99 E36 M3 LSx Build
12-23-2015, 12:58 AM
#181
WOW> great work. I agree that you can deff. see the difference in your welding skill. Those slight differences of heat and thinner wire made a huge difference. Seeing your build threads always lights the fire to keep me motivated.
I am sure it does this to much of us. And for that, I want to thank you Mr. Cpitt55
I am sure it does this to much of us. And for that, I want to thank you Mr. Cpitt55
I've been meaning to make an update, but as usual time is in short supply. Between work, school, helping friends with their cars and doing some updates on the shop to try and winterize it, there just isn't enough time in the day. Had to take about 3 weeks off to finish up end up term assignments, study for finals, blah.
Funny how projects sometimes take on a path of their own at times. I was in need of a break from the exhaust work, so started working on some other areas. I wasn't really satisfied with the flange I tried to braze the exterior fillets with silicon bronze - the filler kept cracking on me and I ended up sinking too much heat into it. I decided to cut the flanges off and weld on some 1/2" thick ones to help mitigate warping problems, and frankly give me a chance to do a better job. Just going to use 347L filler this time. I wanted to wait until continuing on with the secondaries in case the position of the collector shifts at all after putting the new flanges on.
Had some fun with the motor out
I call this pic "10 lbs of stuff in a 5 lb bag"
While the motor was out I wanted to take advantage of what I thought was going to be the last of the warm weather for the season and start cleaning up the engine bay....turns out it's still in the 60s here
go figureDid a bunch of sanding
Sprayed it with some epoxy primer. I just used some rattle can Spray Maxx stuff that I bought from eastwood a while back - it's a true two part primer. Doesn't cover a whole lot of area but goes on pretty nice and sands really well.
Gonna go back over it "for real" with a gun and some SPI primer when the time comes to paint everything - this is more of just a placeholder to protect my work. I was getting pretty tired of looking at surface rust developing. But I ran out of primer and temps dipped below what is conducive to painting so I switched gears again to the rear of the car.
Long story short, the car was hit sometime prior to my ownership and it really wasn't noticeable until after I started taking the car apart. It had a clean title and the PO claimed to not know of any work being done so I bought it thinking it hadn't been messed with. Anyway, the shop doing the work did a pretty lousy repair job - typical "get this outta here as fast as possible" type thing. There was rust developing on pretty much every one of the seams they touched...not sure if they used cheap products or what. I hate rust (killed my last car) and want to end up with a pretty clean project when it's all said and done, so I decided to dig in and fix this right.
These are some of the seams at the tail panel after being cleaned up. Going to be replacing this as the replacement panel is really cheap.
This is on the driver's side quarter
Loads of bondo
Tailpanel removed
Tentative repair plans: build back the trunk floor and see if the seam area on the driver's quarter will clean up. Glue / rivet the replacement panel in as much as possible. Replace the passenger side quarter and wheel house extensions.
The saving grace to all of this is that it makes me feel not as bad about cutting up the fenders and adding flares for some beefy tires. Replacing the quarter will allow me to clamp it in position, fit the flare, and then pull it all off and weld finish both sides. Should really help to prevent it from future corrosion. Planning on some low offset 18x10's and 285's on all 4 corners.
This next part has been a long time in the making - I bought this diy rotisserie kit a while ago and have been sitting on them since: http://store.uscartool.com/car-rotisserie-kit.html. Bought the steel to finally build it and have been using it as cheap practice for tig welding. The point of the rotisserie? It will let me finish my seam welding on the underside of the car, then remove the undercoating, epoxy prime it, and re-undercoat it to protect everything. Figured the rotisserie would be worth not having to deal with trying to work on my back in a confined space - did that enough already.
Bunch of cuts
Finished the one side.....the point of the jack is to be able to bolt the car up at a reasonable height and lift it to working position instead of having to jack the car up high enough to bolt it on to the rotisserie.
The rotator shaft is supported by dual tapered roller bearings. Should really help things to spin nice when the car is bolted up.
Hope to get that finished up soon.
One other thing I've been working on that I'll share is making copies of my motor / transmission mounts for other e36 lsx guys. There seems to be a lot of frustration with existing vendor pricing and lead times so figured I'd try to develop another option. I plan to offer headers if interest arises, but I have a lot more work to do on them in regards to accurately fixturing and replicating the proper cuts to make reproduction even remotely practical. Going to require a lot of thought. At any rate, I've come to enjoy fabbing / welding a lot so embrace the challenge, plus it gives me an excuse to keep my tig welder and saws from collecting dust.
