Alright, so as promised, over the weekend got some car time and picked up where I left off. With my plan to have the inner rockers repaired and the floor put in before the jack stands are moved over to support the car by the rockers for the rear axle to drop, I started with the repair of the driver's side front inner rocker. Got a big sheet of 1mm thick sheet metal and got to work.
First - cut it all out as one piece, as there were too many small holes or pitted areas to try and repair separately.
Here's the shape I decided to go for the front portion, which is the tricky one due to the special concave area for the wiring loom.
Took me about 3 hours to shape and then trim to exact fit in total, which isn't as bad as I expected for a newb doing such a complex patch as one piece.
Final check for fitment
And then tack weld
Used compressed air to cool off the welds, still got some warping but think it'll be just fine after those welds are ground down. Sorry for the bad photo, it's not a convenient spot to take pictures of.
You may notice the drain hole for the sunroof is missing. That was on purpose, since I plan on doing the draining a bit different and avoid water pooling inside the rockers in case the original drain hole (too small if you ask me) clogs.
Outside view, the lower rocker piece looks pitted and weak, but it's plenty strong, trust me - I wacked it with a hammer to straighten out and that was really hard! Turns out this part of the e30 is made of much ticker sheet metal, so decided against cutting it out, rust prevention and correct chemical treatment will be good enough.
Next area that is better to repair before putting the floor in and make use of the extra access the missing floor provides is of course the firewall area.
By the looks of it, rot was getting onto the wheel well too, so stopped after the first few cuts. Had to see what it looks like from the back side, so out with the wire wheel.
Not too bad, but a small rust trace made me look up and what do I find? You guessed it...
This small hole will cause me a LOT of headaches. It was at this point, I realized there is no more putting it off - the dash needed to come out. Having the interior already stripped, made this task a breeze, having pulled out the dash off e30s at least about 10 times now helped a ton as well. So this being said, the process of removing it involved tracing the cruise control wiring harness to remove it completely. Turned out wouldn't be too hard, someone snipped the wires to the electric motor, maybe they had issues with it after repairing the control switch by twisting some wire around it.
At lest they put insulating tape over the cut wires.
Unfortunately, tracing wires around the firewall of a rusty car usually involves finding more rust, and this was not an exception.
Looks like someone was spilling a lot of brake fluid while filling up. When I say a lot, I mean they probably didn't get any of it into the brake fluid reservoir. Then they didn't pour water onto it as well, which causes the paint and seam sealer to flake off upon touch. Thankfully, the rust on the frame member turned out to be just surface, wire wheeled it where I could reach.
This joyful discovery not only changed the cutting plans a bit, let's say it expanded them.
Although the frame is crowded with leaves and other trash, it's solid and nothing more than a few surface rust spots inside. It will clean up nice, I think.
And this was the point where I realized the chassis wiring harness needs to be pulled off too, which I really really really didn't want to do. It's not the hassle and fiddling with connectors going through the firewall I don't want to deal with ... it's me going down the rabbit hole what bothers me. Knowing myself, I'll start luring my own mind into small tidying up tasks and then eventually tricking myself into more time consuming tasks until the wiring harness is completely restored.
I've even started to do that, telling myself, that a repaired and gone through chassis wiring harness is way safer and not going to cause the car to spontaneously combust.
Anyway, once this realization settled in, I started on the task of removing the wiring harness off the chassis. No pictures, but I had to resort to destroying the license plate lights, as the bolts were rusted and wouldn't budge, I found some interesting wiring decisions done by questionable individuals. Such as a stretched to it's limit piece of wire going to the passenger's front speaker and a fist sized ball of wire for the driver's side speaker, the dual wire used for the rear left speaker was first snaked through a tiny hole on the mounting point of the rear parcel shelf and then the terminals of the wire were soldered onto it. As a result, it had to be cut off to take out, as the terminals wouldn't go through the small hole. The radio is powered by a sketchy piece of wire taped (not soldered) to the cigarette lighter power cable. The connector for the radio itself was snaked through a metal casing to hold the radio in place and then soldered together with the aforementioned wiring nightmare and as a result there is no way to take it out of the metal casing as is there is no way to take that casing off the car without snipping all the wires ........ The last piece of intriguing wiring solved a mystery for me. Every time I open the trunk, the interior lights would come on, but not the light for the trunk. I had noticed the little switch for the passenger side rear door is missing and thought it was because of the small accident that caused the poorly repaired rear quarter panel. Turns out, someone took the wire for that switch, cut off the connector off of it, cut off the wire for the trunk light switch and twisted these two together. Brilliant I must say, despite the purpose of it eluding my understanding.
As fun as it was, I wasn't able to take out the whole wiring harness out of the chassis, what's left is the check panel loom and the headlights and other engine bay stuff loom. Stopped at that point, as I was tired and didn't want to brake any of the clips and fasteners.
Instead, I cut off some metal off the donor car.
All these rust discoveries and acknowledgment of inevitable work that needs to be done had me admin - this car is not going on the road this winter. It's far too much work to do in two months AND keep my job. So ... I did what any sane person would.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I bought another winter beater.
