Back to work on the old girl.
First polish turned it from brownish-silver into silver. This is after round two. Contemplating a third before ceramic, but it's getting late in the afternoon.
Door airbag emblems finally came in after being hung up in Springfield MA since the 28th.
 Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
 Ape Out Shirt $21.68 |
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
This was what it looked like first wash after getting it home.
Definitely brownish.
*the white bucket in these two also serves as a point of comparison.
looks great OP. keep us updated
why the frick are you polishing your car multiple times? what are you using?
I like it but really hate those wheels
Hell yeah dude glad to see you're getting this crusty bastard cleaned up! Have you got it into the shop yet to get looked at?
Goes in on the 22nd
I couldn't afford the BBS wheels along with the car. My brother-in-law still has them.
Turtle wax polish. So a very fine cut for the shape it was in. I didn't have any heavy cut nor did I really want to risk it on 20 year old paint. A few passes with a finishing polish works fine to get it smoothed out.
Don't listen to all these frickin assmongers they're just mad they didn't get the deal.
>going to the shop
What are the symptoms?
I think I just committed myself to another 8 hours of cleaning.
Cranks but doesn't start. Throwing crank position sensor code.
Battery died and it wouldn't start after charging.
Out of interest, what are you using to scan the codes?
It was a laptop with some connector. I don't have it, my brother-in-law did.
That's what the shop is for.
I'm only $1070 into the car, so I have some wiggle room with expenses.
I do need the BBS wheels, though. I don't know what I want to offer my BiL for them. They were pretty oxidized, and he hit them with a green scrubby to clean them up.
>It was a laptop with some connector. I don't have it, my brother-in-law did.
That sounds like the pirated collection of BMW dealership diagnostics software, I was going to suggest that exact same setup. For what it's worth, that cable is $25 from eBay and the software is "free", the biggest expense is finding a beater laptop for it and the time you have to spend on learning something that was probably designed by fricking aliens with no concept on how humans use computers.
>that was probably designed by fricking aliens with no concept on how humans use computers.
inpa is a fricking nightmare to use. ista isn't much better either but it's usable. it's just a mother frick to find the function tests buried under piles of german bullshit.
>designed by fricking aliens with no concept on how humans use computers
Germans.
INPA is the SAP of car diagnostics.
For some reason people on ebay are asking insane amounts of money for style 32 bmw wheels, the ones you're calling BBS. Maybe it's shipping cost. U should be able to pick up a set that has poor finish for a few hundred $, like $400ish.
These are my favorite BMW wheel, but at 18 they sort of look too big on a z3, stock the Z3 only had up to 17s. pic related.
https://newhaven.craigslist.org/wto/d/west-haven-18x8-bmw-parallel-wheels/7496335875.html
These are 16s, and might look more at home on the Z3 although originally on an X5. Kind of remind me of z1 wheels. IDK if the offset is all wack though because they're from an SUV, but usually BMW wheels are pretty interchangeable.
https://newjersey.craigslist.org/wto/d/morristown-bmw-x5-style-rims-wheels/7491678741.html
Looks like they go for about $200 each, and nice ones for closer to $300.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/304483302879?epid=1440480683&hash=item46e49e7ddf:g:8koAAOSwS0Bievz6
I've never seen someone waste so much time on something so simple. A full detail (wash, clay, cut, polish, wax/ceramic coat) shouldn't even take 8 fricking hours. Jesus christ
so true haha. Cars tiny too not like he’s detailing a 73 fleetwood or something
This, OP has absolutely no idea what he's doing. If you wash something properly the first time it shouldn't need to be washed 5 more times, then a wax or ceramic coat helps seal it and keep it clean. Power washing the engine bay was also incredibly stupid I can't wait to find out what he filled with water when the shop gets it.
Starting with a brand new car, no.
Now try one that was dailied in CT for 15 years, quite possibly never seeing a coat of wax, and then left to sit for 5 years.
It takes 3 cleanings just to get it to a point where you have some place to put the gunk you're pulling out of the corners in the 4th and 5th go, and then it will take a 6th to finally get it all off.
This was in bad enough shape that I was hesitant to buy it at $1000. It was not just a wash and wax away from the concours d'elegance.
Wheels seem to be in decent shape. The front ContiProContacts have plenty of tread. The rear Dunlops are barely legal.
According to this, those style 32s were an option on the z3. You should put those on the car and try to get a few hundred for the black wheels on craigslist.
https://bringatrailer.com/listing/2001-bmw-z3-m-coupe-2/
Needs new center caps, the ones on it are NLA as bmw replaced them with a newer style. You might find an NOS set at a premium but it isn't worth it.
