I was again travelling.
The instructions to my friend, who owns the garage and helped me so much with contacts and everything to get my work done, were very clear.
It was 31st May 2014. At best we had a 15 day window to wrap up the pending work on a war footing and get the car out of the open garages and workshops as the Monsoon was rolling in from Southern India.
There was a reason why I was panicking.
London gets about 600mm of rainfall in a year on an average.
Mumbai and especially the central parts that I live and where the garage is, gets 2457mm of rainfall on an average, and if the rain gods decide to be extra kind and give us a generous helping, then it can even be over 3400mm.
All of the 2400+ mm crashing down on us between June to September.
Four bad months ahead and I was dreading that the car was not done. The carpets had not been installed, we had to remove the Windscreen rubbers to access the stuck bits of headliner and install a new one.
And the carpet and trim fellow worked out of a small shop with a yard to park and work on the cars.
I came back to Mumbai after 12 days and discovered that the car had been jump started and driven from the sunroof fellow to the trim shop, and then they had struggled to remove the Windscreens and given up, while pigeons did their morning rituals from the ledges above the building.
The car was looking terrible with the muck all over the touched up paint, it wouldn't start, no work had been done, and they hadn't even informed me that they were stuck without the tools to remove windscreen glass.
I called a tow truck and got it towed to a Mercedes restorer. Someone I had been planning to go to for final fitting and some spit and polish, for the simple reason that they are expensive.
I borrowed a mate's Fiat Palio Adventure and loaded up my boxes of parts from my friend's garage.
Picked up the carpet and headliner material from the shop and asked him to finish the work in the new workshop.
The B Pillar trim was in sad shape and the trimmer had pasted cardboard to hold the limp pillars but I knew that sooner of later I would have to spend some money calling for them from eBay.
At the new workshop, I spent about a week hand holding them through BMW parts and especially E30s. Gave them my copy of my Haynes Repair Manual.
We took an inventory of parts that I was handing over in the 4 boxes.
A lot of 'How To' printouts that I had gathered for the various people working on it so far.
So far since I had bought the wheels, they had been lying unopened, and that was the first thing that they attempted.
I've noticed that it is a bad idea to change workshops in the middle of a rebuild. The new guys never trust what has been done before. And will try and poke holes in every aspect.
So I gave them a list of things to be done, and things that have already been tackled. We made a plan that during the week, they will tackle the chassis/suspension work, fit in the remaining bushing, during the weekends, the trim fellow will work on the liner and carpet.
Meanwhile, I had taken the black Vinyl from the chap making the fibreglass door cards and taken them to the seat factory and asked them to use the same dark 'leather' that was used on the sides of the seats so that we have one tone in the interior. We decided that the thin red stitch was ok on the seat, to replicate that on the door card stitch pattern would be too much. This wasn't an M car.
Monsoons, Ramzan, a Mercedes workshop that had never seen an E30, and confusion of where to start delayed the job by a couple of weeks. Nothing was being done on the car.
The workshop guys and the trim chaps were not getting along. I guess because I had forced them to work together. For the sake of continuity. And more importantly, for a monetary reason.
When I first towed the car over and asked for an estimate basis the pending work from the new Merc workshop, they quoted Rs 35,000 for the headliner and carpet (£350 approx), Versus Rs 11,500 (£120 approx) from the guy who was doing it.
And the Rs 11,500 was with the material!
I knew that the Merc guys were expensive. First proof of their margins came through.
Dark and gloomy.
That's how it was in Mumbai.