That's all for now. As you can see, kind of all over the place at the moment....sometimes you just gotta embrace the chaos. I'll get it back together, I promise lol.
Thanks for looking. Merry christmas and happy new year!
01-13-2016, 02:01 AM
#184
Originally Posted by AussieDan
Very nice work all around, Merry Christmas!
Originally Posted by Ls1e36
Can't wait to get my mounts
Getting ready to tear in to my car
Getting ready to tear in to my car
Haven't had a whole lot of free time but since the last post I've done a bit more body work. Decided to order my wheelset and get cookin on the fender flares.
I like the oem-ish look of welded on flares so picked up some e46 front fenders off of rock auto - these were from a 2002 330i sedan.
I went with 18x9.5 et 35 apex arc 8's with 275/35/18 rubber. Could have went with a larger wheelset, but I wanted to stay square and knew I'd be limited by what I could run up front while still maintaining a reasonable amount of clearance / bump travel, especially with such a tall tire. The handling improvements of a square setup, being able to rotate wheels, and striking a balance between wheel package weight and tire cost / selection were all considerations.
Fast forwarding a bit to the flares cut out and mocked up on the car. Here is the stock flare:
e46 flare
Additional clearance up front prior to rolling is ~1"
Ready to cut
After lots of patient sanding / fitting
Welding in progress. Skipping around, tacking, then grinding, and hammer / dollying in between rounds of welding to keep warpage to a minimum. Then keep going until there's aren't any gaps between the welds.
Fitment with front bumper. Wasn't sure initially if I was going to splice into the existing fender or just continue the e46 fender all the way down to the bottom. Opted for the latter so added that piece back in.
Shot from the rear
Same process for the other side..
You'll notice I cut into the body lines....for some reason these flares are not as defined as others I have seen and for that reason require a larger transition area to blend smoothly into the fender. I tried to replicate what I cut out by bead rolling a profile into the flare with a set of shoulder dies. After a couple test samples I found one that seemed to fit nice
I'm sure there are much more refined ways to do this, but I'm not a metalshaper...just pretending to be lol
ANYWAY....here's some test fitment pics. Don't mind the red stuff - it's dychem layout fluid that I'm using to sight the panel. A quick scuff with 80 grit will reveal all your high and low spots that you can go in and (try to) correct with a hammer and dolly. Trying to get it as straight as possible in metal so I don't have use a sh*t ton of filler.
MEAT....it's what's for dinner.
This is with a 17.5mm spacer and a small amount of camber. The spacer is necessary for the tire to clear the coilover spring perch. I'm using TRM coilovers, and their camber plate assembly is insanely thick - approximately 68mm from the top mounting surface and upper spring perch. Vorshlag is putting together a much more compact camber plate assembly for me and I'll be switching from the 7" TRM spring to a 6" Hyperco spring. Hopefully this combination will allow me to raise the perch to be above the tire and buy more clearance inboard. I have full clearance lock-to-lock at ride height up to about 1" of travel but with more compression the clearance kind of sucks. I'm going to be on 600# springs though so I have no idea how much travel I actually need. Probably not a whole lot but I'm shooting for as much as possible for now.
Checking clearances. The fender ahead of the tire where it comes back to meet the bumper is a pretty nasty interference point at about 1.5" of suspension compression. I'm going to see what I can buy here with a fender roller, hopefully I'll be able to push that out some. If that doesn't work I will section it as necessary and pull it out off the tire. As mentioned, I'm not sure what I'm actually going to need because I'm never going to see much travel with 600# springs up front unless I take it off some sweet jumps or something.
Waiting for parts to show up before continuing with that.
Anyway, here's a couple pics of flare fitment at the rear of the car. Will probably be running a 20mm spacer back here.
Clearance increases over the stock flare seem to be much more significant than they were in the front - I measured ~2" at the furthest point before rolling.
The flare ahead of the tire is going to need some work to get it to fit tightly against the body though - need to think about how to approach that. It requires too much force to make it flush, if I tried to weld it like that it would just warp like crazy.
Lot's of pictures but there's not a whole lot of in-process info out there for this job. Figured I'd share what I had. More to come soon.
