Got a question for all of you nutballs! (yeah, me too...) I rarely (and I mean rarely!) post but I'm a long time member/lurker on the forums. Love the community and all of the help provided here.
Light background/story for this question: last year I got my hands on a neglected '89 IX manual sedan, an E30 I've always lusted after (living in the PacNW this car just makes so much sense). After a careful inspection (read on for my failure here) I purchased and quickly got it back on the road (full suspension rebuild to Bilstein sport, brakes rebuilt, new front axles, etc - you all know the drill).
At the start of this summer I decided to swap out the black interior for tan from one of my other E30's and that's where the problems started.
I found a large amount of rust/rot in the passenger floor pan. Amazingly it's very unnoticeable from the underside due to a large amount of seam seal and under coating that was used to hide it. The damage/rust is most of the front passenger floor pan and into the inner rocker (outer rocker looks good so far) and goes over the frame rail area for the FCab mounting points. While I'm a fair welder I'm not a master metal fabricator and I'm concerned about getting the location spot on for positioning the mount points which means professional help and $$.
What do you all think? Should I put the time/$ into fixing and keeping another rare E30 on the road (I'll probably have to sell it because of the huge amount of $$ I've sunk into it) or should I part out? The drivetrain, suspension, body, interior, etc are all in really good condition. Hell, the paint even came back far better than I expected.
Let me know. Maybe I should set up a vote ;-)
Cheers!
Light background/story for this question: last year I got my hands on a neglected '89 IX manual sedan, an E30 I've always lusted after (living in the PacNW this car just makes so much sense). After a careful inspection (read on for my failure here) I purchased and quickly got it back on the road (full suspension rebuild to Bilstein sport, brakes rebuilt, new front axles, etc - you all know the drill).
At the start of this summer I decided to swap out the black interior for tan from one of my other E30's and that's where the problems started.
I found a large amount of rust/rot in the passenger floor pan. Amazingly it's very unnoticeable from the underside due to a large amount of seam seal and under coating that was used to hide it. The damage/rust is most of the front passenger floor pan and into the inner rocker (outer rocker looks good so far) and goes over the frame rail area for the FCab mounting points. While I'm a fair welder I'm not a master metal fabricator and I'm concerned about getting the location spot on for positioning the mount points which means professional help and $$.
What do you all think? Should I put the time/$ into fixing and keeping another rare E30 on the road (I'll probably have to sell it because of the huge amount of $$ I've sunk into it) or should I part out? The drivetrain, suspension, body, interior, etc are all in really good condition. Hell, the paint even came back far better than I expected.
Let me know. Maybe I should set up a vote ;-)
Cheers!
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