This is one of my favorite projects. What can I do to a 28 year old car with 90K miles that’s mostly original? It’s not a garage queen, not a track car, just an honest driver that’s been out in the world for too long. This car had a lot of surface contamination and a few rock chips which had started to rust. Also a few places where the paint was starting to fail that seemed almost organic. But more on that later. The real money to be made was on the interior. (I seem to be doing work on a lot of Dover interiors lately.)
The previous owner had installed sheepskin seat covers years (decades?) ago and never removed them. The covers must have trapped water at some point and the tannins stained the seats. It creates an odd wear pattern. The seats are creased, but not cracked. There wasn’t the usual abrasions on the bolsters, but there were some deep stains. Fortunately the Seat Doctor came to the rescue again and the cleaned up really well as did the door cards.
Adam’s Iron Remover and a clay bar took care of the surface contamination. The clear coat was very fragile and some of the deeper rock chips which had started to rust, had also started to spread out under the paint in odd sort of ways. This one looks like a friendly type though — as if he was waving at me.
But the rust lead me to discover a tool for cleanup to rusty rock chips: Sanding Sticks. A simple solution to address the risk of creating additional damage by sanding with traditional sandpaper.
The final area to sort was a common issue on E36 M3s, the discolored and failed protection film on the rear quarter panel under the wing. BMW put this film here to protect the paint from the wing under aerodynamic load and when closing the trunk lid, but over time they all turned a nasty yellow and cracked. If it’s not cracked, you might be able to clean it up with some heat and a plastic razor blade. These were too far gone so we used heat and the plastic razor bade to remove as much as possible, then used Goo-gone to remove the residue. Be careful with heat that you don’t remove paint as well. After removal, I put down some PPF for protection.
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