As It Was

So, I’d like to introduce myself.  My name is Jeremy Flower, I’ve been working for HMS since 2000, mostly as a web developer.  For about 4 or 5 years I did sales as well – but these days I’m mainly web development and marketing.  I spend a large amount of my time making music, I write music for concert and film.  I play laptop, guitar and miscellaneous other instruments.  For more info on my music, check out my music blog.

In any event, this is the first post in a long line of posts to chronicle the restoration of a 1989 BMW 332iS.  I fell in love with E30’s when I first saw a late model with BBS RX wheels that a friend had.  With tasteful mods, I think these cars are textbook beautiful.

Here are some photos of how the car used to sit.  I was seduced by the fly wheels, strong motor and fancy lights.  That isn’t to say that everything was crap – the suspension was great, and the car came with a set of E36 M3 Vader seats – which I turned around and sold.

The car came with Prime 16" wheels

Brand new tail lights and bumper trim and Remus exhaust

Some history on the car: It was purchased in 2003 for too much money, and had some serious issues. After fixing most of the issues, a missing part of the motor mount system put the motor through the radiator in a braking zone at Watkins Glen, so I parked the car. While it was parked I made the bad decision of restoring the car, and now 5 years later here I am, still trying to finish the car.

Driver's front quarter panel and the wheels.

You can see the European Ellipsoid lights here

As I mentioned, there were a lot of issues.  I took some photos of the problem areas.  Most of the problems had to do with a really bad paint job, but that bad paint job hid many demons.  The Previous owner had the body shop shave the rear antenna, and they didn’t really do such a good job – it had started to rust through pretty badly.  Also, when they painted the car, they didn’t take any of the trim off, or realistically , didn’t even open the hood to paint the cowl.  But, that didn’t stop me from buying the car.  Not quite sure why.  I guess I fell in love with it.

So then where did that leave me? With a desire to rebuild this car into something that I could be really proud of and take care of. I had owned an E30 previously that I loved, but that car died a slow death at the hands of the rust bug. This one had only a very little bit of rust. That was probably the only good reason that I bought the car. I would soon realize that wasn’t enough.

Cracked Paint

Rust where the antenna was

Overspray on the cowl.

The center section of the cowl

Another shot of the cowl overspray

The didn't remove any trim when they painted the car

A closeup of the front lip problem area

There was some paint bubbling on the fender edge

Break it Down

The Project corner

So here’s a post that shows all the things that I found when I started to take the car apart for real. It became very obvious to me that the car was in an impact and repaired poorly. This was not visible to me before I bought the car, because the wavy sheet metal was hidden quite well in the front radiator support. Oh well. I found rust, and some other shoddy repairs. The end of the frame rail was a little tweaked as well as the fender support. There was a fair amount of surface rust.

There is nothing more fun than dismantling a car.  Anyone that’s ever done it will tell you. Along with that fun is a kind of archaeological expedition.  You get to learn the stories of a car, and see its battle scars.  You find out how many years it has sat outside, and where the cosmetic surgery happened.

I carved out a spot in our garage to work on my car. I put it right next to Joe’s 2002, which should be a pretty sweet machine when it’s done. He’s restoring that thing like you read about – original everything. I’ve never had the privelage to drive an 02, but I think this was Joe’s first BMW, so he’s got a pretty sweet spot for it in his heart.

Wavy and rusty bumper mount

Twisted sheet metal up front

This is the inside of the rusty fender support

But On to the dismantling of my E30. I started at the front and worked my way back. You can see that I took the bumper and fenders off early. I wanted to get an idea for what lurked under the sheet metal to get an idea of how many impacts the car had seen and how bad they were. When I got down to the radiator core support and fender supports I found evidence of a fairly decent impact, but nothing earth shattering. It wasn’t like someone grafted a front clip onto this thing, it was only tweaked a little bit.

You can see that the bumper mount was put back into shape with the help of a hammer, and that where the oil cooler mounts is also a little tweaked. This was also evident in the front valence that I took off, which was tweaked a lot in order to make it fit normally. Someone bent the mounting tabs on the valence instead of replacing the core support, which I hate to admit, is probably something I would have chosen to do as well if I was faced with a repair like that.

