Money Pit: The Sequel - Full Repaint Project

[monty23psk]

Nice progress and congrats on getting this finally done. One day I will. Prepping for the Vintage weekend, 800 mile drive and faded red paint/patina to show it off, lol

[bmwman91]

I also want to fully repaint my E30, so please please pretty please be as thorough as you can with this thread.
I'm sure it won't be just me using this information.

I also have some rust on the windshield cowl :/ your seems good though.
Any suggestions on where I might find some information on how to swap it?

I think that the cowl would need to be cut out and a new one welded or brazed in. The PN you want is 41321913778. If there are specific things/details that you want me to take photos of, feel free to ask in here.

[hozzziii]

I also want to fully repaint my E30, so please please pretty please be as thorough as you can with this thread.
I'm sure it won't be just me using this information.

I also have some rust on the windshield cowl :/ your seems good though.
Any suggestions on where I might find some information on how to swap it?

[bmwman91]

The rear portion of the car is mostly done being taken apart. It all went pretty smoothly for the most part. The one issue, and I sort of had a suspicion that it was going to be there, was a rust patch under the battery compartment. Once I got everything out, I gave an ugly-looking spot a poke with a screwdriver, and it crumbled out. I sent a pic to the body shop for evaluation. It turns out that you can get various replacement E30 sheet metal panels, including this one. So the plan will be to cut out the affected portion, buy the replacement panel, cut out the corresponding patch, and TIG it in.






The rest of the rear end came apart in a couple of hours.






So far I have a pretty good pile of parts coming off of this thing. Some is being reused, some is being painted and reused, and some is being replaced.






I also finished taking the side mirrors apart as much as possible. The plastic housing is heat-staked to the aluminum mount/pivot, and the halves seem to be glued or ultrasonically welded together, so there is no practical way to get them separated any further. The wire harness can easily be unplugged from the motor assembly and then snaked out of the entry hole. The trick is to get the cable sheath out of the hole, and then pull one of the wires with its terminals out. After that there is enough room to pull the rest of the wires through.

[bmwman91]

Excited to see how this will turn out! My 318is needs paint real bad. I need motivation to do this

It is a big project, and I think that I may have already found a not-insignificant number of expensive parts that I want/need to replace, but it will be worth it. Honestly, finding a shop to do it has been the hardest thing. Disassembly is straightforward so far.

ahhh yes

How many times did I drag my feet on getting CoTM pics because I thought that I would repaint the car? Better late than never!

[2mAn]

ahhh yes

[Victell]

Nice. Sub'd.

[Dj Buttchug]

Excited to see how this will turn out! My 318is needs paint real bad. I need motivation to do this

[bmwman91]

I did get going on disassembly today. Part of my cost control for this project is DIY'ing as much mechanical work as possible, which will basically be everything except removing the doors, fenders, hood, and trunk (although I will prep all of them for removal as much as possible).

I got the front third of the car completely ready with a few hours of work. Despite my seeming thoroughness when I ordered parts in 2019, I found a rather long list of little fasteners and body-nut type things that I will need to order since all of the old plastic ones are in shabby condition, and some of the metal ones are as well.

There was a first for me as well. I have never had the pleasure of removing the wiper linkage/motor assembly before. When I realized that I was going to need to pull the strut brace, intake manifold, part of the engine harness, and blower motor, I was less than thrilled. At first I thought about just sort of dropping the assembly so it would be out of the way, but it is original, a little rusty, and the wipers did seem to be struggling a bit over the last year when I turned them on. So, I will just replace the whole thing.

At first I simply could not figure out how to get it out. Even with the upper blower cover removed (which I did by popping the air flaps out entirely, and popping the 4 metal clips in the corners off), things were not looking good and I was feeling stuck. At that point I took a break to go grocery shopping with my wife, and consult some old r3v posts on my phone. After the little break, I got back in there, removed the motor from the bracket, pushed the linkage to one extreme, and the thing came out very very easily. So the keys here are removal of the motor, and setting the linkage as shown in the below pictures. Leave both of the wiper posts up in their holes when doing this, and with them up in their holes rotate the bottom forward until the passenger side clears the blower housing, and then it will drop right out. Also I recommend putting some tape on the posts to avoid scratching up the cowling.



















