Burried in Work

Let's just say that outdoor work has been put on hold for a while...

Sweet KeyLime Progress

To Andrea's delight is it time to start putting the car back together. I must admit I am a little disappointed that most of the metal work is done but there are still lots of things to do.
This is where I left off in the last blog. Engine not pulled but some of the engine bay has been derusted and painted. All the front end body panels removed.
After being quoted approximately $4,000 to professionally paint the car I came across someones blog who was doing a "$50 Paintjob" on his car. This involved rolling Tremclad on the car. I figured for $50 (really probably more like $200 by the time I finish) that I couldn't go wrong. If it didn't work out well I could just sand/strip it off and have the professional job done and barely be out anything. I also figured that I could do a better job using spray paint. This is the result of my $200 paintjob (about $50 in so far). The first piece I put back on is the front valence:

I then remounted the headlights and started re-installing the wiring. The driver's side fender has also been mounted. I still need to get a lip spoiler:

I stuck the old, rusty, hood back on just to get an idea of how it'll look. I might actually use the rusted one sometimes just 'cause it looks sort of cool:

Another view with the fender in place:

I temporarily stuck the kidney grills and the headlight surrounds in place, again just to see how it'll look:

Here is the good hood temporarily mounted, to check the profile of one of the corners. Sadly I dropped it on the points at the back end of the hood and bent one of them up. A little pounding with the hammer later and repainting the corner and it'll be ready for clear coating again.

And...just for you, Chris, here is a picture of the paint showing the reflectivity. It's not quite done being polished since the battery in my polisher died, but, despite the fact that there is still some orange peel, it looks pretty good in my opinion.

The items I'll be working on in the next few days (I LOVE vacation!!) are:

• filling the massive hole behind the driver's side rear wheel
• repairing a couple holes in the passenger side rear wheel well
• drain coolant and replace the o-rings on the heater core
• start re-installing the interior
• painting the front bumper
• more work on the doors

Moving Forward

...in a manner of speaking anyway...still can't drive the car.

It's been a while since I updated the blog so there's been a reasonable amount of progress; mostly metal work, but also some other stuff which I'll get to later.

The numerous rust holes in the passenger front have been cut out, patches formed and welded in, painted and seam sealed.

Before:

After:

The picture isn't great since I took it at night; the flash is reflecting off of every piece of dust and dirt in the car.

I still need to patch the hole in the rocker, somehow I forgot about that and moved on to the back of the car. I started digging at the rust in the well behind the drivers side rear wheel. At first glance it looked like just surface rust but once I really got into it I found several spots where it'd rusted through, so...out came the angle grinder to cut out a big piece - I know you never would have guessed that! Here's where it's at right now:

I've also been working on some body work; I'll go into detail in another post soon, but here's a few pictures to give you a hint of what I've been working at:

A Holy Sunday

...or is that a HOLEY sunday? It seems that I cut a lot of holes in the car this weekend. I'll get to that soon, but for now an I'll fill you in on all the work I've done since the last update. Strangely this has involved a lot of holes as well...

Remember this?

After a hole bunch of cutting (bet you never would have guessed!), some welding, and some seam sealing it now looks like this:

I also removed a hole bunch of seam sealer and rust from the hatch. Re-seam-sealed it and painted over it. No good pictures of this. It's not perfect but at least the rust is gone. I can always have it professionally fixed later.

I found a relatively rust-free hood that I've mounted.

The headlights have been cleaned up (and high beams located and installed) and temporarily, at least, mounted on the car.

The de-rusted and re-painted valence has been remounted.

On to this weekends work. I bet you'll never believe this, but I cut a bunch of holes. I started with the areas around the back seat lap belt mounting points. They both looked like this to start:

Then I started cutting. Shocking, I know. After some cutting and grinding I'm left with this. You can see the actual structural part that was underneath the sheet metal. This connects to a beam that goes across the whole car.

