325i Touring resto thread - damp footwells

[Grrrmachine]

I closed up the inner wing repairs this weekend with a mix of stolen panels and self-fabricated patches.

The first part involved mounting the inner wing support. I'd bought a front quarter of a car, and drilled out all the spot welds from this...


to get me to this stage, where I could take measurements and fold up a cardboard template.



Now, this Inner Wing Support is itself supported by an internal section giving it some rigidity across its biggest area. By cutting straight through it, I had to let in a new inner support which involved a lot of hammering, curving and cursing before it got even close to being the right shape.



But once that was on, I could size up and start fabricating the patch that would join the stolen part to the original inner wing support. It took most of the morning, and it wasn't perfect, but I wanted to do it all in one piece for the strength factor. With lots of tapping and filing I finally got to a point where it could be tacked in place:



From there, I took my time so as not to blow holes in either the new, old or oldest bits of metal. Still, because I had sprayed the backs of the repair patches in zinc primer to stop them rusting, I ended up getting some porous welds, which I then ground down and finished off with a flappy sanding disc (while it lasted).



The results aren't neat, but they're definitely strong. I also let in another small patch close to the wing mounting tab. This is where the inner wing support structure finishes, so all mud, water and salt gets flung up and into this pocket, which rots out from the inside. It also causes rust on the inside of the car, behind the speakers in the footwell, so it's worth poking a screwdriver around there if you've got similar rust issues.

This final picture gives you a comparison to the first picture in this thread; shame it took five full weekends to get it done.

[Grrrmachine]

A few other rust spots need to be treated while the wing is still off. With all the road spray able to get behind the wing, splash damage had reached the lower door hinge and had caused the bulkhead to crumble. So with some slit discs, a grinder and a sliver of metal, we went from this...



to this:



All the photos for the Inner Wing Repair can now be seen here:

https://plus.google.com/photos/10634814 ... 3820608609

Next stop, floor repairs!

[Grrrmachine]

Common E30 floor rust


When the E30 was being assembled in the factory, little square pads of metal were attached to the corners of the shell so that it could be lifted and moved around. Once complete, these pads remained, and are mistaken by tyre fitters over the years as jacking points. Because of that, it only takes one bad attempt with a trolley jack to punch a hole in the shell, which will rot under the carpet un-noticed for years, until it looks like this...



The best way to deal with this is to remove the floor pads completely. They're known rot traps, accumulating all the muck and spray the road can throw at it, so out came the grinder...


and in went the new patch, with a curve to it to mimic the floor running up the bulkhead, and a flange on the side for the A-pillar to butt up to


Zip zap with the welder, brrr with the grinder, and a side patch is added to complete the A-pillar running down to the floorpan, and also meeting the outer sill. This is another three-skin joint on the E30, and I made sure the joins were welded both inside and out.


The E30's carpets have a thick foam backing, and these had absorbed all the water that had leaked in and were rotting the floor out from the inside. The underseal was doing a great job of trapping this moisture in, so that this length of the floorpan had corroded completely, without puncturing the underseal.


So out it came, and in went a new patch, tacked for fettling.


I worked my way around slowly, putting out the fires as the underseal burst into flames, until the two patches in the floor pan were completely done. And that leaves this corner in a much more solid condition than it was six weeks ago

[daimlerman]

I'm impressed,good work,keep the reports coming.

[capri_rob]

I'm impressed,good work,keep the reports coming.

+1

Jacking-point delete FTW

[Grrrmachine]

Cheers guys. I know a lot of this work has been done before, but many of the older posts have photos that no longer exist, so I'm trying to document it as much as I can so that more of these can be saved.

Who knows, maybe I'll write a Rust entry to the wiki...

[Grrrmachine]

To bring the bodywork repairs to a close, it was necessary to seal everything up with a variety of chemicals and coatings. I am indebted to skipunda for his advice here, as I'd have ballsed it all up without him.

After welding, the floor was in a right old state. Surface rust, greasy fingerprints, weld spatter, left-over bitumen sound insulation and melted underseal. It wasn't a pretty sight.



What's worse, the rear floor wasn't looking too pretty either. I hadn't stretched my repairs this far back and hadn't anticipated this...



That's the drainage bung hole. I won't show you what the actual bung looks like, but it's not pretty.