Classic rust spot

A well sealed body plug. Right.

Hard to see, but the floor is pushed up slightly

A couple small rust spots on the passenger footwell

The dashboard is removed.

Small scratches on the dash

The dashboard out

Wiring mess

A shot of the rear seat sans upholstery

After I got down to the nitty gritty on the front end, I pulled the interior out to see what kind of condition everything underneath was in. for the most part it was pretty safe. The rust around the accelerator pedal is classic. If you have an E30 and don’t have rust there, you’ve either never driven the car in bad weather, or you live in the desert. The moisture from your right foot just drips down do the floor and sits there everytime you drive. It’s no wonder that rust forms there. That didn’t scare me.

And neither did the body plug that was sealed with enough silicone that whoever put it in was definitely high by the end of the job. Pulling that out and installing it with the correct seam sealer was simple. The pushed up floor section of the passenger foot well scared me a bit, because I distinctly remember it not being there when I first test drove the car. But my memory has been tested on a few occasions and more than once it has come up a bit short.

The small scratches on the dash buffed out. They were very superficial and to be honest are covered by the door seal. It was my first dash removal and I didn’t know the trick about twisting the dash backwards while pulling. That really makes it easy to put in and out.

There were no surprises under the rear seat. It’s pretty hard to get rust to develop there unless you strip the paint off and park on the beach for 2 years with the windows open. But the glue goop they use is pretty hard to get off, so I just left it.

The guts of the sunroof

I had already installed aluminum shock mounts

I pulled the sunroof apart, which was pretty weird and difficult. Today, 4 years after I took this photo, I understand exactly how the whole system works, but then I did not. So I kinda took small steps and took pieces off with hopes of not totally messing things up. I did alright. There’s more on the sunroof later, but suffice to say, the small torx bolts that hold the sheet metal piece to the cassette that slides forward and back are very difficult to unscrew with a small allen type torx wrench. Go out and buy a torx driver or ratchet driven torx set if you’re doing this job. Much easier and much less chance of stripping. You do not want to strip these bolts, because there is almost no way you can get a drill up in there.

You can see the aluminum shock mounts that I installed before tracking the car – I thought I would re-use them but I was wrong. They are now sitting in one of my other E30 street cars doing their job. I highly recommend these pieces. We sell them.

More rust found in the rear driver quarterpanel

The gory details below the shaved antenna

This was the one area of rust I knew about

So these are the shots that should have scared me away, but didn’t. These are shots of the rear driver quarter panel. There was water sitting in the seams which eventually led to the rust you see here, but more importantly I should have seen the seam of rivets and wavy metal that is pictured in the “gory details” photo. It’s kinda hard to see, but this is an upside down shot of underneath the antenna. The seam that you see is farther towards the front of the car and is essentially where the body shop attached a “new” rear quarter and riveted/welded it on. The whole seam is rusty. This is the shot that I should have really studied and from this photo I should have extrapolated the condition of the rest of the car. Hindsight. Water under the bridge, etc. I’m over it now, but suffice to say you can make any problem go away with the right amount of money.

The rust in the bottom of the quarter panel is also a pretty common E30 thing, I had seen that in many cars I looked at. Not too scary, but sucks none the less.

So then I took photos of the stash of parts that I had begun to amass. I boxed up a bunch of things and labeled them, which didn’t keep me from losing parts, but made it look a lot more professional.

The Vader seats that

Door from a parts car

The parts stash grows

More of the parts pile

Parts, parts, parts

I boxed up the small parts

The motor sits on a pallet

The engine bay was gross

And in the middle of all this I pulled the motor. Pulling motors is no longer exciting for me – I’ve done too many now. I wouldn’t mind it except for the fact that transmission tunnels are perhaps the greasiest place on the earth. And pulling exhaust pieces apart after years spent rusted together is one of my least favorite things to do.