Everything else was pretty straightforward. As far as I can tell, I got everything off of there which will need to be off.






Other than that, I popped a couple of trim bits here and there, got the side mirrors out, removed the mirror glass from them since I have new OEM glass to put in, and did a couple of things back on the trunk. The game plan will be to do a little in the evenings after work, and hopefully have it all apart in a week. My drop-off date is May 22, so I think that I should be ready by then.

[bmwman91]

After nearly 5 years since deciding that I was going to repaint the E30, it is finally happening.

It all started years ago when I got into a little bumper-bender in a parking lot which did some minor damage to the passenger side rear corner. The paint was getting shabby by then, and I knew that I would need a new bumper skin and some matching paint. Why not do the whole car? So I started making a list of the major items that I would need and ordered them. All new window seals, lots of clips, some trim pieces where needed, other seals, etc. By late 2019 I was about ready to go find a shop to do it, at which point the original Metric Mechanic 2.1L M42 I was running blew the head gasket as a casualty of the crank damper wheel coming apart and causing some very unfortunately-timed misfires. There went a bunch of time and a good chunk of the paint budget for a rebuild (which MM was kind enough to for me at the cost of labor 7 years after the initial purchase). Some of you may recall that saga lol...I nearly dumped the car and got something newer and more reliable. Thank goodness common sense did not get the best of me when I was vulnerable!

So 2020 rolls around and we all know how that went with COVID and all. I got the newly rebuilt engine in the spring and had the car running shortly thereafter. It ran better than new, and while MM never really said that they found anything amiss in the core that I sent back, the thing ran like a different beast entirely. In a good way. At that point I decided to just drive the car for a couple of years and enjoy it, which I did. In late 2019 I had also picked up an MK5 Jetta TDI with the intent of having it be a very temporary car to use during the repaint project. It turned out to be a good purchase since it removed all of the time pressure from the engine rebuild, and honestly it is nice to have a car that pulls mid-40's fuel economy on the highway while also handling fairly well. It is not quite a project car since I am intent on keeping it OEM or maybe OEM+, but I have sunk some cash into it in the form of various engine, suspension, driveline, and interior parts to get it back to tip-top condition. But, I digress...I have a car to use while the E30 gets painted.

Within the last couple of months I finally found a body shop to work with. If memory serves me right, I spoke with 9 different shops about the repaint. 6 of them outright said no, 2 indirectly said no in the form of estimates north of $25K, and one turned out to be what I was hoping to find. It was sort of accidental in that a former coworker put me in touch with a guy to do some precision TIG welding on a stainless fuel fitting for my Link E36X ECU project. I met the guy at his place of work, which was a body shop. The welds were good, and a while after that I texted him to see if he was interested in repainting my car. This was after a day of being rejected twice by other shops, so my hopes were not high.

To my surprise he seemed open to it. I took the car by, and about 5 minutes in to the estimate I could tell that I would want to work with that shop. He'd done other E30's and usually did 1-2 resto jobs like mine per year in addition to the usual high volume repair work that most shops do. From there we worked out a price, although that is likely to be subject to some upward creep if there are any surprises like unexpected rust once he gets in there. The agreed cost was well under $20k thank God.

I will be documenting the paint project in this thread, so here goes.

Some photos of the car as it looks today. SAD. Has not seen wax since early 2019 when I decided to repaint it.


















Back in 2006 I got into a little fender-bender at the front driver's side. At the time it was my only car and I needed to get to work, so I had insurance deal with it. The shop did a poor job for sure. Orange peel, drips, and more recently the paint has been peeling due to improper prep. The shop basically said they didn't like dealing with older cars, but I was sort of in a pinch. At least the other party in the accident was at fault, so it did not cost me anything. Still, I will be glad to get rid of this crap.