Now I can do all the "while I'm in there" ideas I get, no rush.
First - cut it all out as one piece, as there were too many small holes or pitted areas to try and repair separately.
Here's the shape I decided to go for the front portion, which is the tricky one due to the special concave area for the wiring loom.
Took me about 3 hours to shape and then trim to exact fit in total, which isn't as bad as I expected for a newb doing such a complex patch as one piece.
Final check for fitment
And then tack weld
Used compressed air to cool off the welds, still got some warping but think it'll be just fine after those welds are ground down. Sorry for the bad photo, it's not a convenient spot to take pictures of.
You may notice the drain hole for the sunroof is missing. That was on purpose, since I plan on doing the draining a bit different and avoid water pooling inside the rockers in case the original drain hole (too small if you ask me) clogs.
Outside view, the lower rocker piece looks pitted and weak, but it's plenty strong, trust me - I wacked it with a hammer to straighten out and that was really hard! Turns out this part of the e30 is made of much ticker sheet metal, so decided against cutting it out, rust prevention and correct chemical treatment will be good enough.
Next area that is better to repair before putting the floor in and make use of the extra access the missing floor provides is of course the firewall area.
By the looks of it, rot was getting onto the wheel well too, so stopped after the first few cuts. Had to see what it looks like from the back side, so out with the wire wheel.
Not too bad, but a small rust trace made me look up and what do I find? You guessed it...
This small hole will cause me a LOT of headaches. It was at this point, I realized there is no more putting it off - the dash needed to come out. Having the interior already stripped, made this task a breeze, having pulled out the dash off e30s at least about 10 times now helped a ton as well. So this being said, the process of removing it involved tracing the cruise control wiring harness to remove it completely. Turned out wouldn't be too hard, someone snipped the wires to the electric motor, maybe they had issues with it after repairing the control switch by twisting some wire around it.
At lest they put insulating tape over the cut wires.
Unfortunately, tracing wires around the firewall of a rusty car usually involves finding more rust, and this was not an exception.
Looks like someone was spilling a lot of brake fluid while filling up. When I say a lot, I mean they probably didn't get any of it into the brake fluid reservoir. Then they didn't pour water onto it as well, which causes the paint and seam sealer to flake off upon touch. Thankfully, the rust on the frame member turned out to be just surface, wire wheeled it where I could reach.
This joyful discovery not only changed the cutting plans a bit, let's say it expanded them.
Although the frame is crowded with leaves and other trash, it's solid and nothing more than a few surface rust spots inside. It will clean up nice, I think.
And this was the point where I realized the chassis wiring harness needs to be pulled off too, which I really really really didn't want to do. It's not the hassle and fiddling with connectors going through the firewall I don't want to deal with ... it's me going down the rabbit hole what bothers me. Knowing myself, I'll start luring my own mind into small tidying up tasks and then eventually tricking myself into more time consuming tasks until the wiring harness is completely restored.
I've even started to do that, telling myself, that a repaired and gone through chassis wiring harness is way safer and not going to cause the car to spontaneously combust.
Anyway, once this realization settled in, I started on the task of removing the wiring harness off the chassis. No pictures, but I had to resort to destroying the license plate lights, as the bolts were rusted and wouldn't budge, I found some interesting wiring decisions done by questionable individuals. Such as a stretched to it's limit piece of wire going to the passenger's front speaker and a fist sized ball of wire for the driver's side speaker, the dual wire used for the rear left speaker was first snaked through a tiny hole on the mounting point of the rear parcel shelf and then the terminals of the wire were soldered onto it. As a result, it had to be cut off to take out, as the terminals wouldn't go through the small hole. The radio is powered by a sketchy piece of wire taped (not soldered) to the cigarette lighter power cable. The connector for the radio itself was snaked through a metal casing to hold the radio in place and then soldered together with the aforementioned wiring nightmare and as a result there is no way to take it out of the metal casing as is there is no way to take that casing off the car without snipping all the wires ........ The last piece of intriguing wiring solved a mystery for me. Every time I open the trunk, the interior lights would come on, but not the light for the trunk. I had noticed the little switch for the passenger side rear door is missing and thought it was because of the small accident that caused the poorly repaired rear quarter panel. Turns out, someone took the wire for that switch, cut off the connector off of it, cut off the wire for the trunk light switch and twisted these two together. Brilliant I must say, despite the purpose of it eluding my understanding.
As fun as it was, I wasn't able to take out the whole wiring harness out of the chassis, what's left is the check panel loom and the headlights and other engine bay stuff loom. Stopped at that point, as I was tired and didn't want to brake any of the clips and fasteners.
Instead, I cut off some metal off the donor car.
All these rust discoveries and acknowledgment of inevitable work that needs to be done had me admin - this car is not going on the road this winter. It's far too much work to do in two months AND keep my job. So ... I did what any sane person would.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I bought another winter beater.
Now I can do all the "while I'm in there" ideas I get, no rush.
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