Colin’s Projects

I spent almost 4 hours last night waiting in the emergency room at Kaiser with Colin. He’d gotten a speck of something in his eye on Monday while working on the car and I was finally able to convince him that it was worth a trip to the emergency room! He’d been reluctant to go (despite my constant nagging, I might add) because it didn’t hurt at all and wasn’t affecting his vision… but it turned out to be a small piece of metal, which apparently rusts very quickly in the eye and should thus be taken care of as soon as possible!

The doctor in the emergency room, who we saw after about 2 and a half hours of waiting, ended up not being able to do anything for him as the speck didn’t come away easily with a swab, so after another hour and a half of waiting we were finally referred to a specialist in the morning. We woke up bright and early at around 7am to see him and within minutes he quickly removed the speck (pictured above) with some kind of plastic toothpick. We thought all was well, but then he took a closer look at what appeared to be rust rings… and realized that it was another more deeply embedded piece of metal, requiring slightly more invasive digging to remove!!! DOH!

The good news is that the piece, though fairly deeply embedded, hasn’t actually pierced the eye and Colin’s vision is still perfect (without glasses even). Also even this more invasive type of removal procedure isn’t that uncommon. The bad news is that we need to make another trip to the emergency room on Monday morning so another specialist can do the removing, with other staff on duty in case things get a bit complicated (we sure hope not).

Anyway, Colin’s very lucky as this could have been much much worse! The lesson to learn is that you should ALWAYS wear your safety goggles when working with power tools!

Monday night I finally got a chance to spray on some base coat and clear. The color is “machinery gray” from “Restoration Shop.” Its just a run of the mill urethane paint system. Their color selection is limited, but the quality seems quite good and I liked the color (and the price).

Everything went on pretty smooth. I had too small runs, which were actually from a blob of paint dripping off the gun (totally my fault). The clear coat was a bit more difficult. I sprayed too heavy on the final coat and ended up with some runs and “dieback” on the roof. This is when the clear doesn’t cure properly and loses it’s gloss. Rather than try to just buff it all out, I hand sanded the entire car with 400 grit paper and took it down quite a bit. I sanded through the clear, unfortunately, in several spots. Fortunately, I have a small Iwata airbrush that I use to paint model cars, so I used it touch up the basecoat. This worked great, thankfully, and you can’t even notice the spots. Wednesday, I went back and sprayed 3 more coats of clear, this time with higher air pressure (to lessen the orange peel) and in much thinner coats. Thankfully, it cured properly this time. Currently, I’m sanding out the clear now and will be polishing it in the coming days.

Here is the “new fender” which I am quite proud off. Putting it on properly is quite a bit more difficult than I thought it would be. The front piece, that fits around the lip, is tricky to get aligned nicely. I MIG welded the top seam and then smoothed it with bondo. This should joint should out last me and never crack. The driver’s side fender has been dented since I bought the car so it was a great feeling to finally see it this way.

I test fitted the rear tail lights, and everything fits as it should now.

My “seamless” corner.

I haven’t had time to post lately, mostly because, other than work, I’ve been spending all my time laboring over the car. I finally got all the welding and bondo done, which was a huge relief, until I made a horrible discovery. The passenger side tailight frame was broken when I bought the car and I didn’t have a replacement until AFTER I finished putting in the rear panel. I had the seams already smoothed to perfection and primed when I placed my replacement taillight frame on, only to realize that it sat about 1″ away from the body! After a bit of stress, I realized I just had to start over. I cut the weld at the seam and banged the panel back into shape. I had to re-bondo the seam, re-epoxy it, and then re-prime it, but all in all, it really only took about an hour and a half. It did, however, screw up my spraying schedule for the weekend (I have to maximize my fair weather working time). I have been carefully working around the weather inorder to spray paint at the time of day when the weather gets closest to 70 degrees. With the surprise repair, I had to put off spraying until the next evening, after work.

The above photos show the car after the epoxy primer and some 2k high build urethane primer surfacer. The primer surfacer goes on super thick and is pretty great stuff. Its very easy to block sound out all the little blemishes. I could have easily spent 3 weeks at this stage, but I am on a tight schedule, so instead, I spent 2 days.

Ann took this shot of this brilliantly restored Fiat 500 which we spotted parked outside the temple in Japantown. We’ve since seen it there, again, so it must belong to someone in the kendo club or something. We’ve also seen a nice dark gray one in the area, as well. I think it would be a really fun car to restore, but I can’t really think about that right now.

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.

After reading up on painting, it became obvious that I was going to need a more serious compressor to power the spray gun. I’ve also been using my cut-off tool and die grinder fairly frequently, and the little 12gal compressor just hasn’t been able to keep up. After almost 1 and a 1/2 months of looking around, I found this 5hp, 26gal Campbell Hausfeld. I’ve order an low volume low pressure spray gun to go with it and will take a stab at spraying on the epoxy primer very soon. I already had a moisture trap set up in the garage that I have been using to airbrush my models and it should work fine with the automotive spray gun.

Apparently, this compressor is an oil-less model, which is nice, but its extremely loud. It keeps up much better with my air tools, although, I do wish the tank was larger.

2 weeks ago I started in on the rust repair on the car. The first bit was actually fixing up some small problems on the replacement door that I put on. Those came out great, but I didn’t get a chance to photograph them, unfortunately. Anyways, here is what was the biggest rust problem. This is the front valance, below the bumper. I didn’t take a before picture, but here is what it looked like immediately after cutting out the corroded area.

I cleaned up the metal behind as best as I could with a little bit of sand blasting and a wire wheel attached to my mini-air grinder. I welded up the holes on the inside just for piece of mind, primed it, and then cut the patch piece for the front.

I cut the patch to the exact size of the opening, welded a nail to it so I could hold it while I tack welded it in place all with the hope that I could get the piece in flush so the repair would be invisible.

This started well, but it turns out that some of the surrounding metal was still not so great and the welder just burned it away, leaving more holes. Rather than start from scratch, I just made more small patches to cover them. I really should have cut out a bigger hole, but as I was contemplating redoing it, I realized that this whole panel will eventually be covered by the front spolier and is also going to be covered in a rubberized undercoating, so the patches won’t even be seen.

I had to stop working because it was getting dark and I needed a new wheel for my grinder, but this is where I left off.

After I go over it with the grinder and clean it up, it should look pretty good. The panel feels very strong and shouldn’t let in any more water or road grime.