03-06-2016, 02:21 PM
#186
Body work is progressing slowly, but it is progressing. Since last time I've continued work on getting the front flares finished and started moving onto the back.
I had started mig welding the front flares on but ran into some problems when trying to metal finish / hammer and dolly the weld out. Mig makes the metal extremely hard and pretty unresponsive to shaping pressure. So I cut the flare out and tig welded another one on.
Tight fitup required to prevent burn throughs. Not much room for error since I was only using .023" filler wire.
Flare welded on. Did this with ~25 amps and moving as quickly as possible. I started welding at the center and worked my way outwards in both directions, doing about 1" at a time. Doing it this way prevents metal from being "trapped" in between weld beads and reduces the chances for distortion.
Working on metal finishing the panel - not much filler will be needed. If I was any good at this, no filler would be required at all.
After that was finished I reinstalled the fender and tried to maximize clearance in front of the tire where it joins the nosepanel. I rolled the fender heavily here, cut the end of the nosepanel and bent it outwards, and also slotted the holes in the bumper mount so I could push it out further and get everything to line up.
Same thing done on the opposite side
To maximize clearance on the inside of the wheel, I modified my TRM coilovers with some vorshlag camber plates and 6" hypercoil springs (stock length was 7"). This combination allowed me to move the spring perch up a considerable amount. You can see the difference in camber plate stackup height here
With the fronts in pretty good shape, I moved onto the back. As I mentioned previoiusly, the car had been hit at some point in its past and the passenger side rear quarter was replaced. The body shop did a pretty lousy job and rust was forming in between the seams. I removed the quarter to clean it up and will be reinstalling a new one.
Some of the seam rust below. Details are important folks. Use your chassis wax, weld through primers, epoxy primers..whatever you need to do to keep this from happening.
Thankfully it was all surface rust and cleaned up pretty well
Sprayed with weld thru primer for now until I can get around to epoxy priming it.
With that more or less resolved I moved on to starting to mockup the flare itself.
Clearancing for rear bump travel - this is the minimum necessary to rear full bump travel but I'm going to wait until I get the new quarter to segment this further and bring it out to match the flare seam.
Cleco pinned the quarter back on temporarily for test fitment. The 18x9.5et35 wheels I'm using required about 30mm worth of spacer to fill out the flare. Lots of room for a wider tire but I want to keep a square wheel setup to start out with so I can rotate tires and promote better turn-in characteristics. Time will tell whether or not I need more tire back there but I'm not going to worry about it now. By my math, this is the same wheel position achieved on the vorshlag alpha car which had 17x11 et 23 wheels with 315/35 tires, so I will definitely have the room should I need it.
Trying to capture a couple different perspectives of it because its kind of hard to judge the fitment from one angle.
Kind of difficult to photograph but here's roughly how the car will sit
My hope is that these in progress pics help other people thinking about doing this job themselves. This mod definitely isn't new and there's plenty of before / after pics but not a whole lot in between, especially with the rears.
In other news, I've been working on making copies of my motor / trans mounts. If anyone is interested let me know. I have more information on a blog page here: http://getoffmylon.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_4.html
I had started mig welding the front flares on but ran into some problems when trying to metal finish / hammer and dolly the weld out. Mig makes the metal extremely hard and pretty unresponsive to shaping pressure. So I cut the flare out and tig welded another one on.
Tight fitup required to prevent burn throughs. Not much room for error since I was only using .023" filler wire.
Flare welded on. Did this with ~25 amps and moving as quickly as possible. I started welding at the center and worked my way outwards in both directions, doing about 1" at a time. Doing it this way prevents metal from being "trapped" in between weld beads and reduces the chances for distortion.
Working on metal finishing the panel - not much filler will be needed. If I was any good at this, no filler would be required at all.
After that was finished I reinstalled the fender and tried to maximize clearance in front of the tire where it joins the nosepanel. I rolled the fender heavily here, cut the end of the nosepanel and bent it outwards, and also slotted the holes in the bumper mount so I could push it out further and get everything to line up.