>It takes 3 cleanings just to get it to a point where you have some place to put the gunk you're pulling out of the corners in the 4th and 5th go,
you just have no fricking idea what you're doing, which is blatantly obvious by polishing the car 3 times with an extremely mild compound.
This is like starting with 10,000 grit sandpaper and complaining that it took you 15 hours to get your paint smooth.
Based clown shoe scrubber
Looks good. You'll get way more for it than what your grandma car is worth. These are actually desirable.
are you the euro idiot doing thousands of dollars worth of work on your brother in law's car so he can sell it and presumably cut you out of the profit?
Oof I thought he got a good deal on it from a family member or something, if this is the case I feel bad for op.
I'm the americlap who bought it from him for $1000 to flip for myself.
And I'm not going to cut him in on any of the profit. (after working on it for him to get it ready to sell over a period of several years, when he was finally ready to just dump it because it stopped running, he didn't tell me. I only knew because my sister sent me a picture of her new (used) car and I didn't see the BMW in the reflection. Only then did they tell me they had it scheduled to go "tomorrow" for $1000)
>bought it from him for $1000 to flip for myself.
Excellent buy anon, I hope the shop comes back with simple fixes. Any clue what kind of figure you'll be asking for it?
He wants 2k for it. It can't possibly be worth more than his Pontiac g6 grandma car. It's bouncy and you have to shift it manually. That means it's worth less. You much have not seen the other threads. The guy is a polcel or something
>tales from some stupid wannabe israelite car flipper: blog editon
frick off moron
See, there should've been a broken-down Z3 in the reflection, and there was just an empty space because it was sitting outside waiting to be towed away.
is this a mk7 regular golf?
looks like an e-Golf
Is that fricker plugged into a generator
No, the generator is just next to the plug.
Hey, no need to be upset, buddy. It's not like I snatched this up before some 'true enthusiast" could get to it. It was never available for sale, and it was literally hours away from being towed to a scrapyard with its window askew because the battery was dead.
Only I knew that it actually ran when parked and could buy it out from under the scrapper.
what do you think every other fricker plugs into
Your mom 🙂
This whole saga is weird as frick. Put some anime stickers on it to improve it.
Shined up better than I thought.
Going through six washes over two weeks and still being brown should tell you the state of its paint.
It's still not "2004 Grand Prix shiny", though.
What a shitbarge. That bmw is 1000% better than this thing.
>That bmw is 1000% better than this thing.
I'm glad you think so. My Grand Prix is worth around $8,000. I hereby accept your offer of $88,000 for the Z3.
The type 32 wheels will be $800 extra.
When would you like to meet?
Your grandma car is worth 3k and 2k of that is covid tax.
Still gets a remarkable number of compliments.
>few months ago, guy literally shouts out his window as we're crawling along in traffic: "Wow, that thing looks brand new. Do you drive it in the winter?"
>Yesterday when over at my BiL's looking at the wheels, some of his cousins attending their family reunion complimented the car
>Today, the gas station attendant complimented it
>then, right after, got another compliment when picking up a sub and amp.
I find it weird since I'm far more partial to fifth and sixth gen styling.
oh no, OP is a dumb /misc/ack who buys ugly american cars and doesn't even know about the best era of BMW enough to get one running. Unsubscribed. Next thread please.
Have you ever tried to get to the crank position sensor of a 2002 BMW Z3 3.0i?
I think I'd need another four joints between my wrist and elbow to get my arm up in there.
And I want a BMW. Just not a Z3.
Nah but my pops is an old dude and he did it on his z3m s54 idk if it's that different. Pelican parts says 3 hours, 5/5 difficulty, classic BMW goodness.
it's easy as piss if you remove the intake manifold first. it only takes maybe and hour to remove. There's plenty of videos on the procedure, you'll have to do it anyway to replace the ccv so do that while you're at it.
>if you remove the intake manifold
That's something I leave in the, "Let the shop take care of it," pile, since I have no experience with that sort of thing and it's a part that's getting into the "mistakes could be expensive" zone.
As the expenses of possible mistakes increases and the value of learning from those mistakes decreases due to there being little foreseeable future repetition, the value of "doing it yourself" decreases, and the value of the professional's expertise comes into its own.
While I could "try," even a flawless execution won't save me a particularly huge amount of money over having the shop do it, and any mistakes will likely cost me more. On average, it's almost certainly better to just have the shop do it.
>Removing the intake manifold is going to damage something
OP confirmed for wrenchlet moron who doesn't know the first thing about cars, I can't wait for the shop to hit him with a 4k bill that ruins any chance of making money on the car.
Based and 3800 pilled but I gotta know...
