My job this week is a 2001 BMW E36 330CI in a very nice shade of Graphite Grey complete with tan leather interior. The car is in generally good shape but is in need of some TLC to restore it to her former glory for the new owner who has just bought it. The main parts to be addressed are: • Several nasty door dents on both rear quarters • A large dent on the P/S rear wheel arch that will need to be pulled out. • The trailing edge of the driver’s door has been blown against a wall etc and has “rolled” round leaving a nasty dent in the door at the handle. • The front grill has several nasty chips and needs repainting. • The interior is very dirty form years of use and has a very strong smoke smell. • The exterior paint is quite badly marked and swirled in need of full correction. • Wheel centre caps need replacing as they let down the recently refurbed wheels. That’s enough to keep me out of trouble for a few days LOL!!! The car arrived on Saturday afternoon so the first job was to get my dent guy Barry down to do his magic on the car. All the offending panels were given a quick wash down dried and the car was moved into the garage. By 10:30pm all the dents were sorted. They all worked perfectly with only the long dent causing a bit of trouble due to access its length and its position this is 90% sorted with only a small mark where the panel returned left but to 99% of people unless you are on your hands and knees you will never see it. Also I tried a few test patches in the interior to insure no nasty surprises when doing it. Total time Taken 40 hours. DAY 1-2: Car washed using a 1 bucket method as it is in for full correction and I personally I feel my wash process allows me to do this. Method used • Car pre-soaked in citrus degreaser. Then my own blend of citrus prewash snow foam applied and left to dwell. • Car rinsed and refoamed with PH neutral snow foam again using my new snow foam blend. • Rinsed then sprayed with Tardis a panel at a time to remove tar. Then rinsed. • The car was then jacked up to remove wheels and do arches but the nuts had been tightened using an impact gun and would not budge not even with the breaker bar so to avoid damage I left them on and climbed under to was the back of the wheels. Then washed the wheel arched removed all mud and tar and years of greasy deposits to leave them shiny and new looking A few process pics: • Refoamed and washed with my trusty noodle mitt and Megs gold class I my bucket all horizontal panels first then vertical panels starting at the top and working round. Next up door shuts then bumpers washed and finally the side skirts. • Next up I retreated the car with tardis and used a foam pad to work any stubborn areas. • Refoamed and rewashed to remove all residue. • Next was the clay stage. I am using bilt hambre white clay. I think this stuff is simply amazing and much better than any other clay I have tried. The clay stage really shocked me as this was after half of the Bonnet!!!!! And this was one side of the car nasty indeedie!!!! The car was given one final wash to remove all remaining crud. The car was then pulled into the garage and dried off ready for initial inspection. My first job was to tackle the interior. Normally I leave this to last to avoid dragging dust or dirt into the clean car but as I was going to be wet vacuuming and steam cleaning I wanted to give it the longest time to dry out before the car was collected. The car was heavily stained all over so this was going to be a big job…. Process involved. • Initial vacuum to remove dirt. • Then all surfaces steam cleaned and scrubbed • Test patches checked. All ok! • Roof lining wiped with dilute Megs APC and a cloth then dry foam interior cleaner used and vacced with extractor. • Carpets scrubbed with interior cleaner and wiped clean then wet vacced and re wiped. • Stubborn patched worked with steam cleaner and re-extracted and wiped clean. • All leather cleaned with Gliptone leather cleaner and then fed with Gliptone leather conditioner. • The smell was still there so the Air conditioning system was flushed TWICE and the pollen filter was removed initially cleaned but then I replace it with a new one due to finding mould growing in it!!! Cloth on the left is after wiping the rear seat. The one on the right is how it used to look. Passenger side carpet. Boot carpet. The Pollen filter! The final finished Pics: DAY 2-4: Firstly its out with the paint gauge to check everything is in order and no surprises. The front had seen paint before as the owner had told me and they were reading a healthy 230+microns with the rest of the car showing a more factory 135+microns so happy days then. Firstly I taped up all areas that need protecting and decided on how best to tackle this beast. Here is a wee tip I have on taping doors to stop it coming off and risking nipping paint. Finally I got a perfect combo of • Gloss-it Yellow polishing pad with Menzerma 85RD 2 pea sized blobs and for nasty areas I had a mix of 85RD one pea sized blob and 3M Fast Cut Plus one small blob. As shown below.. • By routine for correction was: Spread at 600rpm Begin working at 1200rpm, light pressure to get residue evenly spread to start correction. Work at 2000rpm, medium pressure working up to heavy pressure towards the end. As residue began to go clear, reduce pressure for a couple of final passes at 2000rpm. Reduce speed to 1200rpm. • Then for perfecting the finish This was again using the Menz 85RD on a yellow Gloss-it polishing pad using the same process as above Finally to sharpen the Finish I used 3M Perfect-it Machine polish on a Blue 3M waffle pad using the following method. Spread at 600rpm Start at 1200rpm, light pressure and slow movements evenly spreading the polish Work at 1500rpm, medium pressure with steady movements. Then finally reducing pressure whilst speeding up machine movement Refine at 1200rpm, light pressure and slow to medium movement. Finally, burnish at 900rpm, with slow machine movements, with very light pressure. Here are my Pictures. Extra tape added to protect the swage line whilst correcting above the filler cap.. A few working marks now need to be refined out. Sorted. Before. After. Before. After. Finally once all was finished I then removed the Centre Caps and removed the badges. Unfortunately these were for a replica set of wheels and did not fit, so I got the ok to try and make them fit and if not the owner would sort it out. So I removed the sticky back and filed the edge down until it fitted in the cap and hey presto it worked only took and hour and a half to do a 10 minute job though!! Oh well the devil is in the detail as they say!!! DAY 5: LSP Time • Paint cleansed using Serious Performance Paint cleanser applied by Rotary at 1500rpm max • Serious Performance Super Polymer Sealant Applied (2 coats) by rotary at 1500rpm max to give a good winter protection. • Race Glaze 42 carnauba wax applied (2 coats) with z6 between coats as a wipe down • Reflection Perfection Final finish • Door shuts treated the same as the outer body. • Windscreen has 2 coats of Rain-X and all other glass polished. • Exhaust tips cleaned with autosol with fine wire wool along with back box then finished with Megs metal polish. • Interior Plastics dressed with Megs interior Dressing and wiped down • All interior glass cleaned with Reflection Perfection Glass cleaner and buffed. Now for the final pictures, thanks for reading and I hope you like. All C&C welcome as always. Ronnie!
Ronnie...thanks so much for taking the time to do that lengthy writeup. What amazing results you got there! Awesome job on the leather too. A question for you...did you steam the headliner? If you did, aren't you afraid of the glue letting go? I am very tentative at how I clean headliners. Your pics are great too. I particularly like this one:
Great Job! That off white carpet is a PITA to keep looking good. If I was the owner I would get some black OEM floor mats.