Same thing done on the opposite side
To maximize clearance on the inside of the wheel, I modified my TRM coilovers with some vorshlag camber plates and 6" hypercoil springs (stock length was 7"). This combination allowed me to move the spring perch up a considerable amount. You can see the difference in camber plate stackup height here
With the fronts in pretty good shape, I moved onto the back. As I mentioned previoiusly, the car had been hit at some point in its past and the passenger side rear quarter was replaced. The body shop did a pretty lousy job and rust was forming in between the seams. I removed the quarter to clean it up and will be reinstalling a new one.
Some of the seam rust below. Details are important folks. Use your chassis wax, weld through primers, epoxy primers..whatever you need to do to keep this from happening.
Thankfully it was all surface rust and cleaned up pretty well
Sprayed with weld thru primer for now until I can get around to epoxy priming it.
With that more or less resolved I moved on to starting to mockup the flare itself.
Clearancing for rear bump travel - this is the minimum necessary to rear full bump travel but I'm going to wait until I get the new quarter to segment this further and bring it out to match the flare seam.
Cleco pinned the quarter back on temporarily for test fitment. The 18x9.5et35 wheels I'm using required about 30mm worth of spacer to fill out the flare. Lots of room for a wider tire but I want to keep a square wheel setup to start out with so I can rotate tires and promote better turn-in characteristics. Time will tell whether or not I need more tire back there but I'm not going to worry about it now. By my math, this is the same wheel position achieved on the vorshlag alpha car which had 17x11 et 23 wheels with 315/35 tires, so I will definitely have the room should I need it.
Trying to capture a couple different perspectives of it because its kind of hard to judge the fitment from one angle.
Kind of difficult to photograph but here's roughly how the car will sit
My hope is that these in progress pics help other people thinking about doing this job themselves. This mod definitely isn't new and there's plenty of before / after pics but not a whole lot in between, especially with the rears.
In other news, I've been working on making copies of my motor / trans mounts. If anyone is interested let me know. I have more information on a blog page here: http://getoffmylon.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_4.html
03-11-2016, 08:14 PM
#187
Staging Lane
Join Date: Sep 2014
Posts: 60
Likes: 0
Received 0 Likes
on
0 Posts
Very impressive, that is a lot of rubber under there!
Regarding MIG vs TIG for this kind of work I'm no expert but have followed some of MP&C's posts on GarageJournal (here's another on BangShift) where he talks about the MIG dot method he uses and mentions using softer wire such as ER70S-7 and why he prefers that to TIG. It looks like you got great results with the TIG though and I think it comes down to personal preference and what suits the individual best.
Regarding MIG vs TIG for this kind of work I'm no expert but have followed some of MP&C's posts on GarageJournal (here's another on BangShift) where he talks about the MIG dot method he uses and mentions using softer wire such as ER70S-7 and why he prefers that to TIG. It looks like you got great results with the TIG though and I think it comes down to personal preference and what suits the individual best.
03-13-2016, 11:19 AM
#188
Very impressive, that is a lot of rubber under there!
Regarding MIG vs TIG for this kind of work I'm no expert but have followed some of MP&C's posts on GarageJournal (here's another on BangShift) where he talks about the MIG dot method he uses and mentions using softer wire such as ER70S-7 and why he prefers that to TIG. It looks like you got great results with the TIG though and I think it comes down to personal preference and what suits the individual best.
Regarding MIG vs TIG for this kind of work I'm no expert but have followed some of MP&C's posts on GarageJournal (here's another on BangShift) where he talks about the MIG dot method he uses and mentions using softer wire such as ER70S-7 and why he prefers that to TIG. It looks like you got great results with the TIG though and I think it comes down to personal preference and what suits the individual best.
Yeah I have read his posts before. It boils down to just using what I had.....didn't have any 70S-7 on hand so went to the tig. Certainly more than one way to skin a cat, but the tig is nice since you don't have to do nearly as much grinding to knock the welds back down. I had started doing the fenders with mig and got tired of grinding pretty quickly.
03-21-2016, 07:33 AM
#191
Started getting serious about the rear flare on the drivers side this week.
I ran the edge of the flare on a shrinker a bit more to get it to match the contour of the body as well as I could. Much better than it was.
The biggest problem area with the flare is where it meets the bumper - it tucks in pretty significantly and causes some pretty big interference problems with the tire.
Cleco pinned on and starting to pull out the rear
I tacked the rear edge and ran a fender roller on it as much as I could. Couldn't really put that much pressure on it until I tie the inner layers back in to support it, but it made a big difference in terms of clearance. Also pictured is the little bracket in progress that will push the rear bumper out to match the flare.
