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As promised:
While up at school a couple of weeks ago, I was struck with an idea. A trip to my nearest Christmas Tree Shop and $7.99 later, and the dream was realized:
Driving through the center of UConn's campus would always net me a few people poking their walking partner and pointing at my car, lots of smiles, and even a few waves and laughter here and there.
Happy holidays all.Leave a comment:
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The moonroof was installed the weekend I gave it a second coat of enamel, when I came home to study for finals. That weekend I also installed the brand new mud flaps front and rear that I bought. I'll post up the pictures from that tomorrow, but for now I have a couple of shots of the 1980 gray market euro 635csi that I bought, and some people had been interested in seeing.
That's my family's "backup" car behind the 6er, a 1978 Plymouth Horizon with 48k original miles. It was voted car of the year by someone at some point. The color, as well as lack of almost anything other than four wheels, some doors, and an engine led my friends to affectionately say the car came from the Vietnam war. Supposedly the lore states that the .50 cal was removed before public auction, although there are still some bullet holes to be found here and there. Kidding aside, it starts up religiously after your 9th pedal stomp and 3rd crank. Ironically Plymouth sourced the engine for the Horizon from VW.
This thing is all German, except for the cluster. Being gray market, it was never federalized.
Close-ratio dogleg:
And the M90 in all its lurking, primitive glory:
Tomorrow will yield the aformentioned sunroof installation pictures, as well as the mudflap installation pictures, and bonus E30 with reindeer costume pictures.Leave a comment:
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It's been a long time and I've been held captive by school, finals, and general lack of time. Many updates to post, so allow me to start:
I left off with the trim on the glass panel sanded and ready for paint (see end of original post). Planning to paint everything in one go, I moved on to cleaning and prepping the privacy panel for paint/resto:
It had come to me with a very flaccidly attached rail system, so I took it to a sunroof/custom auto shop I was lucky enough to find near where I go to school. They used some wood and new rivets to reattach it nice and solidly, although they did a poor job of dealing with the cloth they had to move, which can be seen was simply glued onto the top of the panel, instead of tucked back in properly, illustrated here:
You can clearly see the tan fabric on the bottom of the panel, glued in place. One of the mounting points came to me with cracked plastic around the rivet point, and at some point I introduced a crack to the other side:
This had to be fixed for longevity's sake, so I poked around the garage, planning to use some two part epoxy. I instead found "JB Quik(Kwik?)":
This set very nicely, so nicely in fact that I was struck with an idea, and decided to re-do their job of tacking the cloth to the panel. Pulling it off the panel, I found it could easily be re-tucked under the plastic top portion, albeit a bit loosely. JB Quik/Kwik and some popsicle-stick spreading later:
You can see the residue of the shop's glue on the top of the panel, which I attended to later. The JB whatever did a nice job of sealing the fabric into the space, and would later be painted.
If you noticed earlier in this post, the headliner fabric of the privacy panel was pretty dirty:
Hoping it would wash out, I mixed up some oxyclean in a spray bottle, and started tooth brushing, which came out pretty well:
Even the edges cleaned up decently, which were really filthy when I started. I wasn't so worried about the stains that wouldn't come out, as I correctly guessed that they were so dirty in the first place because they must have contacted the rails for the old headliner in the previous car, and would be hidden from view when installed anyway. The black plastic top of the privacy panel was a bit stained as well, but a little cleaning and the requisite pre-paint sanding cleaned it up very well. Forgot to take intermediate shot of this; original condition:
Now it was time to paint:
Now at this point I ran out of the half can of duplicolor self etching primer I had started out with, so I went to the store and got what I thought was much nicer quality rustoleum bare metal primer to use on the top of the glass panel's trim when it came time to flip it over and paint the top. More in this mistake shortly.
The fruits of my labors:
Soul crushing defeat in 3...2...1...: The rustoleum primer really did a number on me. Apparently it had a much different flashing characteristic than the duplicolor I had used on the top. Thinking the whole thing was primed and dry on both the top and bottom, I began laying down my SEM trim black, which is a nice quality paint that I've used many times before with great success. Letting everything "dry" overnight, I begin handling it and removing my masking tape. The bottom ended up coming out absolutely great (where I used the duplicolor primer): nice and dry, even finish, and no chipping, basically SEM at it's finest. On the top I was not so lucky. Looking at it crooked yielded blemishes and nicks, don't even get me started on what it looked like after the tape was removed. Long story short, the primer had not flashed properly, and was still an almost gummy consistency, leading to disaster. I really wanted this to turn out well, so I bit the bullet...
