BMW E30 Touring resto

I bought my Touring a few years back, knowing full well it was a project. A 1989 vintage, 320i, it came with all the traditional extras you get in Poland: 14-year-old tyres, a dog-chewed interior, and miscellaneous bodges including a door window held in place with a piece of wood.



I spent the previous year making sure all the mechanicals and electricals worked, and this year I figured it was time to do something about the dull paintwork and various paint bubbles. The plan was to do it in stages, taking off panels, sorting any rust, then painting the panels and re-fitting them. So I've started with the front wing, and got a bit of a shock:



The inner wing support has crumbled away, there's a crack between the inner wing and the suspension turret, and there's holes under the fusebox, to the rear of the arch and at the edge of the floorpan (due to the E30's "jacking points", which are notorious rust traps).

I'll have to just cut away and see how bad the rot is, and go from there.

While I want the car in good condition, I don't have the space to strip it completely, so I can't really remove all the interior. This makes fixing the rot around the fuse box rather troublesome.



Worse, the loom has no joints in it, so to get it out of the way means either unplugging EVERYTHING in the cabin (including the tail lights), or just protecting it as much as I can and hoping for the best.

Chop chop chop with the angle grinder and dremel got me to this stage, so that I can see how bad the damage is. This is a three-skin joint, where the inner wing joins the scuttle, which sits on the bulkhead:



The scuttle won't be too hard to patch back in, and the inner wing is also fairly simple. The main issue is the bulkhead, since the seam between that and the inner wing has sprouted rust too. It's mostly surface rust, but there's also pin-holes which need to be dealt with:



I'm not sure what to do about that, but I can't patch the top of the bulkhead yet since this rust goes allllll the way down. I also don't feel good cutting it, since there's not much else holding the inner wing to the rest of the car other than the chassis rail at the bottom.

have a look at this thread

http://retrorides.proboards.com/inde...y&thread=70135

there's quite a lot on the inner wing / scuttle area, tonybmw also has a thread about his own BMW somewhere on that site aswell

looks like a lot of problems you've got there, but small sections at a time should stop any movement

jim

I saw the Vauxhall resto years ago, I didn't know they'd condensed all Tony's info into one handy thread. The man's a legend.

So thanks for reminding me of it; there were a few tips I'd forgotten, and the whole thing is a great confidence booster.

Wow, i would never have imagined it would look like that under the wing

E30 tourings are cool
Good luck with it

Blurk99 - Thats an awesome link i fancy a go at making my own panels now

First repair patch fabricated:



This rust forms because BMW pumped a sealant down the A-pillar at the factory. Unfortunately, the stuff that gets through the gaps its supposed to seal ends up under the scuttle, where it acts as a moisture trap. This ate away the bulkhead from the inside.



My thin-metal welding technique leaves a lot to be desired, but it improved once I put on the halogen light and cleaned my mask visor. Fortunately this is an internal weld, and will be hidden by the scuttle, so as long as penetration's good it can be ugly. I did go all the way round in the end, using a lamp in the footwell to highlight any pinholes that I may have missed.

I tackled some of the bulkhead today:



This part sits just behind the plastic arch liner, and had one of the mounting holes which had long since rotted away.

So, cut the infected area out:



Make up two patch panels (one to repair the bulkhead, one to extend the arch outwards) and line them up for fitting:



And then start laying down snotty little blobs of weld to hold it all together:



I didn't quite get the chance to weld in the second of the two panels, but it's beaten into shape and the holes have been drilled to plug-weld the two edges together, similar to the original seam that had rotted away. I used a massive strip of copper (50x5mm) behind the panel to take heat away as I welded, and also to help me fill the gaps from my less-than-perfect patch forming.

The silvery-white residue in the photos is what's left over of the phosphoric acid (30%) that I sprayed over the area, to see just how bad the surface rust is on the main panels.

Right, that's all the repairs under the fuse box taken care of. Once the bulkhead repair was in place, I ground down the welds ONLY where the next plate would sit on top of them. Then I sprayed the area with zinc-rich primer, and did the next steps:


Weld in the repair panel for the scuttle, with plug welds in place of spot welds at the bottom


Understand how the two plates make a triangle drain, so that water that enters the wiper grill holes can run out through the inner wing.

If you remove the windscreen wiper grill, you can access the area behind the scuttle. This will be necessary, because the waxy anti-rust BMW use, and their seam sealant, are flammable, so scraping as much away as possible reduces smoke and flames in the area.

This repair was done with the dash and wiring loom still in place, although I did insert off-cuts of steel between the bulkhead and the sound-proofing on the inside, to remove heat and to reduce the risk of smoke and fire. I also bent some aluminium into a "sleeve" to wrap around the loom, to protect it from weld spits and grinding sparks.

you're cracking on quite nicely with that lot, the complexity of the repair for that last picture would give me nightmares!

jim

I'll admit that after cutting, folding, grinding, filing, trimming, drilling and breaking the repair section, I ended up welding it at the top and then hammering the hell out of the bottom until it contoured properly with the bulkhead. If this was an external repair I'd be screaming, but since it's hidden internally, and is about to be sandwiched by another panel, it's not a major problem.