After a bit of cutting, pounding and welding both seat belt mounts now look approximately like this:

If you look closely in the picture above you will also notice a smaller patch. I noticed a second rust spot on both sides. It is above a bracket that holds the gas tank up. That got cut out, patched and welded too. At this point I was very close to running out of wire for the welder so I moved on to only cutting and no patching. I was now on to the passenger side front footwell. It looked better than the drivers side (I'd already patched a couple small rust holes). I've been removing sound deadening as I go since it can hide rust. I removed the sound deadening material on the inside of the firewall and didn't see any rust...or so I thought. While I was getting ready to start cutting in the footwell I happened to glance upward and see this:

Nuts...that's the underside of the battery tray. It had looked a bit rusty from the top but I hadn't noticed any holes.

I guess it was a nice theory. So...on to the cutting.

I still need to clean it up a bit before I weld in new metal, but it won't be too difficult to fix this. Back to the footwell. It started out looking like this:

After a bit of cutting I was left with this. Doesn't look so bad...

Or does it?

Admittedly, I did cut out a fair bit more than I needed to because it would actually make it easier to patch. The rocker needed a bit of work too:

After a bit of cutting it looks like this. Unfortunately the factory jack point had to go since it was totally rusted.

While I was cleaning up my tools I decided to have a really quick go at the brake caliper. It looks like they should clean up nicely. This was the result of about a minute of work.

Oh, here is what the car looks like right now.

Hopefully in the next couple weeks I'll get all of the holes fixed and I'll be able to start putting stuff back into the car. Of course then I'll start working on removing all of the small bits of rust from the undercarriage and I may pull the engine to clean up the engine bay as well. The fun never ends!

Winter Sucks

Yes, I'm Canadian and I said that winter sucks. Especially when you're trying to work on a car and you don't have a garage. Since the snow, wind, freezing rain, and cold have arrived in London I haven't gotten too much work done on the car so I did what any real man would do...I went shopping...for car parts...and tools. As you may have noticed from some of the pictures my car needs some new parts. Kijiji has become my best friend. In the last month I've found:

• A left fender
• Black leather door cards
• An original radio and speakers
• Some miscellaneous interior parts
• A complete cruise control unit
• A non-cracked dash

I also got some nice tools for Christmas; a welder, angle grinder, and an electric impact wrench (why didn't I get one of these before?).

This weekend I am taking a trip to see a couple people in Toronto with some parts that I want:

• A mint right fender
• A cluster that doesn't have the hideous fading and bleeding white guage faces I've currently got
• An complete Mtech2 replica body kit

Despite the way it sounds I actually have been doing some work on the car. I removed the second fender, which looked okay from the outside, only to find that it was full of holes that had been filled with Bondo and "fixed". I had a suspicion that this might be the case. Off to the garbage it goes...

I also pulled off the metal front valence and I've been working at cleaning it up. The twisted wire wheel for my angle grinder has been my best friend in this endeavor; I'm stripping it down to the bare metal to get rid of any rust, then I'll rust treat it, re-prime and paint it.

The gas tank is a work in progress at this point. It looks like it is repairable; although I am keeping my eye out for a good one for a decent price - if I can get one for a fair price I have no problem with saving myself the work of trying to fix this one.

It's empty...

It's been a while since I updated the blog so I guess it's about time...
Not a whole lot of what Andrea would consider progress. Many more parts in the living room and the basement though!
The big project was getting the gas tank out. It sounds simple enough doesn't it. Then you realize that to get the gas tank out you have to first remove the entire exhaust from the headers back, then remove the various guards and heat shields, then remove the drive shaft, drain the old gas from the tank, then finally you can remove the gas tank.
The bolts holding the exhaust downpipes onto the headers were extremely rusty and required a whole lot of heating with the torch before they'd come off - like half an hour of heating per bolt. It took me two weeks of evenings to get the damned thing off!
Thankfully the drive shaft came off relatively easily. Other than one black thumbnail (crushed it with a wrench) it was pretty painless.
I also removed the shift mechanism while I was under there. It's extremely worn and most of the parts will need to be replaced.
Now that the tank is finally out I can get a better look at it to see what sort of shape it's in. After an admittedly cursory inspection it actually looks to be in reasonable shape and I'm pretty sure I'll be able to repair/seal it pretty easily.

