Nick's Alpine White 1991 318is

[AlpinStar]

Nice work on the paint! My old spoiler used to look just like that. I may have to follow suit and paint my front and rear valences as mine are pretty weathered. PDR has also been on my list of things to do (for 5 years now). And nice choice on the exhaust!

Thanks, Mike. Yeah, the spiderweb cracks seem to come for all E30 spoilers with time. I expect them to return on mine sometime too. I searched around a lot for paint and primer that had some elasticity additive to allow for some stretching, since I've heard such a thing exists, but all the local custom paint shops said they didn't carry anything like that. I suspect it's a specialty product that the shops just didn't want to bother with for such a small volume of paint.

The valances were pretty satisfying to paint at home, even with just rattle cans (I'd just make sure you get really quality primer, base and clear products from a dedicated custom auto paint shop). The masking and prep work takes some time, but worth it. The surface on the valances is kind of hard to mess up because it's got that rough "stone guard" texture anyway. Definitely no need to wet sand the clear on the valances, either.

[Albie325]

Beautiful car, look forward to seeing more! Also, you could have done much worse than to follow mike.bmw 's formatting, his thread is one of the very best on the forum.

Question: How much did the PDR run you? Granted it's going to be highly variable by state and individual shop, but I have no concept of what a ballpark estimate would be. I've been considering having someone go over my E46 but if it's crazy expensive I'd just forego it.

[AlpinStar]

Beautiful car, look forward to seeing more! Also, you could have done much worse than to follow mike.bmw 's formatting, his thread is one of the very best on the forum.

Question: How much did the PDR run you? Granted it's going to be highly variable by state and individual shop, but I have no concept of what a ballpark estimate would be. I've been considering having someone go over my E46 but if it's crazy expensive I'd just forego it.

Thank you! The PDR work cost me $450 here in Northern California. That involved removing probably 6-8 dings in the hood, several along the passenger front fender and door, and one or two in the trunk. Most of them were pretty shallow, but a couple were more noticeable (like the one in the trunk from someone shutting it on something too big to fit in the trunk). It all came out perfect, though - you can't tell there were ever dents on the car, and no paint work needed on any of the dents. Not cheap, but worth it to restore former glory, IMO.

[2mAn]

PDR guys are magicians... I need to get that done on my E46.

[AlpinStar]

Sorting The Interior: Crack-Free Dash, GearSwitch Cup Holder and Coco Mats

A little update tonight on some of the first things I did to the car after buying it a few months back, with more to come soon.

One of my first moves after getting the car was to add cupholders - specifically, the GearSwitch model. (See bottom left of photo.) It's great; it holds two travel cups perfectly, and the only space it takes up is that sorta-useless long narrow tray to the right of the parking brake handle. One of the holes also has a removable liner that you can take out to hold a larger Nalgene size water bottle too. It's a high quality piece, made of high-quality 3D plastic. It looks right at home in the E30, and sturdily holds 2 cups for those morning coffee drives.

I also added a set of four Coco Mats. I've always loved how they look in vintage German cars (911s, 2002s, etc.) I figured they'd look great in the E30 too, and they do. They help give it that "vintage sports car" feel. I opted for black-over-tan pepita, to tie together the black and tan in the car. A lot of people seem to prefer all-black interiors, but I love the color combo, even though it's fairly common. I also rented a steam cleaner and cleaned all the carpeting, since it seemed like it had been awhile since that had been done.

Last but certainly not least, I decided fairly soon after buying the car to bite the bullet early on swapping out the dash. The original dash wasn't THAT bad, but it had a few longer cracks in the center section that weren't going to age well. After reading mike.bmw 's great writeup after doing that job himself, I decided I would probably break more things than I fixed if I tried to do the swap myself. Fortunately, I've got a good local E30 shop (CATuned). As luck would have it, they had an almost entirely crack free dash on hand, with just a couple very minor cracks at the very front down near the defroster vents. I took it home for a night, drilled out the ends of those cracks to hopefully stop them forever, gently filled in the cracks with black JB Weld Plastic Bonder, gave everything a good conditioning, and took it back to the shop for the install.

Here's the end result:

[AlpinStar]

A couple more updates to report today: Speakers & a Strut Tower Bar.