I want it to look like the car came this way when I'm finished, so I started working on provisions to allow the side molding to continue through the flare like it did stock. Shouldn't be too difficult to do.
With a good start on the flare I turned to figuring out what to do with the inner layers. Due to the shape of my flare, it's tying in the body line pretty far up. I stared at the inner layers for quite a long time trying to figure out the best way to seal everything up and pretty much what I settled on was cutting and hammering them out to meet the cutout for the flare and welding the layers back together there.
I looked at it a bit more and realized trying to seal up / protect all those individual cuts from rust would be more difficult than just having one continuous piece of metal in there with one continuous seam, so I cut them all out and will be adding in a new piece of steel to seal that up. This also gave me better access to further shape the inner-most layer of metal and beat it out to meet with the quarter. It's pretty heavy gauge (16 ga, I think) so it requires quite a bit of persuasion. BFH is the tool of choice here.
Lots of hammering
The inner layer pretty much hammered out to match and ready to weld. Just need to do some trimming and get some weld-thru primer to try and protect everything that I don't have access to once it's all sealed up. Will probably also be getting some 3M Rust Fighter to spray into the internal cavity once complete.
In other news, the slr mini kit came in and I installed that. Very nice components / machine work. I was drawn to this primarily for the geometry correction benefits, along with the increased steering feedback and 40% ratio quickening that results from shifting the tie rod pickup point closer to the center of rotation. This also produces increased steering angle, but I doubt I will be able to utilize much if any of that due to the tire sizes I'm running. I'm setting this car up moreso for autox / road racing anyway so I don't care about having 8 million degrees worth of steering angle.
That's all for now. Continuing to gear up for the upcoming body work marathon. I think I'm beginning to see the apex of the project - I think I'm pretty much done cutting and removing stuff. Looking forward to sealing everything up and starting assembly.
I ran the edge of the flare on a shrinker a bit more to get it to match the contour of the body as well as I could. Much better than it was.
The biggest problem area with the flare is where it meets the bumper - it tucks in pretty significantly and causes some pretty big interference problems with the tire.
Cleco pinned on and starting to pull out the rear
I tacked the rear edge and ran a fender roller on it as much as I could. Couldn't really put that much pressure on it until I tie the inner layers back in to support it, but it made a big difference in terms of clearance. Also pictured is the little bracket in progress that will push the rear bumper out to match the flare.
I want it to look like the car came this way when I'm finished, so I started working on provisions to allow the side molding to continue through the flare like it did stock. Shouldn't be too difficult to do.
With a good start on the flare I turned to figuring out what to do with the inner layers. Due to the shape of my flare, it's tying in the body line pretty far up. I stared at the inner layers for quite a long time trying to figure out the best way to seal everything up and pretty much what I settled on was cutting and hammering them out to meet the cutout for the flare and welding the layers back together there.
I looked at it a bit more and realized trying to seal up / protect all those individual cuts from rust would be more difficult than just having one continuous piece of metal in there with one continuous seam, so I cut them all out and will be adding in a new piece of steel to seal that up. This also gave me better access to further shape the inner-most layer of metal and beat it out to meet with the quarter. It's pretty heavy gauge (16 ga, I think) so it requires quite a bit of persuasion. BFH is the tool of choice here.
Lots of hammering
The inner layer pretty much hammered out to match and ready to weld. Just need to do some trimming and get some weld-thru primer to try and protect everything that I don't have access to once it's all sealed up. Will probably also be getting some 3M Rust Fighter to spray into the internal cavity once complete.
In other news, the slr mini kit came in and I installed that. Very nice components / machine work. I was drawn to this primarily for the geometry correction benefits, along with the increased steering feedback and 40% ratio quickening that results from shifting the tie rod pickup point closer to the center of rotation. This also produces increased steering angle, but I doubt I will be able to utilize much if any of that due to the tire sizes I'm running. I'm setting this car up moreso for autox / road racing anyway so I don't care about having 8 million degrees worth of steering angle.
That's all for now. Continuing to gear up for the upcoming body work marathon. I think I'm beginning to see the apex of the project - I think I'm pretty much done cutting and removing stuff. Looking forward to sealing everything up and starting assembly.
