckoned about £1,500 with a 6-8 week lead time. (Plus paint)

The third place is the guy I saw previously about getting some work done outside MK, and who offered me the use of his workshop to weld the car up myself. I'd got a price before of about £700 for some touching in of a couple of places and some tidying up.

He said about another grand to do the sills. (Repair inner and replace outer with my supplied parts.)

Or, if I strip and rebuilt the car to/from a rolling shell (with the engine still in, but nothing in the cabin or boot or any glass), it would be £4k to do the sills, any rust at all that he came across, including the scuttle and flitch panels, and a full inside and out respray (with photographs provided).

Option three is my current preferred option. Yes it's a crap load of money, but I know it'll have been done, will have been done well, and it won't be several weekends of my time spent doing tiny bits of progress to a much lower quality. I'm also at the stage where I daren't touch anything for fear of whatever else maybe lurking within, and this would remove that fear completely..."

Option three is what I went for, so we set about bringing the car home and stripping it down.

**TriggerFish** · 11-17-2014, 01:42 PM

Started stripping it apart and removed the rear seats. They'd gone very mouldy from having the floor matts sitting on them, so lots of cleaning needed here!

Otherwise it looked and sounds solid underneath(!), although it was damp due to the leaking light gaskets.

Next, I managed to tackle the last of the areas I was afraid of - the behind the wing area.

As you can see, it's mostly sound. Why mostly? There's a little bit of surface rust by the underside of the top mount. That, and there's also a new material in use on the car - fibre glass! The black bit below my finger fails the magnet test. Bad times!

It looks like there has been a repair done here at some point, but, fibre glass aside, it appears to be done to a high standard.

On the bright side, the front valance is perfect, although look at the pikey spray job around the lower grill area. Couldn't even be bothered to mask it off.

And the remains of the genuine BMW wing. Dunno when it's from, but it's not lasted too well!

Still, the main part of the flitch panel/topmount area is sound, as is the valance, so I'm happy!

Did notice one of the console bushes is shot, so that's dead! Time to upgrade to the M3 ones.

The seat belts and parcel shelf are now out, as are the door cards. All I've got left to do now is remove the CD changer/electric ariel from the boot, remove the shadow line trim, rear spoiler, dashboard and headlining.

Some photos for the level of bodgery at play:

(We're looking at the sections under the rear windows in this photo)

And the parcel shelf in all its faded glory. Going to be redyed before being fitted as it looks terrible. I'll source some period speaker pods too.

There's looooooads of these left in the car - something to leave for the body shop!

Dashboard out. Can safely say it's a job that's sufficiently unpleasant that I don't want to be doing it again! Thus, the search is on for a crack free dash...

In good news, the revealed car underneath looks no worse than expected. There's a grey foamy barrier thing that might be hiding stuff. I'll remove that tomorrow in the day light.

Doesn't look too bad:

Until you can see all the wiring. Looks like Mr. Mastic couldn't wire either. I'm not great at it, but I'm not this bad! There's a random spade connector sticking out - I have no idea if it's live, earth, audio or something else! Gonna be fun tidying this lot up...

After about an hour, I managed to lop this out of the loom. I've traced down a lot of the wires, although I'm not happy with the connections, so will likely resolder all of it once the car is back. There's more to remove too - like the defective auto-windows module. At least the alarm looks to be well installed.

Starting to look a bit better now:

Anyway, some more stripping down the scuttle is sound, but there was a little bit of rust on the sun roof tray :(

Next up, the car made it to the body shop. I arrived there in June. It's still there today.

Here's some photos from when it arrived at the body shop and was raised into the air. Not pretty!

Apologies for the poor phone photos.

This is the sill joining the floor pan. Or not, as the case may be.

Rear passenger's arch (obviously!)

The boot behind the rear passenger's arch

Front driver's footwell:

Rear driver's arch:

This is the other sill. :o :o The daylight is the inside of the car!

The passenger's footwell:

So yeah. A good day! -_- On the bright side, I got a good look underneath, and apart from being a bit tatty, and the front ARB bushes looking a little worn, and a weeping gearbox seal, it looks sound. Bushes all look/feel solid, so that's a relief!

So, that's the state of the damage. The body shop was to fix all of this, and then spray inside/outside. At this point, I started cleaning/fixing everything else that I'd removed from the car. I did have some issues with the body shop, but I'll skip over those and just show the end results.

**TriggerFish** · 11-17-2014, 01:56 PM

I started with one of the door handles as a small, model universal (so cheap if it cocks up) part to test the paint/process. It's just done using cheap Hycote Satin Black spray paint. At £2 a can I thought it was worth a try - I could always buy something 'better' if needed, but it seems really close to the BMW finish and is easy to work with too. :)

Seems to have gone well with only a light sanding to the factory finish needed for the paint to adhere, and it looks a lot better too, although the photos don't really show this too well.