...and stripped, remasked, and repainted the entire thing, this time with brush-on, oil based, bomb proof rustoleum black enamel.
I kid you not, sitting as you can see in my room in the (room temperature) basement, it stayed tacky for two god damn days at the least. The end of thanksgiving break came and went, and I left with a sad face and no moonroof installed. About two weeks later I came back for a three day weekend to study for finals and put another coat on, which dried much faster thanks to the help of a small, delicately used space heater. In the end I was happy with the oil based rustoleum. The finish was glossy and not as uniform as if I had used an aerosol paint, but it's tough as nails and probably better suited to long-term exposure to the elements that the outer/top trim will see.
During this whole debacle I also got a couple of other things done, namely replacing the gas cap condom thing. Old and new:
I also started preparing my high beam smoking plates that I got from Newman awhile back. Scored vs non-scored:
Fully scored:
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4drPwr's 89 Alpine Project - Back from hiatus
Hello everyone, I'm an E30Tech-er and R3V lurker. After awhile on the forums I decided to make my own project thread over at E30Tech, and figured I'd post it for your perusal here, as well. This first post is a couple of weeks old now:
The first project for your consideration: Original moonroof restoration!
So it began when I saw this thread, and the moonroof contained within for such a great price:
E30 moonroofs that I've seen for sale usually go for $500 easy, even $600 or so, and most don't include the headliner/privacy slider panel, which this one did. Obviously, I carpe diem-ed that shit and got it shipped here by greyhound bus parcel express. If you glanced at that thread at all and saw the pictures, you'd see that the glass panel had some awful chipping of the trim going on.
Obviously needed some work. As luck would have it, I do work, son:
The first step was to get the area immediately inside of the trim masked off, so I could refinish the trim. I decided to mask the whole panel off to save me some time later since it would have to be done at some point.
As luck would have it, I'm a DaVinci with masking tape, but for the very few places where I didn't get a perfect line touching the trim, including corners, I used a razor blade to make sure no inkling of tape was touching trim, and yet no glass was exposed. I have mild OCD for E30 projects.
Those of you familiar with JapAndrew's restore thread will know, as I do, that he completely removed the trim, restored it, then re-siliconed it to the panel. I am not him, and I am smarter and lazier than the average bear. My trim was perfectly well adhered so I saw no reason to fuck with it. I started sanding it down with an aggressive sanding sponge, and quickly saw how tedious it would be.
I quickly turned to modern chemical solutions for everyday problems:
I don't fuck around. I put the foam on my garage floor, put a garbage bag over that, and the panel on the bag to minimize mess.
The aircraft stripper had a field day:
The black muck in this picture is small piles of whatever formerly resided on the trim, after being nuked with aircraft stripper, and scraped off with a razor.
Time to do the same for the underside of the panel/trim. It was more of the same, so I didn't take any pictures. After I cleaned all of that shit off both sides and all the trim, I took to sanding the trim so it would be ready for paint; it came out nicely:
At some point during this couple of days of work, I was pleasantly distracted by noise outside the garage, and a knock at the door. I was greeted by this...I wonder what's inside?
It's very easy to get gifts for Thanksgiving, you just have to buy them for yourself:
In no particular order, you are looking at:
1)Front driver side euro plastic bumper trim (I bought the full set awhile ago and nearly immediately gouged that portion by accident. Finally pulled the trigger to replace the eyesore)
2)Front (short) and rear (long) OEM BMW sunroof seals. Always wanted to replace the ones on my steel sunroof, so with a glass moonroof going in it was the right time to do them. The moonroof uses the same gasket mounting lip as an OEM panel. These suckers were about a benjamin together
3)OEM BMW floor mats for a sedan/coupe, with securing hardware, in Indigo (to match my interior)
4)OEM rubber thingy that goes around your gas cap, mine was icky
5)Brand new OEM mud flap set, front and rear for the impending salt and crap that will be on the roads. I have a thread in the appearance section if anyone can help sort through the jigsaw puzzle of mounting hardware that was included...
That's all for now, but I have a bunch more pictures to put up a bit later, and will hopefully take some more as I'm hoping to start painting before the inevitable food coma sets in. Happy holidays to all.Last edited by 4drPwr; 02-22-2011, 12:02 PM.
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