So, to get this all scrubbed up nicely, I use an etcher. This is a very primitive method, and there are more sophisticated products on the market for this, but not in Poland. So it's out with the Phosphoric Acid, in an atomiser bottle


and the wire wool to rub it down with


A bit of elbow grease, a go-over with the vacuum cleaner and a wipe-down with panel wipe (or white spirit), and you're ready for an anti rust treatment.



I've picked up plenty of these over the years, but they all work in essentially the same way, converting surface rust into a stable oxide, and sealing the whole layer under a membrane. It doesn't cure rust, but it's an added layer of protection. There's also zinc paint which is good if you've just drilled a hole in a panel (for fitting body kits to sills, for example.) This time around, I used Dinitrol RC900, which sprays out like WD40. Spray it on, let it fizz, then give it a tiny drop of water on some tissue paper to stop the reaction process, in case it eats too far into the metal.

Once it's sprayed on, it should look like this:





And that's the new bung plate from BMW, ready to be fitted in. There's one on each side of the rear footwell, and although I haven't looked under the carpet yet, I bought a second just in case.

To fit them, they just drop into the slot and twist, which isn't much of a seal, so to give them all the help they can get we'll use a brushable seam sealer.



You can use U-Pol or 3m, I'll use my local brand. It goes on smoothly, and application is even better if you cut the bristles down on a normal paintbrush by an inch. This was liberally daubed and smeared over every single area of the resto, including the inner wing, the floorpan welding and the bulkhead. I was too filthy afterwards to hold a camera, so there's no photos, which I'm sure you're gutted about.

Although seam sealer is soft AND strong, a more durable layer needs to go under the car, and with all the floorpan and wheelarch repairs I had to look at my options. There's no Waxoyl or POR-15 over here, and I didn't want to mix engine oil with pig fat and paraffin like your grandad used to, so I bought this:



It's a 2-in-1 seam sealer and underbody spray. The upside is it makes a good spatter pattern of thick rubbery sealant which is similar to the original BMW stuff, but the downside is that it needs a compressor and a special gun to be used. I had the compressor already, and the gun was about five quid, complete with a special tube for injecting the sealant into cavities. This tube turned out to be utterly useless, but the gun itself sprayed a good controllable mist which left the arch like this:



After that, it was just a matter of covering the interior repairs in a good coat of hammerite. You can also use cheap spray paint if the repair is not going to be visible, but make sure it's acrylic so that you have a plastic layer of protection. I'll be covering my repairs in bitumen sheets for soundproofing, so no-one will see them anyway.

With all that taken care of, I can go back to what I wanted to be doing, which is sanding down the doors ready for spray-painting.

[Reck]

Wonderful thread. Planning on taking the wings off my E21 in the next couple of weeks and dreading to think what I'll find underneath, but this has at least given me hope!! Thanks for the detailed write up.

[Grrrmachine]

and here's the inner wing, fully seam-sealed and painted over with Hammerite:



and a side-by-side comparison from two months ago:

[Grrrmachine]

So now it's time to move onto the panels.

When I bought the car, the two front wings were in shocking condition. The driver's side was a red replacement, brush-painted silver, while the passenger side was original and rusting under the bodykit. The bonnet was dented on its leading edge, the driver's door was a rusting blue replacement, the passenger rear had a big dent in it and overall the car was crusty and scabby. Even the clearcoat was peeling from the sunroof panel, although thankfully the roof itself wasn't rotten.

With that in mind, I spend some time sourcing replacements, making sure they were as rust free as possible. Then I converted the garage into a bodyshop:



From here, panels were stripped to bare metal with a grinder and a flap-disc (in the case of the brush-painted wing)



or otherwise flatted back and resprayed:



Even a new front valance was sourced. For this I didn't worry too much about getting it perfectly straight, since the lower part is covered in a stonechip and then painted over, so it doesn't need a mirror finish:



I then spent a day comparing the 8 doors I had, fitting the most rusty to the car and getting the best four ready for paint. Because they're vertical panels they needed to be sprayed vertically, so I mounted hooks on the walls and hung the doors from their top edge for painting:



It worked well, with three of the four turning out useable. Stupidly, in my eagerness I put the base on too wet with one door leading to runs, so that will have to be stripped and redone. I've also done a bonnet and another sunroof panel, which means only the car itself remains.

[TouringMatt]

Cracking work

[Grrrmachine]

With all the panels done, it was time to get the shell stripped for its own paintwork.

