Full of surprises. A 72 tii from the northeast

[stymee]

So I've been worried about this part of the project almost since the beginning. I wasn't real sure how I was going to support the rear of the car while I dropped the rear sub frame. I decided to use that rail where the rear diff hanger mounts, I just needed some taller jack stands. Some 6 ton stands with 23" of lift did the trick. Once I had the car well supported, it only took an hour or two to get everything disconnected and dropped. AH, progress!

It took me a while to figure out how to unhook the emergency cables. I never could get a decent angle to do it without removing the shoes.

I figure I'll start with a good pressure washing of the entire sub frame. Then it's time to tear everything apart and prep for a nice coat of POR15. Then all new bushings and bearings, and probably CV joint rebuild as well.

I also have a lot of work to do underneath the car. The whole underside is covered in thick, nasty undercoating, that will take some time to clean up. So far a heat gun and putty knife seem to be the only sure fire way of removing it.

[stymee]

I ran into a couple snafu's when disassembling the rear sub frame. Right off the bat, I had to cut off one of the axle capscrews because the hex was smushed.

Here is the exploded view. The sub frame mounts might as well be welded on, no amount of pounding got them to budge!

So, I cut them off!

Which left the bolts in there, I am currently in the process of drilling them out, it is unreal how stuck in there they are! I even tried heating the frame and jacking them out. All that succeeded in doing was either stripping the threads or breaking it off further in the frame.

Next up is the removal of the swing arm bushings. I couldn't find any metal 2" pipe at the nearby home improvement stores, so I gave PVC a try. Not pretty, but it got the job done!

Some interesting challenges arose when pulling the stub axles. The inner bearing stuck on one of the axles. My puller didn't have the reach, so I welded up something to gently pull the bearing off the axle.

And it actually worked!

Here are the axles and flanges all cleaned up. They are in good shape, the splines still fit nice and tight with no slop. It bugs me that the dust cover is different on the two axles. Not sure if one was cut down for some reason? I will probably get new ones just because.

Another crazy thing that came up. When I was removing the axles, I only found a spacer (item C) on one side! Searching the forum, I came up with a lot of posts about the importance of said spacer, so I'm not sure how there wasn't any detectable play in that axle! I'll keep searching the corners of the garage as it is possible that it rolled somewhere during the disassembly process. And thanks for the pics, C.D.!

[stymee]

I forgot that I needed to get the rear diff bushings out before I send all that stuff off for powder coating. So I got that out of the way. I used the tips I found on the Faq, using a hack saw from the inside to allow a chisel to beat them out.

I welded in the first piece of the rear subframe area. This was 16 gage and is very solid. I need to fab all of the jack point reinforcement pieces. I have lots of good pics of that area, particularly from Tommy's Goodfellas build.

And SCORE, finally found my E30 seats, did you know they will fit in a Mini?

They are both driver's seats, but one is in really good shape, I will see what I can swap around on what will be the passenger side. I know the rear seat isn't exactly plug and play, but it was hard to pass up.

Now I can go ahead and cut out that pesky sheet metal for the original '02 seat mounts. I want to weld/fab up something very solid to mount the new seats too.

[stymee]

It's been a while since I updated, but I have gotten a lot of work done in the last month. I kind of jump around, keeps me interested and motivated.

I decided to cut out the original seat mount framing since I have my new front seats.

Now that the seat framing was out of the way, I started some exploratory surgery on the passenger inner rocker/floor area. Boy am I glad I did. Beware, it is ugly! Viewer discretion is advised...

The inner rocker under the hump had a big hole in it, so I decided to cut away some of the hump to get a closer look. Like the driver's side, the outer rocker is in really good shape. Unfortunately, those repairs that I thought looked ok were not! Check out the cross section of the repair area.

Once I cleaned off the layers of seam sealer and undercoating, I found what looks to be 22 gage sheet metal lapped over the old rusty bits.

Well, I was looking for an excuse to replace the passenger side column and floor pan. Those repairs were terrible, they just left all of the structural pieces rusted and shriveled, and tacked some thin sheet metal over top.

While I was in the area, I cleaned up the front inner fender as well.

And took some measurements of the fender bracket for when I remove the column.

On to the repairs! I created a new inner rocker out of 16 gage. It will be butt welded at the top and plug welded at the bottom. All this after a nice coat of POR-15 and weld thru primer.

The area all prep'd and ready for weld.

Tacked in.

And welded.

A close up of some beads.

And now to weld the part of the hump back in place. Again, these clamps make life so much easier!

All cleaned up.

[jgerock]

Makes me wonder why you purchased this car with all that rust eating it up. I wish I had your welding and sheet metal skills.

[stymee]

Now back to the driver's side rear subframe mounting area. I formed the first layer from 20 gage steel.

I didn't have an original piece to go by, but I did have some great pictures from the Goodfella's build (thanks again, Tommy!).

I prep'd and POR-15'd all of the areas that would be

And all welded in and cleaned up. It is amazing how solid formed sheet metal can be! There is another layer that goes over top of this one, but I am going to wait until I get the main support pieces in before I do more.