Also tidied stuff into boxes depending on what they're for, so I don't just have a masses pile on unlabelled pieces when I come to reassemble the car. I'd forgotten how much cats love boxes -_-

Went to London and met a nice chap off e30zone to grab a pair of front seats. Mine are a bit scuffed (I'll dye them though), but the runner and mechanisms are rusty, and it really bugs me. So I got these for a tenner so I can either use those runners or take them apart and spray them, and then fit them to my seats.

Also grabbed another headlight with BOSCH on it (not Hella), so now I've got 6 headlights and enough to make a matching set finally. OCD: satisfied. Also got a genuine leather handbrake for a tenner too, which means I return the one I got off eBay which is just a sleeve over the standard plastic one. :thumbsup:

He also threw in a few other bits and pieces he thought I might find useful FOC - top guy!

Not a bad haul for £30 IMO.

And within about 2 minutes of the cat waking up, he found the seats -_-

A bit more spraying done. Just got a couple more pieces of trim to take and then that's done. Then I'll move on to finishing re-dying the carpet/parcel shelf.

Headlight rings before:

And after:

Not the best finish, but they're very hidden when on the car

I didn't even know what this is or where on the front of the car it goes any more, but it was dirty, so I sprayed it anyway! It was also a good test of how well the paint works on plastic before I sprayed the visible stuff like the grilles/kidneys and ruined them

After:

And a big piece of the shadowline trim. Comes up pretty nicely I think. Better than before anyway.

I was expecting to buy new ones of these, but seems some wet kitchen roll is all I needed!

Also autosol'd the chrome bits of the kidney grills. Made a huuuuge difference in the flesh!

These also came out really well I think. Scuttle trims for the wipers and the mechanism for the opening rear windows.

Also picked these up posted for £30 from the US too. I paid $42 to get a jiffy bag posted from the US, yet these + postage were less. Industrial postage seems to be a con!

I dyed my new carpet (PO cut mine). Should make a nice difference as I think the grey ones are horrid.

Ordered a few service bits to fit: new cam belt and tensioner, PAS belt, alternator belt and new discs/pads all round. I left out the handbrake shoes as I think from memory, it actually worked :o

I just need to ring BMW and order a new rocker cover gasket and at some point, a new water pump too (there's more than one type, and I can't tell which I need until it's out).

I was shocked at first with how small the brake pads were:

Then I saw how small the discs are! (These are the fronts)

I know it's lighter, but considering it left the factory with just 14bhp less than the 330d it's compared too, that's a small set of discs! (They're 17s on the silver car, for reference).

Work at the body shop was progressing slowly at this time, so next on my plate was to redo the rocker cover.

This is how it looked at first - covered in oil stains and peeling finish. Nice.

After a quick degrease it cleaned up much nicer, but still tired looking.

A spray of degreaser on the underside has tidied things up nicely too.

And after rubbing it down with a sanding pad thing, we get this. I really liked this finish and the 'patina' (even typing that word makes me feel pretentious!) that was left. However, it wouldn't really fit in with the clean/new look I'm going for, so I ploughed onwards.

I've seen some photos of these done with wrinkle paint, so I bought four cans of this stuff, although I've used just under one, so a bit of a fail there! [/img]

After being sprayed with three coats, and left in the garage overnight, you get this:

And some close ups of the finish.

Next stage is to use a sanding block to just rub down the raised bits to get to the metal underneath, and then mask it up, and spray it again.

After leaving it overnight again and peeling the tape off, you end up with this:

There's still some black marks on the metal, but it's not noticeable from a distance, and given it's a 25 year old part, it sort of seems appropriate it's not perfect anyway.

A very simple job, and well worth doing while adjusting the valve clearances IMO.

**TriggerFish** · 11-17-2014, 02:05 PM

During this time I won a new engine for it on eBay.

With ECU, inlet manifold, clutch, prop, starter, alternator, mounts, injectors, wiring loom etc. for £41!!

Doesn't have a head, but a new 325i ECU is £55 on eBay anyway, and an inlet manifold is £20, so great value for money (about $25 I guess?)... The plan is to rebuild it into a 2.8l. Should be a nice project/learning exercise for me.

I also got a complete set of gaskets for £45, inc. head gasket (£70-£90 normally), rocker cover (£20 normally) and manifold gaskets/heatsheilds (£25 normally) and a load of smaller washers and misc. gaskets.

Next up, I tackled the seats. The second one (not pictured) is MUCH better, so I need to redo the first one so it's a better finish.

I also started addressing the scabby, pink seat belt clips.