Weight Reduction...

This weekend I spent some time removing the interior. I knew that there is some rust under the carpet so it needed to come out. That required removing about 75% of the interior. I also need to recover the headliner; getting that out required removing pretty much everything else. Here's a pic of the car after I got the carpet out. Most of the yellow/brown stuff is sound deadening not rust!


Here's the area that had rust that I knew about; the drivers footwell directly behind the wheelwell is a common area for rust on these cars. Around the gas pedal is another one. There's also some small bits of rust in the passenger side footwell, but they are much smaller.


Some of this is surface rust but, realistically, most of it will get cut out and new metal will b
be welded in.
Here's the base of the gas pedal. This area isn't nearly as bad as it appears in this picture; a lot of what you see is rust/dirt mixed with water.

Here you can see what's left of the interior of the car after I got the headliner out as well.

It's Exhausting

Well, lots of work on cars today. Both the GTI and the Civic need their oil changed. I also did a bit of work on the emergency brake on the GTI; it was set too tight and was causing the left rear brake to overheat and destroy ABS sensors. It's fixed now.
On to the point of this blog...I also removed the exhaust from the BMW this afternoon. It was very loud so I was anticipating the odd hole that would need to be patched. Here I am getting started at removing the bolts from the joint between the catalytic converter and the exhaust pipe:


Here's part of the reason that it wasn't hanging straight. You can see one of the hangers in the middle that is not in the rubber hanger:


Here you can see the other reason it wasn't hanging straight; it was held up with some wire wrapped around it:


Now, after a bit of persuasion, I've got it off. It's a bit rusty:


It's odd, after I got the exhaust off I started the car again and it wasn't any louder than before. I wonder why??

I don't think that I'll bother with trying to patch it up, I think I'll just get a new one and put it on.

On a side note, I picked up a new MIG welder and an angle grinder at Canadian tire today. The welder was 50% off and the angle grinder was 60% off. If anyone wants a MIG welder at a great price let me know; I've got a raincheck since they couldn't initially find the one I wanted.

The New Family Member

As you may have guessed I have recently acquired an 1988 BMW 325i Touring (wagon). Ever since these came out on the market I have always wanted one and for whatever reason I have always had a thing for wagons. Last winter there was one regularly parked at the velodrome that I said I wanted if it ever went up for sale. Luck was on my side because at a club race earlier this year the former owner Dave told my wife he had one for sale...the one I wanted! Five hundred bucks later I am the proud owner of a CLUNKER!

Given the title of the blog you may have figured out it needs a little work; I use the term "little" loosely.

In the month since I got it I have so far managed to:

• reassemble the dash
• remove bubbled paint on hood and sand down to bare metal
• rip the dash apart (I know this seems redundant but there is a method to my madness)
• removed and replaced the drivers door connector and wiring in order to get the power windows, locks and mirrors working...no extra parts left over...phew!
• located a 13 button on board computer and harness...not quite working yet...don't know why, it works on the bench
• figured out why the turn signals and four-way-flashers weren't working, and repaired it
• repaired the headlight switch
• located but not purchased a hood yet
• removed some extraneous wiring and the siren from an alarm system that Dave removed
• got in trouble from my wife from spending too much time with the car
• apologized...back to the car

My goals for the coming weeks are:

• get the instrument cluster and on board computer fully functional
• figure out why the rear windows don't work
• figure out what is draining the battery
• repair/replace the headliner
• replace the drivers door vapour barrier so water does not pour in when it rains