Next, I needed to cut out the barrel or collar that holds the 14mm pin that the rear sub mount bushing bolts to.

This piece is NLA, so I had to save it.

The rust was just on the surface, it cleaned up pretty nice.

I tried my best to get some dimensions off of the piece. I will send this to the machine shop to cut off the areas where the weld was piled up. It is times like these that I wish I had my own lathe!

Here is how the pieces will go back together.

I want to get my subframe back from powder coating before I go much further in this area. I want to make sure the positioning/alignment is perfect. I can't go whole lot further up front either, until I get the sheet metal from Walloth & Nesch. Good thing the pieces I need are on a holiday special! Stay tuned...

[stymee]

On to the rest of the passenger side inner rocker area. I wanted to go ahead and weld in the last piece to strengthen the area before I cut off the column.

This piece was actually pretty tough to form. I used 16 gage. Don't mind the rust in the background, that is the back side of the column piece I will be cutting out soon.

Tacked in.

All welded in.

On to column! First step is to drill out the spot welds on and remove the fender bracket.

Then I cut the tie in pieces, drilled out the spot welds and off it comes.

Here are some shots of a couple patches that were made to the old column.

Lap welds!

Unprotected!

Crap! Note all the wire blow through that was left. This was even lapped over some rusty bits!

[stymee]

While I am waiting on the sheet metal from Walloth & Nesch, I decided to dig in to that rust spot in the drivers side rear wheel arch.

Here is the spot as it looked when I bought the car.

And after a little work with a wire wheel. The hole towards the rear is where the bumper was bolted. Looks like a hole that was drilled and not protected (ongoing theme!).

Close up shows that the rust was through the inner fender as well.

After cutting out the wheel arch, I saw the smoking gun. There was another lap welded repair panel that rusted out. Ugh.

So I started cleaning out some of the undercoating in the wheel well. It was up to 1/4" thick in some spots! Here is the pile of debris after about an hour of cleaning.

I uncovered the non-factory trunk ventilation hole...

There was still a layer or two of undercoating and crap to remove.

And after another 3 hours of work with an oscillating multi tool and a wire wheel, here is another pile of debris. I think I removed at least 2 pounds of material from this wheel well.

And here it is all cleaned up! Surprisingly, I didn't find any more surprises! It does look like the rear clip was replaced at some point. This car certainly has some history!

And on to the other side. I cleaned up enough to show the area behind the passenger side subframe mount area. Another major repair was made here. This one looks better. There is no serious rust in the main support pieces. I still plan on cutting out the lower quarter/rocker area to take a peak.

And after another 3+ hours of scraping and wire wheeling, this side is all cleaned up, too.

I did find some rust in the rear shock mount area. A little of this has bubbled through to the trunk. I will cut it out to see how serious it is.

Other than that, this side looks pretty good. You couldn't pay me to do this again! I guess I can look on the bright side, I only have two front wheel wells and the entire underside of the car left to clean up! I want to make sure I uncover every bit of rust, this thing is going to be with me for a LOOOONG time.

[stymee]

Makes me wonder why you purchased this car with all that rust eating it up. I wish I had your welding and sheet metal skills.

I often wonder the same thing. Chalk it up to over optimism (about the rust that I could see), lack of experience (purchasing old '02s) and impulsiveness!

Thanks for the kind words. I was after a project and I got one. I will say that it is good to practice welding/sheet metal work on areas that don't need to be perfect. I really want to show that anyone can do this stuff! I hadn't welded a single piece of sheet metal before this project. Lots of cars in this shape have probably gone to the crusher, but I am not a quitter (even when I should be). Some days I wish I had waited and bought Mlytle's purty shell!

[stymee]

Ugh... I somehow lost sync with my picasa web album. In an effort to fix the issue I screwed up a lot of my photo links. Once I get good and frustrated, I will get out in the garage to start cleaning off some more undercoating...

[stymee]

Put in a full day today. I started with some work on my Stahl header. The collector was welded on pretty crappily, so I ground down the welds and re-welded it on. Then I tried to neutralize some of the rust with some metal ready (not shown in this pic). I want to try out some high temp header paint.

Then it was back to the drivers fender well. I needed to reconstruct the inner fender where I had cut out that bad repair and some rust. First order of business was to test fit the repair panel.

I bought the cheaper repair panel from Walloth & Nesch. It seems to be a hair thinner than the quarter panel, but actually fits pretty good.

I made some paper patterns for the inner fender with the repair panel in place. Then I cut them out of 20 gage sheet metal, formed them a bit and tack welded them in place.

Good penetration on the welds.

I used this as practice for welding in the repair panel. I did little tacks one at a time to try to keep the heat and warping to a minimum.

Next I decided to take care of that hole going into the trunk. I uncovered some more rust when I was cleaning up the area.

All welded in and cleaned up. I will finish up those tabs once I have the repair panel back in place.

[carrosene]

I'm having a lot of fun following your restoration. Keep up the good work.

