Colin’s Projects

Colin’s currently sanding so I figured I’d post a few photos on our (almost real-time) progress. Having procured a new tank of CO2 and a full set of new seals, we’re really planning on getting a lot done today!

Colin started by sanding the roof which thankfully just had surface rust and came out pretty nice and clean! Then it was time to remove the front and back windshields. Just a few cuts to the seals, a little push from the inside, and the back came right out. The rust looks pretty minimal so we’re hopeful that it will clean up okay.

The front windshield also came out pretty easily… to reveal some serious rust! The seals were so shot we could feel the moisture still in them, and there was even a pool of water that had accumulated on the bottom!

More pics after the sanding…

Last week I got some epoxy primer onto the new driver’s side door. I was able to pull the big dents most of the way out by welding some nails to it and pulling with vice grips and all the rust holes are now nicely patched.

I started up on what I knew was going to be the biggest part of this whole project and that was replacing the rear panel. The pictures don’t show it, but my rear panel was rusted through in many places and was pretty bent out of shape.

I just cut carefully along the seams of the panel with a big cut off wheel. The spot welds on the vertical support had to be drilled out. You can also see the battery in its new spot in the trunk.

Here is the area where the fuel tank sits. It was pretty awful looking, but, fortunately, there was no serious rust. The tank sits on some closed cell foam rubber so I went to Home Depot to find some stuff to replace it with. The rust I cleaned up with a wire wheel.

Here is the new panel partially welded in. I opted to fill the seams for a cleaner look.

It looks terrible because of the paint, but the new panel is very solid and straight and makes me feel much better about the back end of the car. Everything lined up perfectly and the trunk closes better than ever.

I am also converting the car to the earlier style small bumpers, so I am filling all the holes left from the “big bumpers.” I’ll be using a fiberglass reproduction of the original bumper more for practical purposes than anything. I like the look of the small bumpers much better but I don’t want to pay the absurd prices that the chrome ones command.

Finally, I painted the inside of the trunk with some flat black Rustoleum enamel. It looks so much better in there now that I can hardly recognize it.

With most of the door stripped away, 2 small rust holes were revealed as well as the usual dent that the doors get when the door brakes fail. The front corner of the door had rust through with a similar, but much smaller, hole on the back side. Here is the worst hole being repaired.

This is the back side. I actually started by cutting out a small rectangle on the outer part of the door skin which revealed some rust on the section shown in the picture above. I just cut a little triangular section out as the effected area was very small.

Here is the patch piece being test fitted. I tack welded in the two bottom corner in first so then I could bend the piece up to match the contour of the door.

Here are the completed welds. I’ll grind them down tomorrow and they should be nearly invisible.

This is the opposite side of the door. You can see the fresh metal below it.

Again, here is the tiny patch being test fitted. I tacked welded the corners and then tapped down the warped parts with a hammer to make sure it was nice and flush.

And this is the final product. It’ll need a little bit of bondo but it is much better than the rust hole that was there.

I was also able to fill all the trim holes in the door, the holes left from a body puller and I pulled out the major dents. I don’t have pictures of that as I haven’t quite finished them up, but hopefully I can take some tomorrow.

So the big reason I was able to get the car for such a low price was that the previous owner drove it into his (park) ‘66 Nova. The damage was completely limited to the BMW’s front fender and driver’s side door, thankfully, and it looked much worse than it really was. To get me by, I bought a door from a salvage yard. I went to work on it about a month ago, fixing the smaller bits of rust, but I discovered some more nasty bits that were in harder to repair places. So, when I saw a door for $50 I figured it was a good deal considering I could pretty easily sell my current one for that.

So this is the 3rd driver’s side door that I’ve had since having the car. My hope was that it would be the last, but I’ve learned to never be to sure until the 30 plus years of paint have been stripped away…

Thankfully, stripping the door was not too bad. I finished the whole outside surface in about an hour working at a pretty casual pace. I was able to do most of it with the big sander and went over the hard to reach parts with the abrasive disc on the sander.

The good news is that the panel is in pretty good shape. There are two small holes in each of the corners, but both are easy fixes. Someone stripped the panel at some point and loaded it up with bondo. The rust holes had been covered with bondo, too, which is a complete joke and of course was not holding up at all. The doors on the 2002s all seem to get the same dents in them too from failed door stops, and this one has a small one. It looks like someone tried to pulled it out, but didn’t weld up the holes from the puller. I’ll close them up with the welder and then properly pull the dent out.