I knew the sunroof was scrap, and had already painted a replacement, but wasn't expecting it to be quite so tragic when I removed it:



The tailgate is the only removable that I will keep in place, but it still needed rubbing down. Unsurprisingly, like all tailgates, it had its fair share of blisters



But what really surprised me was the rear arch. There was blistering around the bumper, and when I removed the window trim I found evidence of a previous paint job; not a bad one either, but as I touched the grinder to the rust blister I also dug into the surrounding filler, and dug, and dug, and dug...



You can see where the fibreglass goes over the original primer, then the filler on top of that, and the new paint layers. It didn't work though; moisture penetrated underneath and pitted the metal, eventually cracking the thick repair, so it all had to come off. But the amount of filler here is shocking; it's between 5-8mm thick in places.

[Grrrmachine]

With all the removable panels painted and stored, it was time to get the car into the garage and stripped down. The bumpers and trim were taken off and the windscreen removed so that the rust hunting could begin.



A quick zap with the welder and a smooth-down with the flappy disc got it back to how it should be


But it was as I moved lower down, and removed the side skirts, the the real horrors started showing. The driver's side sill was replaced last year, and I'd had that skirt off to make last month's floor repairs, but the passenger side had been left unattended, until now:



This metal support inside the sill is the rear jacking point. A thick metal plate pushes into a hole in the sill at this point, and it had rotted away the sill around it. I was running low on metal supplies at this point, and really didn't need another serious welding job, but I cracked on with it as best I could. There are also two bolts on the bottom edge that hold the rear subframe mount, and these were rusted solid too. One had to be drilled out, which made a messy job of the inner sill too.

Remember the rusty sunroof? It lovingly donated its skin to make not one but three sill repair pieces, to mimic exactly the sill, the rear support section and a piece of the inner arch.



The desire to grind the welds completely smooth was offset by the need to keep the metal thick. The area will be primed and stonechipped soon, so it doesn't have to be perfect anyway.

But there's more welding to do in other areas, so I'll be tackling that ASAP. The paint needs to go on before winter properly sets in...

[Jozi]

Those are neat repairs and and good use of scrap body parts!

At what point will you decide it's to cold to paint? I'm sort of close to painting myself and reckon it might be to cold, can only imagine it's even colder in Poland right now than here.

[Grrrmachine]

It's been minus temperatures for the last week here and to be honest, it's doing my head in. I was supposed to be shooting paint two months ago, but then I found all this rust...

I'm looking at ways to insulate and heat my garage, but bearing in mind it gets to minus 30 at night sometimes here, I think I might have to take a break between January and March to concentrate on other things.

[Jozi]

Were still looking at 10+ here in Ireland, I don;t know for how long though or long enough for me to paint bits and pieces. I'm just under a lean-to though. I reckon, like yourself, I'll end up doing other things and leaving paint till Feb-Mar

[Grrrmachine]

Moving around the car, there was very clear rust around the seams holding on the rear valance.



These welds trap moisture, which then bubbles up underneath the underseal. By the time the underseal peels off, you'll have a gaping wound in the metal which looks a bit like... well, I don't need to say.


You can try and be OEM and cut two pieces to restore the rear quarter panel and the valance, but then you'll be recreating the weld that caused all the problems in the first place. I took the more direct approach cutting the entire weld out, letting in a fresh plate (more sunroof) and using a flappy disc to polish the whole thing flat



The seamsealer and stonechip will cover any little flaws I've left.

The other side was even worse, as this is a deeper pocket for the rear battery (if fitted) on these cars. The rot went all the way down to the floor this time, so two pieces were cut in the valance and a third in the floorpan to rebuild the back quarter. All tacked in place..



filled in and ground back

[Grrrmachine]

Between the sill and the valance, there is still the frustrating task of the rear quarter panel. On these cars the fuel filler goes through here to the tank, and years of petrol splash down the inside of the panel, softening and stripping away the underseal until you get this:



It's only surface rust at the top, but further down it allows all the road elements to start eating away at the bottom of the wheel arch, which means cutting out fiddly curves of the inner arch:


This hole backs into the battery-in-boot box I mentioned earlier; with rust at both ends, it's amazing the floor of the box was still in there. E30s also have a tendancy to rot out half-way up the rear inner arch at exactly the location where the plastic inner arch liner stops, so more holes had to be cut out from here:



Getting your helmeted head into the wheel arch with the welding torch is more than a little tricky. Getting steady welds without blowing holes is an absolute nightmare. So I apologise for the blobiness of the welds here, but at least all that metal is keeping the water out. And to make you that little bit jealous, that's a one piece repair, hand-curved



And with the repairs to the rear valance done as well, there's a whole load of new metal in the rear floorpan



With all this chopping out of rust, my welding has definitely improved in the last six months, so that each new bit of brown doesn't make my heart sink as much as it did in the first post. Still, with these repairs done there's very few locations left where rust can hide itself. Fingers crossed!