Parts Arrive

I decided to convert my car to the 5 lug suspension from an E30 M3.  I found a shop parting a wrecked M3 and sent them a check.  This was the first load of parts that arrived for the car, and it arrived in a plastic bin.  Please, never ship suspension parts in a plastic bin.  Many parts were bent, and one of the strut tubes had a hole worn into it.  Awesome.  After a lot of patience and some prodding, the place I bought these parts from came through and sent replacement parts for the damaged parts and all the parts that they said were included but didn’t come with it.

The E30 M3 Suspension

Rear trailing arm

Bent front spring

Strut tube with a hole in it

Taking More Parts Off the Car

It takes more time than you think to strip a car completely, especially if you think you’re going to be re-using the things you’re taking off.  It would have been a lot easier if I had a realistic view of what would get re-used and what could be thrown out but hey, that’s how you learn.

Shown in the pictures below, you’ll see that I found more rust, some behind the passenger fender and some underneath the fuse box on the firewall.  I was really upset to find all this, but whatever.  It was about this time that I realized that I was going to go all the way and completely restore the vehicle, do a complete paint job, etc.  So I took everything out, brake pipes, heater core, ABS pump, Ebrake cables and all the wiring.  Taking the sunroof apart was pretty obnoxious as well.

On to the pictures.

Chemical Nation

The Box of sandpaper

60 Grit

The man that did the paintwork my car requested that I deliver the car to him with no paint on it, stripped to bare metal.  I tried to do what he said, so I went down to my local auto body supply shop and picked up a few gallons of Tal-Strip and a bunch of gnarly sandpaper.  The way this stuff works is pretty cool.  You scuff up the paint with 60 grit sandpaper, pour the chemical stripper on it and then cover it with plastic and let it fester.  I learned that you can’t do this outside in a New England winter.  It needs to be above 50 degrees for the chemical to really strip the paint.  The few panels I stripped on warmer days worked much better than the stuff i did on cold days.  I wasn’t comfortable stripping the car in the garage because I didn’t want the fumes.  So I spent a lot more time than I probably needed to stripping the car.

Stripper in a bottle

This is the reason I can still do algebra

The chemical stripper I used was aircraft stripper.  I’m not sure what makes it “aircraft” stripper, but that’s what it’s called.  I scored a sweet respirator mask from harbor freight that kept me from losing brain cells and dieing while working with the chemicals.  I also used seriously thick plastic gloves and a roll of plastic tarp material to keep all the stuff contained.  What’s really cool about this stripping stuff is that as soon as it touches water, the chemicals are deactivated.  So when I was done stripping I could just hose it down with soap and water and not worry about having acid everywhere.

Anyway, I masked off the interior of the car, and started scuffing.  I say scuffing because if you look at the picture of the sandpaper, you can see small rocks glued to a piece of cardboard.  If you’ve ever bought 60 grit sandpaper before, you know what I’m talking about.  Insane how gnarly this stuff is.  I have lots left if anyone needs it. .

So after a long few weeks of stripping paint, I finally got down to “metal.” In fact, what I worked my way down to was bondo, and lots of it.  The car had been in a serious enough fender bender to replace half of the rear driver quarter.  It really wasn’t done very well, which is why the storage box in the trunk was so rusted. The passenger rear quarter was also riddled with bondo.  The door that I had snagged off a parts car with a fellow BMWCCA member was bondo free, however.  This was great news to me, and ended up saving me 300 bucks in the end.

I started to get an idea of where the car stood.  At this moment, I knew that there were two obvious options, to stop or keep going.  Stopping would entail me essentially throwing the car away – it wasn’t worth rebuilding if the paint work wasn’t done well, and to do the paint work well, I would have to chose the other option which was to repaint the car properly.

And that is the story of how I made the worst financial decision of my life so far.

E30 M3 Suspension Follow-up

In the post I made earlier about the E30 m3 Brake setup, I mentioned that there were some problems with some of the parts due to shipping, wear, and just plain not being there.  After a very long wait, I received new parts from the place where I bought the suspension parts.  They sent me some brand new stuff that looked great.  I documented it just for posterity’s sake.