Before

And after a quick wipe over with some model paint

For the seats themselves I started out with this:

So as you can see, serviceable, but tatty and cracked.

First steps were to split the seat apart, and then rub it down with a couple of supplied cleaners and alcohol wipes, and then sand the leather back a little.

Next stage is to fill the cracks with filler, allow it to dry, and sand it back until it's smooth. Keep repeating this until the filler and the leather are at one level.

These should give you an idea of the amount of cracking/filler I had to use!

Once that's done, another quick wipe with the alcohol cleaner and you're ready to spray. This is simple, and made a lot easier with a proper air compressor. I didn't get any photos of this, I jumped straight to the after ones. The finish is tacky and very shiny after spraying. It attracted a lot of dust that I had to remove, although there's some bits I missed. After spraying it with a 'sealer', you then apply a lacquer (for want of a better word), which is used to flatten down the finish, or make it shiner as needed.

When dry, this is what I ended up with.

And some close ups of the repaired areas:

And there we have it. Far from perfect, and there's a couple of bits that annoy me, but to my parents, who saw the finished product and aren't aware of the imperfections to the same degree I was, they think it looks good. I think so to on the whole. But defiantly an improvement on before.

Now I just need to weld it back together.

(Oh, and excuse the mess - it's the failed aftermath of building work where my parent's had no idea of the end result, or seemingly, the budget either. *slow clap* )

**TriggerFish** · 11-17-2014, 02:19 PM

So, back to the body shop, and it's October by this time. Focusing only on the work completed:

One of my 3rd party wings. :(

This was resolved by welding the solid top of my old wing to the solid base of the new one.

I found there was rust by the wiring loom grommet, so out that came

This is what I imagine giving birth is like.

All of this (and more in the 'bay):

out through this!

(The small hole to the left of the masking tape)

Fast forward a few more weeks and it's got some paint on it. This is as it stands now (November). It just needs a final polish to remove a couple of imperfections and then it's mine to rebuild and enjoy :)

A nice sight to be greeted by compared to the previous visits:

Not too sure on the G60s. They're only there as a temp. wheel while the others are refurbed, but I think with some correctly sized tyres, a paint in silver, and some banding, they should look pretty decent.

Two solid suspension towers:

Some general reflection shots (there are some tiny scratches in the roof, but they don't show on camera)

And quite a few on the unpolished boot:

This run on the rear bumper is the worst imperfection though, but I'm told will be removed.

Since those were taken I've seen it outside in natural light, and it looks amazing! Can't wait to get it back.

**TriggerFish** · 11-17-2014, 02:25 PM

And the final non-bodyshop updates to bring us up to date include the purchase of a new set of BBS wheels ('basketweaves to you guys?) with usable tyres for £52 ($80).

While picking up the wheels, I also grabbed an old HU.

I've modded this so that the HU tape head is rewired into a 3.5mm aux jack, so it's now got an FM radio and 3.5mm inputs, so with a cheap bluetooth streamer it should be 21st century-ready :)

And a wiring diagram if it ever helps anyone else trying to convert a Blaupunkt London sqm 37 to accept a line input/aux connection from the head tape. Excuse the poor diagram!

Now, as this only had 6watts, and no EQ, I also grabbed a DSP too. I just need to grab some speakers now.

**TriggerFish** · 11-17-2014, 02:27 PM

So, there we have it. If you stayed with me this far through my ramblings, then thanks!

But, yeah, that's where I'm up to now, but there's a few bits like refurbing the injectors, painting the inlet manifold etc. that I've missed out. I've also stockpiled a few other bits like an e46 067 steering rack I won for £30 too :)

Any further updates will be in 'real time', so should be more interesting (or at least, more coherent!) I hope.

Cheers all!
Joe

**Infini** · 11-17-2014, 07:15 PM

Great work mate.

I'm also doing some repairs to my sports seats but I'm still trying to find some replacement "is" squared Natural Beige fabric for my passenger seats.

**Kevinl** · 11-17-2014, 09:02 PM

such a nice car so sad to see all that rust but you are taking care of it

**MPLFoster** · 11-17-2014, 10:39 PM

great job on the restoration!

**e30austin** · 11-17-2014, 11:26 PM

You are much more patient than I! Welcome.

**Ray Smoodiver** · 11-17-2014, 11:56 PM

I was right along with your for the rust ride up until halfway through, thank god mine didn't get that bad, I would have walked away and reshelled!

Welcome and keep the pics coming.

**N2MYE30** · 11-18-2014, 05:02 AM

When I saw those 1st pix, I was like yeah, looks nice but what under all that MT2 stuff? I was right! Amazing that you are getting it back on the road! Bravo! In for the finished results. :up:

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Joe's 325i Sport from the UK

Joe's 325i Sport from the UK

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