03-21-2016, 03:52 PM
#193
CkPITT55,
Awesome progress *** always. I seem to look over BMW swaps now unless you see your username. LOL.
Any reason you didn't merely use silicone/bronze to braze the flairs on? Alot quicker, less heat as you know and I would imagine a lot easier metal finishing.
Awesome progress *** always. I seem to look over BMW swaps now unless you see your username. LOL.
Any reason you didn't merely use silicone/bronze to braze the flairs on? Alot quicker, less heat as you know and I would imagine a lot easier metal finishing.
05-24-2016, 01:57 AM
#197
Still alive and kicking here gents, I have a long 2-part update for you here so grab a coffee and/or your favorite adult beverage and get comfortable. It's been a little while but I've been busy. Work on the fender flares continues, along with some other general shop updates that will pave the way for more progress in the upcoming weeks.
I spent a little more time tweaking my front end setup a bit. My initial steering clearance was pretty poor after installing the SLR kit with the standard e36 arms and wheel spacers to set the wheel position in the flare. I would have needed ~ 30mm worth of rack limiter per side to prevent the tires from hitting the frame rail when turning. After some research / playing around in solidworks to project potential differences in the geometry, I test fit some e46 control arms (~25 mm wider per side than e36 arms) and removed my wheel spacers. Without getting too technical, this component tradeoff bought me a lot of additional clearance and dropped my necessary rack limiter to ~8 mm per side. To offset the increase in camber from the longer control arms, I simply swapped my camber plates left to right to give me more positive range adjustment to bring the wheel back within a more streetable range.
Removing the wheel spacers brought the wheel in much closer to the spring perch, but since I reconfigured the coilover for use with a shorter 6" spring it looks like I will still have clearance.
With the front end more or less wrapped up, I turned attention to some shop related updates necessary to allow me to proceed forward with body work. I intend to try and paint this myself....well as much as I can anyway (I don't have the pockets to afford paying someone else to spend the time / attention on it that I would want them to), one of the first things I did was build a water trap for my compressor to help give the air a chance to cool down enough for the water to drop out as condensate. The hope being that it would help my filters be more effective at pulling out water and reduce the moisture content of the air. Not really that critical for regular air tools but really important for painting.
Bought a bunch of 1" copper tubing and started soldering. The velocity of the air through larger tubing is slower, therefore more time for heat to be dissipated and water to condense.
Pressure testing the completed assembly....doesn't leak!
Mounted on the wall behind the compressor
Seems to work pretty good. A heat exchanger between the compressor and tank would have been better but we'll get there eventually.
From there I moved on to start prepping parts and gathering supplies for getting parts under some epoxy primer. I ended up going with SPI epoxy which seems to get great reviews everywhere on the internet, sands easily, and is also a hell of a lot cheaper than PPG dp40 series primers ($180 for sprayable 2 gallons vs. ~$140 for sprayable quart). Should be a great foundation for corrosion protection as well as the rest of the paint job.
My buddy's neighbor heard about what I was doing and offered to let me borrow a spray booth he had put together for when he painted his car, so I jumped at the opportunity. He put together this wicked blower motor setup that houses some standard furnace filters to capture overspray from going outside. The motor drives the blower via pulley so that there aren't any spark sources in the path of the flammable vapors that are passing through....nice to know I won't catch myself or my project on fire! Big thanks to him and my friend Jon for helping me haul all this stuff to my shop.
The frame is made out of some 1" electrical conduit tubing...just slides together like legos. The walls are made of the 4 mil poly sheeting that I cut / taped to the frame as necessary.
Here's the more or less completed exterior, with filters placed for the intake to make sure I'm minimizing the amount of dust being drawn into the booth.
I rigged up some ducting for the blower outlet to allow me to vent the paint fumes while keeping the garage door most of the way closed to lock heat in the shop (it still gets down to 40s and 50s at night here in PA).
On the inside, I used some conduit clamps to put up 2x4s for mounting my filter / regulator, and also keep the hose off the floor. I don't have a picture but I also hung up a couple spare 4' light fixtures on the opposite wall to get some additional light in the booth as the ceiling lights are pretty diffused by the plastic.
With the booth ready to go I got some panels ready to shoot. I started by removing the unknown finish (not OE bmw since this panel was replaced on the car) on the quarter I pulled off using aircraft paint stripper.