Ann tried to take some photos to show the mess that all this work creates.

It was only about 1.5 hours to get all this work done which really wasn’t too painful.

After months of looking at the horrible paint and watching the rust spots grow. I finally started to spray on some new paint. Friday night, I started work on the trunk by filling the holes that hold the “belt line” chrome trim in place. The trim seems to trap moisture and is responsible for pretty much every single bit of rust on the car, so I decided to do away with it all together. I’m not terribly fond of how it looks, either and its very expensive to replace so shaving it off was an easy decision.

I used some non-galvenized nails to plug the holes. I tried to find nails that had heads that were just slighter larger than the holes so that they would be easy to grind off.

Next, I went about touching up some of my welds that ran around the inside seam of the trunk. It seems like water seeped in through the trim holes and then was trapped against the trunk seal. This was very time consuming as the patches were tricky to make because of the complex curves. The total amount of time for these repairs was probably about 5 hours. I still need to grind down the welds some more but I am still waiting for a carbide burr in the mail.

Once the rust had been dealt with, I stripped the entire trunk panel with 60 grit sand paper on my gigantic Craftsman sander. There were 2 thick layers of paint on the trunk so this took almost 2 hours. The amount of dust it generated was unbelievable. Doing this in the 90 degree heat is really a miserable experience so I just blitzed it without taking a break.

This being my first time using my spray gun set up, I was pretty nervous. I set up my moisture trap, used a nice, high quality hose that was just long enough, and set the pressure to the exact recommendation for my gun. The gun itself is a Chinese made clone of a much more expensive gun and it was recommended for the type of work I’m doing. It was only $80 which made me sort of nervous (when you consider that name brands are 4 times as much) but I figured it was probably worth a shot. I bought two guns because it supposedly a bad idea to mix your primer gun with your color and clear coat guns and also because I needed two different tip sizes.

The first coat of primer I used is Dupont’s direct to metal epoxy primer. This is the stuff that they use on modern paint jobs and you use it without any sort of etching primer underneath it. Because of this, you’re supposed to scuff the steel with a pretty rough grit paper (like the 60 grit that I used) so that it has something to bond to. Its pretty expensive stuff, but it takes VERY little to cover a panel. Its a two part system with the epoxy and then a temperature specific activator. It supposedly seals the metal just about as well as anything can and also provides a great base to start applying bondo to.

The spraying went incredibly well. The gun is stupidly easy to use and produces almost no overspray. It is a low volume low pressure design with a gravity feed cup so its very efficient with its paint use and consumes very little air. My compressor kept up without a problem which was a huge relief to me (I figured that was going to be the biggest hurdle to overcome) and the air coming out was clean and moisture free.

The epoxy cures into something that almost feels like plastic. It seems extremely durable and I’m very happy with the result. I did get a 1 small run but it will sand out very easily. I quickly dialed back on the amount of paint that the gun puts out and that seemed to solve the problem.

I also managed to pick up a new fender for $20 (as well as a better driver’s side door and a rear panel) from a guy in San Jose who had some spares. It was in good shape with no serious dings and just a minor bit of rust on the very bottom.

I stripped it with my sander and an abrasive disc and sprayed it on Saturday. It looks as good as new now. I also welded up the holes for the side reflectors (they had them on the US cars but not in Europe so I decided I prefer how the fender looks without them), the trim holes, as well as the holes for the bumper’s side pieces (I am switching to a much smaller bumper eventually).

This is some of the dust left after stripping the fender.

The fender came out very nicely with just one spec of dust landing on it that was easily sanded out. It still needs a little bit of bondo in its one dent and to clean up the welds, but overall, it looks just about new.

I did manage to catch my leg with an abrasive disc while cleaning around the lip of the fender. It still hurts and it put a pretty good sized hole in my jeans.

Tonight I’ll start stripping the new door. My plan is to get epoxy primer on all the removable panels, then switch over to painting them fully. Once those are done, I’ll tackle the roof, door jambs, and rear quarter panels but I need to pull the glass out for that.