You gonna buy a v8 after you sell the z3?
No, my Grand Prix is plenty fast enough for where I'm at.
My past is rife with close calls and multiple tens of thousands of dollars in fines and insurance costs. I may still be banned from driving in Wisconsin. (I didn't pay close attention to the notice at the time, but I got the idea they didn't want me back)
I don't really need to put that part of my life on repeat.
The money from the Z3 will just to into savings. I have no great needs, and when one comes up I usually manage to satisfy it on the cheap. (if not make a profit.)
That reminds me, I still need to see if I can sell my second Alpine Type R for more than I paid for the pair.
use iron remover.
I probably should've, but I didn't know the color was that far off until after polishing. The three rounds of polishing did the trick.
I threw a layer of ceramic on it, so I guess I'm done with that. It at least has some of the wet/gloss look to it. I perhaps could've gotten deeper with more buffing, but I might also burn through the clear and end up with a mess on my hands.
No that tells me you don't know how to wash a car
Good shit anon thanks for posting an update. I don't see "brown" in that paint in any bad way, but monitors are notorious for frickery. Hope you're not schizo about browning of the paint.
How is the rest of the car coming along? This is the first I'm reading that the window was fricked. Hope you can figure that out.
I think generally you gotta make it go as close to OEM as possible, but it seems those wheels are staying as is the vinyl wrapped roof. The nice thing about BMWs is the parts fiche is easy to navigate on realoem.com so you can order detail items like missing bolts/shrouds directly with the proper part numbers.
If you're gonna go full autistic and go for a bringatrailer or dougandbids listing, ebay has reproduction warning sticker sheets for a bunch of these old german cars because I'm sure a few of those are missing/damaged.
After polishing it, I was like, "Holy shit, this thing is SILVER!"
Titanium silver is quite the bright silver. I had thought nothing of how it had looked originally since there are quite a few gray and brownish silvers out there. But this thing's base is white, which came out once I polished the embedded dirt off.
The window was just fricked because it had no juice to properly operate. The windows automatically go down a hair when you open the doors, then close to seal back up when you close them. With the battery dead, it just stays up when you open the door, and then doesn't seal right when you close the door.
So this thing would've had water pouring into it if it had been siting in a yard somewhere.
I'll snag the BBS wheels from my brother-in-law and pay him for them out of the profits. I don't think they have any clear left on them, so I'm not sure what I'm gonna do about that. But I'm guessing the staggered 17's with actual rubber will raise the price more than the cost... depending on what he wants.
If he wants $1500... maybe not.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/254525692499
Pretty sure the roof is stock. There doesn't seem to be any clear under there.
>First polish turned it from brownish-silver into silver
>silver
>"""s-i-l-v-e-r"""
Today was power washing and scrubbing the engine compartment and all the nooks and crannies, along with a second coat of ceramic. Getting all the grime out of the channels really puts a finishing touch on it.
No pics since it was basically dark when finished that and got around to washing my car. The Turtle Wax ceramic on that worked well. 100 mile trip in the rain, then a week outdoors between a hotel and work where it got rained on again. and my Grand Prix was still the shiniest thing in the parking lot. Then a 100 mile trip back and it was still pretty clean.
>Power washing a BMW engine bay
Oof
Starting to come together.
I'm about at the "toothbrush" stage at what really needs to be worked on.
(yes, it needs to be vacuumed again. It's 4 days until it goes into the shop so I'm not doing ultra finishing touches right now)
need to polish up that door trim, get those Momo plate circles out of the carpet, and see if I can find some Coupe door sill trim. Both sides are pretty beat up.
It was a daily driver, rain. wind. or snow; so it's not going to come back to factory. But it came back much further than I expected.
I think I'm going to hit the painted metal under the hood with a cleaner polish to get the rest of the discoloration out.
Don't you think maybe before you start waxing the subframes you should successfully diagnose the no-start issue?
Yeah, he wants $800. I'm going to head over there now to grab some pics.
Honest question: Why waste so much time detailing the interior and exterior before you deal with the mechanical issues?
It was a month wait for the shop appointment. My own car is already clean. There was nothing else to do.
Since it is a multiday process to clean a neglected car, might as well do it when I feel like doing it.
>it is a multiday process to clean a neglected car
it's not.
>if it's good enough for me, it's good enough for anybody
>Too stupid to wash something
>Getting mad at other people
Yikes. It takes one wash if you know what you're doing. The whole point of washing something is to remove all the dirt and grime, if there's still stuff on the car you either switch to more aggressive tactics or spend more time. You don't just keep washing it over and over.
>takes one wash to keep it clean over two weeks
This is what it looked like a week after the first washes.