After a few hours of scraping / sanding / welding holes shut / grinding / cleaning, it looked like this:
With that ready to go, I switched back over to the rear flare I had started. I'll preface this section of the post by saying that lots of guys talk about how much work goes into doing this, but it's hard to appreciate it unless you do it yourself. I spent a lot of time thinking about how best to seal everything up - and ultimately chose to cut out a lot of the factory metal and make a patch panel out of a single piece. Less welds = less chance for water infiltration and corrosion.
Anyway, innermost layer of the wheel-well hammered and welded to the quarter.
Fast forward a couple steps, and I have a patch panel formed and trimmed up to fill the hole that I had cut in the wheel well. (Cleco pins are awesome)
Fast forward a couple more steps, and I got everything prepped for spraying in the booth with epoxy primer.
Quarter in epoxy
Wheel well patch in epoxy
I spent a little more time tweaking my front end setup a bit. My initial steering clearance was pretty poor after installing the SLR kit with the standard e36 arms and wheel spacers to set the wheel position in the flare. I would have needed ~ 30mm worth of rack limiter per side to prevent the tires from hitting the frame rail when turning. After some research / playing around in solidworks to project potential differences in the geometry, I test fit some e46 control arms (~25 mm wider per side than e36 arms) and removed my wheel spacers. Without getting too technical, this component tradeoff bought me a lot of additional clearance and dropped my necessary rack limiter to ~8 mm per side. To offset the increase in camber from the longer control arms, I simply swapped my camber plates left to right to give me more positive range adjustment to bring the wheel back within a more streetable range.
Removing the wheel spacers brought the wheel in much closer to the spring perch, but since I reconfigured the coilover for use with a shorter 6" spring it looks like I will still have clearance.
With the front end more or less wrapped up, I turned attention to some shop related updates necessary to allow me to proceed forward with body work. I intend to try and paint this myself....well as much as I can anyway (I don't have the pockets to afford paying someone else to spend the time / attention on it that I would want them to), one of the first things I did was build a water trap for my compressor to help give the air a chance to cool down enough for the water to drop out as condensate. The hope being that it would help my filters be more effective at pulling out water and reduce the moisture content of the air. Not really that critical for regular air tools but really important for painting.
Bought a bunch of 1" copper tubing and started soldering. The velocity of the air through larger tubing is slower, therefore more time for heat to be dissipated and water to condense.
Pressure testing the completed assembly....doesn't leak!
Mounted on the wall behind the compressor
Seems to work pretty good. A heat exchanger between the compressor and tank would have been better but we'll get there eventually.
From there I moved on to start prepping parts and gathering supplies for getting parts under some epoxy primer. I ended up going with SPI epoxy which seems to get great reviews everywhere on the internet, sands easily, and is also a hell of a lot cheaper than PPG dp40 series primers ($180 for sprayable 2 gallons vs. ~$140 for sprayable quart). Should be a great foundation for corrosion protection as well as the rest of the paint job.
My buddy's neighbor heard about what I was doing and offered to let me borrow a spray booth he had put together for when he painted his car, so I jumped at the opportunity. He put together this wicked blower motor setup that houses some standard furnace filters to capture overspray from going outside. The motor drives the blower via pulley so that there aren't any spark sources in the path of the flammable vapors that are passing through....nice to know I won't catch myself or my project on fire! Big thanks to him and my friend Jon for helping me haul all this stuff to my shop.
The frame is made out of some 1" electrical conduit tubing...just slides together like legos. The walls are made of the 4 mil poly sheeting that I cut / taped to the frame as necessary.
Here's the more or less completed exterior, with filters placed for the intake to make sure I'm minimizing the amount of dust being drawn into the booth.
I rigged up some ducting for the blower outlet to allow me to vent the paint fumes while keeping the garage door most of the way closed to lock heat in the shop (it still gets down to 40s and 50s at night here in PA).
On the inside, I used some conduit clamps to put up 2x4s for mounting my filter / regulator, and also keep the hose off the floor. I don't have a picture but I also hung up a couple spare 4' light fixtures on the opposite wall to get some additional light in the booth as the ceiling lights are pretty diffused by the plastic.
With the booth ready to go I got some panels ready to shoot. I started by removing the unknown finish (not OE bmw since this panel was replaced on the car) on the quarter I pulled off using aircraft paint stripper.