[Jozi]

With all this chopping out of rust, my welding has definitely improved in the last six months, so that each new bit of brown doesn't make my heart sink as much as it did in the first post. Still, with these repairs done there's very few locations left where rust can hide itself. Fingers crossed!

I had the exact same experience! Good job again.

[Grrrmachine]

I reckon, like yourself, I'll end up doing other things and leaving paint till Feb-Mar

One of the things I've been warned about is the temp of the compressor tank and incoming air. Colder air will have a higher moisture content, and although I've got some really fancy filters here (20 and 0.1microns) there's still a high risk of trapping moisture into the paint, which will bubble out six months later when the temperatures rise.

After all this prep work, and on a black metallic car, that's not something I want to risk

[Jozi]

Maybe I won't do any painting after all! Pretty sure we have no filters on our compressor! I don't fancy bubbling paint either even if it will be covered over with underseal. Would heating the primer/paint as it's cures with a hot airgun help?

[Grrrmachine]

Hot air's not recommended, although I've got no experience with it. You can get panel heaters though, which look like Halogen lamps but use Infrared to warm things up. These can be pretty pricey though, and are only good if you're doing panels; you'd need loads to warm up a whole car.

You should have same basic filters on your air lines post-compressor anyway, to keep out the oil and water.

[Jozi]

I'll have a look later and see what it has. It's a cheap yoke of a compressor. I was in a paint shop yest and seen some panel heaters, never thought of looking at a price. I've really only got patches I want primer sprayed on, mostly around the the car in places you don't really see and a lot of it will be covered over with underseal. Will also be priming/painting inside the car ourselves. The pro's can do the engine bay and bodywork, I'm to afraid of making a balls of it and having to do it all again!

[Grrrmachine]

Bear in mind then that the car shouldn't sit in primer too long; primer's porous, so it will absorb moisture.

All I can think of is to do your repairs, then spray on something like Dinitrol RC900, which is an anti-rust chemical and barrier. That'll seal in the repair for you to brush seam sealer over the top, then you can leave the panels for a few months and do the primer and paint when it warms up.

I looked at the machine mart website; panel heaters start at 100 quid...

[Jozi]

Thats another thing I was worried about. I might look locally if there's a place I can rent a panel heater, no machine mart in Ireland You think heating the area to be painted before and after painting is enough of a precaution with this weather?

[Grrrmachine]

I've not been letting the car rust in the garage, but now that winter's kicking in I don't relish spending too many hours laying on the -5 concrete.

But with the rust tackled and slathered in underseal, I decided to tackle some of the mechanical issues, so that the car could get a fresh przeglad (Polish MOT) when it's finished. So I decided to drop the rear subframe and refresh all the decaying and perished components at the back end.

Getting the subframe off these cars is simple in theory; the whole rear end is held on via two bushes, held in with a bolt each. The bolt is easy enough to undo, but the aluminium centre of the bush welds itself to the car over time. Still, if came off eventually...



and it wasn't very pretty back there. The bushes are completely shot and are on order, but the brake lines... oh, those brake lines. They were mullered:



I had a go at undoing the nuts with spanners but it just wasn't happening so I unbolted the entire T-piece, ripped the brake lines with my bare hands (they were that bad).

Then I went indoors to warm up, bringing with me copper tube, brake fittings and my flaring kit. A cuppa later, and I had...



two long lengths for the trailing arms, two short lengths to go from the t-piece to the flexi hoses, and a long coil to repair the front-to-rear brake line.

A little bending, a little tweaking, and cleaning the T-piece up with a brass brush on the drill, and it all came together:

[capri_rob]

Nice work

Rear valance repair is interesting - I need to get a new one put in mine and am expecting similar issues under the bumper but I don't have the skillz to do it myself.

[Grrrmachine]

Bush time!



