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peterman

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Just the other day, in a moment of clarity, I drew an unerring relation to restoring a car and going to college - at least for me.

In both cases

  1. I thought I would breeze right through it at first.

  2. I was enticed by the marque offerings: education and, ahem, women for grad school. Car community and cool/performance parts for the classic BMW.

  3. It has taken me longer that thought or scheduled.

  4. It's really expensive.

  5. I made great friends.

  6. There is so much learning involved.

  7. And last but undeniably not least: such a monumental financial decision should not have been awarded to a person of my maturity.

Do I regret any of it? Absolutely not. Well, perhaps I should have applied for more scholarships and tried harder to get a TA position but aside from that I loved grad school. Undergrad was a different story (don't go to NJIT) but I still learned quite a bit. This was just a revelation I decided to share...

Shameless plug:

I designed and prototyped a fuel pressure regulator for electric fuel pump setups.  It sits where the mechanical fuel pump sits.  Visit this thread for more info.

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On to the update!

 

I have been absent for a while, my last post was in early April so it's obviously been more than a few months. In that time I got married to a wonderful lady (who bought me a motorcycle!), took a 2 week honeymoon to the Azores where we bathed in thermal springs, surfed, hiked, drove incredible roads and watched rally cars fly by us from behind chicken wire fences. There was a hip surgery for the newly betrothed, another wedding, baby showers, birthdays, a few funerals, more traveling... It's been hectic.

I was able to get in the garage from time to time and get things moving. We got a big momentum boost when the hotel room for The Vintage next year was booked. Super early, right? I couldn't believe that it was filling up this early. Really? We have to book a year out? A big thanks to Jim G for getting us in there.  Also a congrats to Jim on making the Cover of "Der Bayerische" and a great article!

Given the rate at which rooms are going there should be quite a few cars there next year. We missed this years because it was our wedding weekend. We would have taken my patina/cirrusblau e30.

With The Vintage room booked, I now have a deadline to miss meet. I've been in high gear and encouraged by the wife to keep going! “Shouldn't you be in the garage?” Which also just so happens to be the second line in the book How You Know You Married the Right Woman. The first line is “Surprise! I got us plane tickets to Le Mans!” (Hint, hint, if you're reading.)

Anyway, I replaced two portions of the trunk. One around the spare tire and one on the outside of the gas tank area.

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I was able to weld in the driver side patch panel with fairly good results.  I am hellbent on getting the passenger side in really well.  It sucks learning everything the hard way but I think it is a really great way to learn this stuff.

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If you remember from an earlier post, this was the side that I cut too high, so I actually had to weld in a strip about 3/4" inch of original panel above the patch panel.  There are two beads of welds in this area along side of the car!

I fixed another hole in the rear passenger floor pan and welded in the rear seat support.

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I welded in the passenger side rocker panel and cut out the passenger rear inner wheel well and the fender.

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Next the new passenger side inner fender was welded in place. I picked this up along with the driver side inner ender and both rear outers from W&N. That's where the welding on the car stopped.

 

I found a new nose locally as well. It is a late model nose with the big bumper holes but somebody welded metal over to make it look like a small bumper nose then bondo'd the front clean. It doesn't have any rust and looks to be in really good condition, so I am happy with the purchase

 

I welded up a few large, stout "L" brackets and bolted one to the front subframe, and the other to the rear subframe pickup points. With some help rom a friend down the street, we put the car on her side. Completely suspended off the ground, I was able to start removing the under coating. Working on the underside of a car while standing up is great. Here are the methods I used to remove the undercoating.

  1. Wire wheel/wire cup – Good results, but slow going. Tough areas are skipped by the wheel but you can get most of them with the wire cup. Obviously this makes a bunch of dust and throws it everywhere which is not ideal.

  2. Heat gun and scraper – really good results and can get the tough areas. I bought the Kobalt one from Lowes (http://www.lowes.com/pd/Kobalt-1-500-Watt-Professional-LCD-Heat-Gun/50157920) It works really well. Set to 1100F and the undercoating peeled off like a fresh slice of Havarti. (What?)

  3. Multitool – This worked pretty well also. I purchased the Porter Cable (http://www.lowes.com/pd/PORTER-CABLE-12-Piece-3-Amp-Oscillating-Tool-Kit/50358206) which was on sale for $49 down from $89 at Lowes. I took the wood blade it comes with and ground it down to a chisel on my bench grinder. I was able to just peel up the undercoating. Would work really well for large open areas where you have a lot of access. It's a really good all around tool.

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Now I am on to getting all the good primer off for painting. I plan on using POR15 and all of my research says bare metal is needed to get the full performance of the paint. I've been using the unwoven resin coated wire wheels and they work pretty well. They are not really durable so I am using a lot of them. They aren't cheap either.

 

NOTE:

This may be important for some doing this type of undercoating repair.  The PO put after market seats in the car.  He made brackets and bolted them to the stock mounting points.   Well the brackets were tearing the metal around the transmission tunnel - see the red areas in the picture below.  I was able to reset the metal with a punch and hammer from the inside of the cabin and then weld them closed from under the car.

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I lost all of my photo documentation of the build over the last year when I reformatted my computer and my backup hard failed to work the one time I actually needed it. I lost over 800 pictures of the build among everything else. Do not trust Western Digital with your computer. Or buy two of them. I'm livid over the loss, but life goes on – with all thats going on in the news can I really complain?  First world problems I keep reminding myself.

 

Cheers!

Pete

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