Front Speaker Upgrade

When I bought the car, it came with Infinity Reference 6.5 inchers in the rear parcel shelf, and the original 5.25" speakers in the front kick panels. The original speakers were shot, so I replaced them. I went with Infinity Reference 5.25" speakers, since I already had that type in the rear and I've had good luck with Infinity speakers in the past.

I considered adding the cool OEM BMW premium sound A-pillar tweeters and going with midrange woofers in the kick panels, particularly since it looked like the A-pillar location was already pre-wired for the tweeters. But after testing one of the sides, I wasn't getting any signal. Not sure if a PO somehow disconnected it, or if they were disconnected when the new Alpine head unit was installed (it was in the car when I bought it). Plus, after pricing it all out, I decided I just didn't care enough to add the tweeters - the stereo sounds pretty good with just the 4 stock speaker locations.

The speakers fit just fine under the factory kick panel covers. I did have to remove the hood latch lever and kick panel to get to the driver's side speaker, but other than that, this was a very easy install. The stereo sounds great, though the sound stage is biased a bit toward the rear due to the front speakers being located pretty low in the car and the rear speaker sound bouncing high off the rear glass. Bass response is not great, but decent - guessing the prior owner's upgrade to 6.5" speakers in the rear helped with this aspect. Overall, I think I'll be leaving the stereo and speakers alone at this point.

New and old (notice difference in magnet size):



Here's the new left speaker installed (before replacing the cover). I like how BMW mounts these speakers - the mounting screws attach via plastic clips that ensure the body of the speaker doesn't vibrate against the metal footwell framing. Nice.



While I was at it, since I had pulled off the kick panel, I decided to repair some of the vinyl which had separated from the frame of the kick panel. I just used some super glue and some clips/clothespins to hold it in place for several hours til it cured:




UUC Motorwerks Front Strut Bar and Fuse Box Cover

Even after just a few months of driving an E30, I can tell how flexy this chassis is. I bought a strut tower bar from UUC Motorwerks to take some of the slop out of the front of the chassis. The bar is super light - it's like 5 pounds. As always, keeping weight off the car is a priority, since light weight is kinda the whole point of this car!

I took the car on some long backroads toward the coast this weekend, and was impressed with the difference - I didn't notice any creaks going down driveways or on tight, fast turns. The car felt a bit more settled/planted.

The part that mounts to the strut bar on both sides was a bit too large for the lip at top of the strut towers (see photo below), so I had to dremel it down a bit to get it to fit. Took maybe a half hour.



Here's the end result. I also replaced the fuse box cover, since all the latches on the old one were broken off and it was looking pretty beat.

[AlpinStar]

Just a quick snap from a recent drive through the hills.

[mike.bmw]

Nice updates. Looking good!

[moatilliatta]

Great photo! Looks peaceful.

I really like that 2k Spraymax primer, What project is that for?

[AlpinStar]

Great photo! Looks peaceful.

I really like that 2k Spraymax primer, What project is that for?

Good eye - I like that primer too, though what you're seeing in that photo is custom 2K Alpine White paint and clear. It was for the paintwork I did on the car. Speaking of which, this leads in nicely to my next update...

Re-Spraying Front & Rear Spoilers, and Getting the Clips Right

The last piece of paint work (which I just did) was bringing the front lip spoiler back to white. I decided that the front lip just "disappeared" from view too much in black, and I figured bringing it back to the OEM body color couldn't be a bad thing. I ordered the proper front spoiler mounting clips in white (part no. 51711979334), and sanded, primered, and clear-coated the spoiler in Alpine white.

While I was at it, I decided to just replace the rear spoiler as well with a nicer, freshly painted one, since I wasn't totally happy with the way the rear spoiler came out the first time around (the cracks in my original one didn't sand out well). After painting, I installed it with fresh spoiler mount gaskets (part no.
51-71-1-916-637; you'll need 6). The gaskets were probably unnecessary, but I like doing all the little details right.

This also gave me the chance to remove the crud that had etched itself into the paint under the spoiler. I'm happy with how it all turned out, and I think moving back to a white front lip spoiler was the right move. Process and results below.

Sanding and cleaning:



Priming, followed by base and clear coats. (Please ignore my tiny, crappy garage; it's from 1917, when the house was built! I love living in the center of town, but it does require garage compromises.)



30 years of under-spoiler gunk:



The same area after going to work with some Meguiar's swirl remover and a light buffing pad:




End result in the front: OEM-style white front spoiler, with correct white clips.

[PieterVN]

Nice job man, looks very good!