[jerry]

excellent work with no apologies... it's inspiring to see you take this bull by the horns and run with it. when you are done this will be a great solid car that you truely resurrected from near death. your metal shaping skills are equal to your developing welding skills. i know how slow this work can be to accomplish.

[stymee]

Thank you, thank you! The comments really keep me motivated. At this point, I don't really fear anything that I may find!

I found out that my new sheet metal was in route, so I killed some time cleaning off some undercoating. Here is the tii fuel pump bracket. I am debating cutting this off and going with an in-tank pump. The original pump is still running, but it sure looks original...

After a couple hours of making an absolute mess of myself and my garage floor, I got a visit from the DHL man, who had my new sheet metal from Walloth & Nesch. Once again, W&N provided excellent service and extremely fast shipping considering it was coming from Germany.

After a little more massaging/cutting/fitting, I put the column in place. Nice fit!

This panel is quite a bit different than the one I used for the driver's side. I asked W&N about it before I ordered it, apparently their old tooling was worn out so they developed a new panel. I like the fact that the sunroof drain hole is already roughed in. I didn't like the fact that the panel ended short of where the fender bracket sits. There is some surface rust on that area that I would have liked to just cut out. I actually could have left the fender bracket on, I'm guessing that was the idea behind the new shape.

Column all prep'd and covered in 2 coats of POR-15.

Same thing for the area the panel will be covering.

Tacked in.

And welded in.

Another bead close up.

I decided not to quit there and moved on to the passenger floor. I was anxious to cut out the crappily repaired floor and frame rail to see what's what. Here is one last shot of the old floor.

The upper line is where the new floor will reach, just far enough!

The new floor in place. I will patch the area up front first.

And the flinstone drive access. The frame stub is in pretty good shape, plenty to work with. Because the frame was so crappily re-created on this side, I will take a pattern off the rail I made for the driver's side to make a new one for this side.

Just for kicks, I measured the thickness of the previously repaired floor. Not only was it only 23 gage, but it had no forming at all, so it was very flimsy. Sheesh.

For reference, the replacement floor from W&N was a full 1mm thick, or somewhere between 18 and 20 gage. I have a whole weekend ahead to get the frame rail fabricated. Stay tuned!

[stymee]

I got started on the new passenger frame rail. I created a pattern off the driver's side and then flipped it over to get me something very close to what is needed for the other side. I got to thinking about metal thicknesses when I was measuring those other parts a few days ago. When I put the caliper on what I thought was my 16 gauge sheet, I found that it is actually 1.9mm, which makes it 14 gage! 16 gage should have been 1.52mm. This made me feel slightly more manly because it is really hard to work with. Here is a table of sheet metal gages (or gauges if you prefer) from Wikipedia.

gage	inch   (mm  )
14	0.0747 (1.90)
15	0.0673 (1.71)
16	0.0598 (1.52)
17	0.0538 (1.37)
18	0.0478 (1.21)
19	0.0418 (1.06)
20	0.0359 (0.91)
21	0.0329 (0.84)
22	0.0299 (0.76)
23	0.0269 (0.68)
24	0.0239 (0.61)

Anyhow, here is the pattern cut out of the 14 gage sheet. Case boxes provide excellent pattern material. Having to empty the case first is really not too much trouble.

And here it is starting to take shape. There are two reasons for all the cuts. One is to allow the rail to bend to follow the shape of the floor, the other is to make everything easier to bend (queue more whining about needing a metal brake).

It was at this point that I started cleaning off more of the stub of the frame rail that was left to work out how the new rail will be welded to it. Oh boy, more surprises!

The frame stub is in pretty good shape, plenty to work with.

LOL. What was I thinking? Once I cleaned off the layers of undercoating, I found another atrocity. The pics are at a weird angle, but here you can see the piece that I cut out of the frame rail (That I thought was in "pretty good shape").

The welds on the side weren't all that bad, but what they were covering up was. I sincerely hope that the old metal wasn't quite this rusted when they did the repair...

Here is the virgin frame rail after the "repair" ws cut out. I would much rather work with a little surface rust and original metal than some thin patch over old rusty bits.

Time to fab yet another piece. I am actually starting to enjoy this part almost as much as welding them in. There is just something quite satisfying about re-creating parts out of metal. Especially without any real metal working tools (I am quite proud of myself if you haven't noticed). This amuses me even more since I work with high end CNC machines all day at work (but unfortunately cannot use any of it for personal projects).

Here is another shot of the new rail. This will be butt welded to the original rail once everything is cleaned, prep'd and coated with POR-15!

So, while the POR was drying, I moved on to the front section of the floor that won't be covered by the very nice piece from W&N. Here is a shot of where the piece will go.

And tacked in.

And welded. I still need to clean up the welds a bit. I also may have put too much heat into something because it ended up with a little hump (the part reflecting the light). I may need to cut a little slit to bring it back into line.

On today's agenda will be welding in the frame repair, and hopefully fitting and tacking in the floor pan so I can finish up the rest of the frame rail. My rear subframe and components should be back from powder coating some time this week. Things are taking shape!