More Wrong Parts Arrive

So then I ordered a brake master cylinder to go with my new E30 M3 brake setup.  I wanted to ditch my standard E30 MC and upgrade to an E30 M3 unit so that my brake system felt exactly like the M3 system.  Having fallen in love with the way my buddy Kael’s M3 brakes felt, I wanted to get that same feeling in this car.  So I did what any good consumer would do, I called a supplier and ordered it.  Showed up a couple days later and was totally wrong.  I couldn’t put this thing in if I tried.

So, return it and try to get the right part, but wouldn’t you know it – that was the “last one” and they aren’t going to re-order the part.  Ok, send it back, pay the restocking fee (I swear to you that HMS Motorsport has the most lenient return policy of anyone in the business) and find the part elsewhere.

*sigh*

Off to Paint

Passneger side stripped

Bondo, bondo, bondo.

Passenger bondo

The roof came out great

Most panels stripped

I had taken as much paint off the car as I thought I could, and invited my paintman to come check out the damage.  He came over and told me about bondo, what it is like to paint on, and why you don’t want any bondo on your car, especially if you’re spending all this time on the car to make it look great.  Sadly, I agreed.  I say sadly, because that meant that I had to buy new sheet metal.  Lots of it.

And of course if you’re replacing all the sheet metal on the car, you have to do it with Factory BMW parts because everything else is a bad copy.  So I did.  I placed the order for a new hood, two new fenders, passenger door, front valence, two new rear quarter panels and a rear tail panel.  I kept the sunroof, roof, driver door and trunklid.  And in retrospect Mike said it would have been the same price to buy new parts as to have his guys prep the old ones.

This is what we at HMS affectionately call “Pulling the Trigger” or in other cases “Dropping the Hammer”.

Fresh Fenders

Fenders Valence hood

So I hung the body parts that I could for the transport, the hood and fenders.  I rolled the car out in the sun to shoot some photos of what it looked like before I took it down to Mike’s.  Incidentally, the Gray 325iX you see in the photo here is now mine as well.  Joe, my boss here at HMS, decided he wanted a newer car so I picked this thing up.  It’s not cheap to maintain, I’ll tell you that.

So Mike and I agreed on a date that I would tow the car down to his shop.  That day came and it was pouring.  But like the impatient kid I was, I didn’t let that stop me.  I rationalized it thusly – As the car sat in our garage, it developed surface rust because there was nothing but sheet metal exposed to air.  So what’s wrong with a little more rust?  Right.  He rightly called me an idiot when I showed up, and boy did I feel like one.  The next day was completely sunny – should have waited.

Radiator Core

Radiator Core

And, radiator core

So he let the car sit for a little, I figure probably because he was so frustrated with me creating more work for him.  Once he pulled it into the garage, he called and told me I needed an new radiator support.  Not shocking since I knew the car was in a front-end impact.  And I was suprised at how reasonable a lot of the sheet metal was in terms of cost.  Until you add it all up.  But in any event I ordered it up and took a few shots of it.

Bodywork Is Voodoo

New Rocker on Frame Jig

No Rear Quarter

Passeneger side done

So once Mike got all the body parts he needed and forgave me for bringing him the car in a downpour, he started to work on the car pretty heavily and quickly.  The car spent some time on the Frame Jig, because so many panels were replaced, and because we wanted to make sure the car was straight before moving forward.  These are some of my favorite photos of the whole process because you can see how the car is put together for real.  I see this as the turning point in the car – when parts stopped coming off, and when they started going back on.  I like to think of it as the “Rock Bottom” phase on a VH-1 Behind the Music, where the rockstar wakes up in a pool of vomit and sweat and realizes that heroin isn’t a foodgroup.  But I digress.

Driver's side trunk storage partition

Passenger front fender

Driver Fender & Door

So all the new panels started to go on the car and make it look like a car once again.  You can see all the welds in the picture on the far right, this is inside the trunk, where the Jack lives.  These other two shots are great as well – as all the panels really started to come together while the car sat on the frame jig.

New Body Panels

So here we see all the new body panels welded on.  Closeups of all the welds, etc.  You can see the fixes of all the rust spots.  Not much else to say, solid work – love it.