Wasn't going to polish it a week after that without washing it again.
>wash a car and leave it outside parked under a tree for a week
>GEE HOW DID IT GET DIRTY AGAIN???
also
>first washes
>washes plural
lmao
Pretty much this, what the frick did you expect? You're fricking stupid.
I was a professional detailer for about 4 years. You're clinically moronic if you think it's a multiday process.
Given there are no clean cars on the road except for mine, you obviously weren't very good.
Am i correct that you are spending afternoons washing a car that does not run? Seems like you got things backwards a bit the first goal was to get it running at least
>can't get to crank position sensor
>can get to exterior and interior
Hmmmm, I wonder what I'll work on?
he's spending 8 hours a weekend washing a car multiple times that doesn't even run.
and then leaving it parked outside under a tree
I feel like I'm getting trolled, but I have a neighbor just like him that powerwashes his jeep 3 times a week despite never even driving it.
It's not going to get 20 years of grime accumulated in a week.
Once the car is finally clean it will only take a simple wash and vacuum to keep it clean. It's the getting the crud out of everything to get it to that point that's the issue.
it doesn't take multiple washes to get rid of 20 years of grime either. It doesn't take multiple polishes to get rid of 20 years of grime.
You're doing things extremely inefficiently, and then you're getting defensive as if your moronic way of doing things is the right way and actually makes sense.
Get the car running
Wash, clay, cut, polish, wax/ceramic
park in garage
done.
The washes don't even touch the grime.
The power washer didn't touch the grime.
washing gets surface shit off.
clay bar gets contaminates adhered to the paint off
cut removes swirls/scratches in the clearcoat
polish restores glossiness by removing any small shit left from cutting
wax/ceramic protects your freshly polished clearcoat
Post a picture of the products you're using to detail this car. I want to laugh.
Get a tarp to cover it once it comes back from the garage gl with the fix.
It'll be going in a garage after the final wash for pre-sale pics. It's fine outside right now.
Now do 20 years worth of stuck-on greasy grime.
Clay does not lift grease.
>Now do 20 years worth of stuck-on greasy grime.
I detailed a car that was sitting outside for 30 years parked under a boomer's pine tree. You're just fricking moronic.
Go watch ammo nyc and see all the cars he details for the first time in 20+ years. There's nothing unique about your car, you just don't know what the frick you're doing.
>I detailed a car once
>Youre so stupid, unlike me
>Go watch a memetuber shill his products
>Provides one example of a car he's detailed
>Assume he means that's the only car he ever detailed
Soap removes grease, what the frick are you doing that you haven't washed any grease and residue off before clay bar.
>Soap removes grease,
Takes either polish or carb cleaner to get this off.
You use carb cleaner to wash your dishes? I guess the billions of people using soap on grease are somehow missing something that you magically know?
>You use carb cleaner to wash your dishes?
Yes. Brings the freshness out.
>I guess the billions of people using soap on grease are somehow missing something that you magically know?
I used dish soap. Guess what color the car still was? Brown.
>Using dish soap on a car
So you're fricking stupid and you don't know what you're doing basically? And that car isn't brown, you might want to check your eyes or re learn your colors.
You don't normally use dish soap on a car because it strips wax. Guess what you can use if you either want to strip the wax or you want to get a car that hasn't had wax on it in 10+ years squeaky clean?
This didn't need a mild cleansing, it needed to be melted down to its component elements and rebuilt.
>And that car isn't brown
It's certainly shifted that way.
It's an entirely different hue after polish.
Look at the white of the BMW badge compared to the paint. It stands out starkly against the paint in the older pics, but blends right in with the after polish.
>you might want to check your eyes or re learn your colors.
Says the person who thinks the dress is white and gold.
You will never know what this looks like on a calibrated U3014:
[Embed]
A $4k bill would still leave me with $5k+ profit.
You sure are mad about being called out for being too fricking stupid to wash something, you must be a real loser in real life.
You sure are mad at me washing a car.
Who's the bigger loser?
Dish soap is normal when you're trying to start over with a car. I'll use 50/50 Dawn and car shampoo typically.
That's what the clay bar is for. You don't wash it half a dozen times because it won't do anything the first wash didn't. Washing removes surface shit.
I spent 6 hours detailing my $500 bucket and got made fun of, but I don't care it made me happy and my car looked amazing
Beautiful car OP, do what makes you happy
Imagine getting butthurt that a guy on the internet washed his car several times after having to park outside in pollen season in Connecticut. You've got a lot going on in your busy life there, huh, bud?
Based schizo op, keep us updated with your demented polishing.
Schizo gets mad for being called a schizo for blogging being a schizo. Based.