Having been told by my 'MOT' man here in southern France, down near Toulouse that my car had too much rust and too many holes for the new regulations I would have to get it repaired for the next time , that would be in two year's time... The list of work covered the usual things for an E30, driver and passenger footwell corners, holes in the sill around the jacking points, tow hitch ,minor holes in the chassis around the rear suspension mounting points, tailgate and more than a few holes in the floor where the heat shield studs had rotted through. I guess I have been a bit lucky in that the roads down here are not gritted in the winter, most of the snow is up in the mountains, so people either carry snow chains or change to winter tyres. The first job was fix the rear tailgate, fortunately I managed to find a 325 Touring in a BMW specialist garage in Toulouse, that was by sheer luck as the Touring is very rare down here, I have only seen one other in 18 years, apart from the scrapper, and that was a tourist.
Whilst the car was off the road I could then address the odometer that had stopped working, a very common fault across the entire BMW range. The problem is that the grease used in the odometer 'gear box' rots the plastic gear teeth, it is easy to fix, first you find out which make of speedo you have, mine is a Motometer, then you count the number of teeth on the gearset to see which one of nine different combinations you have. If you are lucky as I was, tooth numbers are inscribed on the gear wheel, you can then order a new set from a specialist in Germany
https://partworks.de/en-gearworks-de-co ... ant-b.html This is what it looked like when taken apart, you can see where the gear teeth are missing.
I now have a working odometer. I'll post up some more resto shots later.
Well, so much for the nice clean job and on to the real hard work.
It wasn't really that bad, until I got going with a screwdriver and a hammer, both driver and passenger sides were about the same.
I replicated a few parts, in this case the factory locating points and the inner wheel arch bracket, I know some don't bother replacing them as they are a rust trap but, I'd rather it looked about right., besides I needed somewhere to fix the inner wheel arches.
|The view from the inside, I had to cut out some perfectly decent metal in order to repair the vertical sill membrane.
Then back underneath to repair the big hole.
Next step was to make up a new lower wing quarter panel , weld it in, very carefully with heat sinks either side of the weld to reduce distortion. I was quite happy with the end result as it needed almost no body filler.
Before fitting the quarter panel I needed to replicate the inner wing part that fits to the lower door post, firstly the 'remains' of the old bit, then the new part made and fitted.
and finally. I will show some shots of the other side in the next update.