After a few hours of scraping / sanding / welding holes shut / grinding / cleaning, it looked like this:
With that ready to go, I switched back over to the rear flare I had started. I'll preface this section of the post by saying that lots of guys talk about how much work goes into doing this, but it's hard to appreciate it unless you do it yourself. I spent a lot of time thinking about how best to seal everything up - and ultimately chose to cut out a lot of the factory metal and make a patch panel out of a single piece. Less welds = less chance for water infiltration and corrosion.
Anyway, innermost layer of the wheel-well hammered and welded to the quarter.
Fast forward a couple steps, and I have a patch panel formed and trimmed up to fill the hole that I had cut in the wheel well. (Cleco pins are awesome)
Fast forward a couple more steps, and I got everything prepped for spraying in the booth with epoxy primer.
Quarter in epoxy
Wheel well patch in epoxy
Last edited by ckpitt55; 05-24-2016 at 02:12 AM.
05-24-2016, 02:10 AM
#198
Had to break the post up into 2 parts
After the epoxy cured, I got the patch panel back in the car:
Here's the little piece I added to seal everything up near the molding support
Next I bonded the inside seam of the panel in with some 3m panel adhesive, and sealed the holes left behind from the cleco pins with some stainless rivets, which also served as clamps to hold the panel securely as the adhesive cured.
Next, I started the process of welding the outer edge of the panel to the quarter.
With the patch panel in place, I could finally start the final trimming / fitting of the flare. As mentioned I wanted to integrate the factory molding to go into the flare like stock, so a lot of effort / time was spent getting that to look decent (or try to anyway).
Another closer shot
Here's the flare at last being tacked up with the body
I chose to mig weld this one, it was pretty difficult to get a fitup that was good enough for tig. I started at 12 o'clock on the arch, spacing out tacks until I get the whole way around the panel. Then grind the heads of the tacks down so that the next tacks have good penetration, and proceed with another round of welding.
After a couple iterations of welding / grinding, eventually the weld spots overlap each other and you end up with a continuous-ish seam that will then be sealed up with some short strand filler to make it waterproof.
Still a bit of work to do to finish it up but you get the idea.
General look at one finished side with how the car will sit at approximate ride height. Might drop the rear a bit more once I'm able to roll the flare a bit for some additional clearance, but clearance isn't bad as is. I don't run into problems until I'm about 1" away from my bumpstops, but I don't envision ever getting there with 900 lb springs in the rear of the car.
Plenty of room to stuff more tire inboard should I ever want it
As always, thanks for looking. Hoping to get more progress rolling along here in short order.
After the epoxy cured, I got the patch panel back in the car:
Here's the little piece I added to seal everything up near the molding support
Next I bonded the inside seam of the panel in with some 3m panel adhesive, and sealed the holes left behind from the cleco pins with some stainless rivets, which also served as clamps to hold the panel securely as the adhesive cured.
Next, I started the process of welding the outer edge of the panel to the quarter.
With the patch panel in place, I could finally start the final trimming / fitting of the flare. As mentioned I wanted to integrate the factory molding to go into the flare like stock, so a lot of effort / time was spent getting that to look decent (or try to anyway).
Another closer shot
Here's the flare at last being tacked up with the body
I chose to mig weld this one, it was pretty difficult to get a fitup that was good enough for tig. I started at 12 o'clock on the arch, spacing out tacks until I get the whole way around the panel. Then grind the heads of the tacks down so that the next tacks have good penetration, and proceed with another round of welding.
After a couple iterations of welding / grinding, eventually the weld spots overlap each other and you end up with a continuous-ish seam that will then be sealed up with some short strand filler to make it waterproof.
Still a bit of work to do to finish it up but you get the idea.
General look at one finished side with how the car will sit at approximate ride height. Might drop the rear a bit more once I'm able to roll the flare a bit for some additional clearance, but clearance isn't bad as is. I don't run into problems until I'm about 1" away from my bumpstops, but I don't envision ever getting there with 900 lb springs in the rear of the car.
Plenty of room to stuff more tire inboard should I ever want it
As always, thanks for looking. Hoping to get more progress rolling along here in short order.
Last edited by ckpitt55; 05-24-2016 at 02:19 AM.
05-24-2016, 02:12 AM
#199
Everything you do is topnotch. LOL.