The rear subframe is responsible for the whole back end of the car. It's got a fat bush at each end, whose rubbery jiggling allows the rear suspension a little degree of lateral flex.



In this case, a whole lotta jiggling! These bushes were utterly shot, with the aluminium core rattling around loosely inside the rubber sheath. They popped out easily enough (with a bit of drilling), and then a hacksaw was used to slice into the metal band around the edge. Once that was cut, a sturdy bolster was driven between the bushing and the subframe until it eventually popped out. Not as bad as I was expecting...



...although a bit of the aluminium was still stuck to the car. No matter, a 3mm drill bit cut into it quickly enough, and then a baby bolster (5mm) and a hammer chopped it out easily enough.

The trailing arm bushes were another matter entirely.


The trick, apparently, is to use 10mm threaded bar and some nuts to pull them out, winding the nuts down the bar slowly and steadily until they pop out like wine corks.

Not a f king chance with these! I snapped a meter's worth of 10mm bar and shredded the thread off some 12mm bar before I found the solution; 160mm M12 bolts, with long nuts on the other end, wound in with a 1/2metre extension bar. That. Was. Hard. Work.



But with a bit of lube (proper lube, Durex Play, strawberry flavour ) the new ones slid in quickly. And we're ready for reassembly!

[capri_rob]

Nice work

[Grrrmachine]

A year before I took the car off the road, I had a new sill put on one side. So I wasn't expecting there to be any rust in the area.

But laying on my back, smacking out the remains of the subframe bush, the glimmer of orange rust caught my eye around the mounting point. So I started prodding around the copious amounts of underseal slathered around the inside of the wheel arch, to see how bad this surface flaking was...


Very bad! The bodyshop last year must have discovered the rotting wheel arch while they had the sill off. Rather than put in a small plate for me, or even tell me, they'd just slapped abrushable seam sealer all over it and left it, so that it could fester and spread to the inner sill too. Bastards.


So chop chop chop, and spray spray spray with the phosphorous to see where the rust is...


and in with the new metal. The inner seal wasn't too bad, so I just filled up the pinholes. The cavity will be injected with wax soon enough.

The other end was rotten too. This is the pocket with the washer bottle in for the touring rear wash/wipe, so with all that fluid sloshing around I expected it to be completely shot. It wasn't too bad, but it had pinholed in a few places so out it came:



and in went the repair patch


The smell of burning underseal is properly choking.

I got the wire brush on the angle grinder to clean it all up, and decided to take a little swipe inside the arch to see how bad those little rust blisters were. Oh dear.



The underseal and paint flaked off in sheets. It had obviously been loose for a while, and I'm lucky I'd caught it now; that could have become terminal in quite a short time. As it was, I was able to polish it all up and cover it with anti-rust (Dinitrol) to preserve it. The whole repair will be seamsealed in due course, but for now my arse is too numb from sitting on minus-15 concrete, so that'll be tomorrow's job.

[Grrrmachine]

With the orange crusty stuff finally dealt with at the back end, it's time to make sure they don't return. Spray-on Dinitrol, brush-on seam sealer and a thick coat of stone chip got one side sorted...



But the other had its own form of crustiness, in the form of a rotten vent pipe. It crumbled away in my hands.


So I ripped it off with my fingers, and got to work cleaning things up. The wire brush on the angle grinder removed the surface rust, the three-layer chemicals did their trick, and then a restored (not new) pipe cover was fitted to get the wheel arch back to how it should be. The top mounts were also changed to remove any embarrassing rusty leftovers.



And with all that tidying, fingers are crossed that the back end is finished. The rear beam is bolted back on, new brake pipes are installed, all bushes have been replaced and some new springs were installed. Even the anti-roll bar has been sanded back, repainted and refitted with fresh drop links. All it needs is the big beefy diff fitted.


And a quick shot of the ruined components removed from the back end, to remind us all why these things need changing occasionally.

[THEHOOD]

Good work there mate , my touring is looking pretty much the same at the moment

[Dezzy]

Some good graft there

[capri_rob]

Epic work - thankfully as most of us arent putting vast mileages on these turds now rear beam bushes should last a good few years once done - its just the pain of doing them at the time !

[Grrrmachine]

Thanks guys. I've noticed that it's only taken six months for the webhost to start losing some of the original photos, so I'm transferring them all to Google now.

For the really anal of you, all the subframe photos can be seen here:

https://plus.google.com/photos/10634814 ... 4759696561