My LilRedBM

LilRedBM

Wrench Pro
Points
153
Location
Bonnie Scotland
Car
BMW E30 Touring
Well,now i can post pics i can tell you of the ongoing saga that is my bmw, i bought her back in 2001 after having my escort van rammed one sunday morning at 2o'clock by a drunk driver in a mondeo, he hit it so hard he ripped his front wheel clean off ! i picked her up from a middle aged couple in dundee for £1600 with a years ticket and no tax, she had a few small issues but nothing major so i was well pleased, especially since she had a relatively rare black leather interior, this is how she looked back then

i couldnt afford to run 2 vehicles at the time and was having my 2 kids over from Germany to stay with me so i thought the estate was the best option.

After abusing her as a tool carrier to and from building sites for a couple of years i bought another van and decided to do her up and wanted to put a wide arch bodykit on and to cut a long story short i couldn't find one that i liked, i'd already had a small amount of success with a stereo install that i had built so i thought f@*!K it i'll have a stab at building my own and this is what happened:-
Firstly i put the spacers and wheels onto the car,20mm spacers with 8x16 wheels on the front and 65mmspacers with 9x16 wheels on the rear.
Then cut, welded,seamsealed and waxoyled the arches, got my hands on some polystyrene( i later used kingspan) and did this



Then using an assortment of rasps,files,surforms and various blocks of wood,metal etc and some sandpaper i started shaping, with the help of a couple of beers a box full of tuning mags and various comments from mates querying my sanity she started taking on in my eyes a pleasing shape


I ended up having to cover the whole kit i was building in tinfoil and pva woodglue as polystyrene melts if you touch it with resin whereas kingspan or celotex doesnt, anyway i fibreglassed the whole lot and to keep the kit rigid i made it in one piece(apart from the front bumper and the two bits of the rear arch that open with the back doors) then ripped the whole lot back off,removed the foam from the inside,tidied the edge up round the kit and tigersealed and riveted it back onto the car,
 
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Then followed hours and days of mind numbing sanding and filling and changing the skirts and rear end that i didn't like until i had achieved this


At this stage i got a painter mate of mine involved and went through varios stages of sprayable green ti filler, and etch primer loads more sanding, i was really surprised what actually shows up when everything is one colour, there were so many small blemishes and flat spots that i hadn't seen before but i was almost there, then time to paint woohoo

And finally in this short story, this is what she looks like at the moment

I still have the engine swap to do followed by a custom exhaust system then finally i will finish the back end off with a carbon diffusor
Hope you like and for anyone wanting a more in depth explanation on how i did this feel free to visit my website www.homemadebodykit.com
 
i can't get my bigger pics up, had to take all the pics i had from my photobucket album, i'll try again later resizing them but i do have bigger ones of the later stages on my wesite, the earlier stages were taken with a prehistoric sharp mobile and i don't know how to make them any larger without losing focus :embarrest:
 
Very impressive work. It literlally must have taken hours and hours to get that sort of finish. Are you happy with the end result?
 
Thanks for the kind words lads, i'm happy enough with the results for the moment, there are a couple of bits that i could have done better but i'll address those in a couple of years when i change the colour ,i think to blue although i am becoming increasingly more interested in getting her foil covered in blue instead of getting her painted again.
At the moment i still have to do the engine swap, take out the tired old 12v m20 2.5 and put in the 24v m50 2.5 but i have to sort out the loom first and that i am at the moment stumped with as i bought the engine with no loom attatched then bought a loom modified to fit the E30 plug in the engine bay but i don't know which plug goes on which sensor or indeed which sensor is which and as bmw didn't start putting their workshop manuals on disk until after they stopped making the E36 i'm having trouble getting info :sad2:
 

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