I've been enjoying my week off over Christmas, and luckily getting a couple of hours in the garage too!

Yesterday I removed the rear brake calipers, as they were pretty corroded. They aren't in the best of shape so I might use the ones of the dead 540i sitting on the drive. I know these are good as I was driving it daily till it packed up completely in September. I decided that whilst the rear axle is partially dismantled, I thought I'd go the whole hog and re-con the parking brake at the same time. On the 5-series this is a small brake drum inside the brake disc.

So Today I removed one of the rear brake discs, and found lots of corrosion inside it. I cleaned this up with a wire brush and it all looks very useable. In my haste to remove the rear axle assembly from the donor I had cut the handbrake cables, and have now found that I may not be able to replace the cable conduits. However all is not lost as again, I have a 540i sitting on the drive which may have to donate it's trailing arms.

The other thing I've done in the last 2 days is fabricate the base and front hoop of the dash/scuttle assembly, complete with fixing brackets. I've ordered a rivnut tool from CBS which I will use to fix the assembly to the chassis. The nice thing about this is that by pure chance, the dash instrument binnacle fits perfectly between the steering column and the dash hoop. Brilliant!

As always, I've taken some pics and will post them up soon.

Happy new year for Friday!!!

Well hello everyone and a very Happy Christmas! (yes I know it was yesterday but all the same!)

The wife was very generous and bought me a digital video camera for Christmas, so I thought I'd have a little go of it and give you a little look around the car as it stands. No matter how many pics I post, a video will always be better.

And please excuse the burp, I didn't think it would come out quite so loud.

Last night I reconditioned the 2 BMW allowys for the rear axle, and painted them gloss black to match the steels I had done earlier. I had been warned not to grit blast them, as it might be too powerful and open up the pores of the alloy, but found that by turning the blast pressure down to 25psi, I could remove the paint without damaging the alloy itself. I then went over them again with a sandblaster (actually pink aluminium oxide grit but very bery finely ground) and this left a nice smooth surface, but sufficiently keyed to accept paint easily. Anyways, here's the pictures:

Ok here they are before I started, one was painted black. I masked the centres of both, as they did not need painting. Just worth a mention that the tape is fibreglass tape, ordinary masking tape wouldn't be able to resist the blasting process.

Here they both are after a good 45 minutes of grit blasting, and a 10 minute sanding.

A close up of the inside of a wheel shows there is no damage to the surface of the alloy, just nice and ready for paint.

Back in the spray booth, primer applied.

Followed by gloss black. And what a pain in the neck they were to paint, all those different angles in the multispoke pattern. But I am really pleased with the result.

Ok, finally found a way to upload my images without a data cable, so here's the back end of the chassis after i sprayed it with hammerite.

Yesterday I finally got round to de-rusting and painting the rear half of the chassis. I was avoiding it as the big knotted wire brush on my angle grinder was very fierce and would nearly pull my arms off if i caught it just right on the edge of a tube. Then it dawned on me, my spare grinder has a variable speed control! So using the one with the speed turned down to just below half, I de-rusted it all in super quick time.

I then painted it with a can of hammerite aerosol rustproofing paint. Unfortunately the only colour I could get was silver, I may well repaint it in the future but for now at least it's all protected - looks nice too!

I did take a picture of it, but my new phone (a replacement from O2 - the product of a 3 month saga) didn't come with a data cable, so as soon as i get one, i'll upload it.

I recently got some time to myself, so I reconditioned 2 steel wheels to fit the front axle. They were very grubby and rusty, but luckily I have access to an industrial grit blaster which does an amazing job of cleaning them up. see the pics below for the results:

Here are the wheels with the tyres removed (incidentally my local tyre fitters charged me a bank-breaking £3 for removing and disposing of the old tyres!) as you can see they are very mucky and rusty around the rims. However under the tyres was immaculate, so I masked off the centres as they simply did not need doing.


This is the rear of both wheels after I blasted one of them, you can see the difference it makes, the metal surface is now clean and perfectly keyed for paint application.


And here they are after I had finished the blasting process. If you do this yourself, make sure you blow off all the grit with compressed air, paint them withing 2 hours of blasting as they will rust VERY quickly if you don't. And DO NOT touch the blasted surface with your bare hands as you will leave fingerprints in it that WILL show through the paint.

Immediately after blasting I placed the wheels in a spray booth and applied 2 coats of primer.

Followed by 2 coats of gloss black. And don't they look superb!

Oh well so it's yet again been a month since I last posted.

I wish i could report a whole new wave of progress - but i can't. The truth is I haven't done much at all on the car. There are a few good reasons for this though :-

1. My wife has recently become pregnant with our first child, so I have lots to do to prepare for that!
2. I have been put onto permanent nightshift. ( although this may have it's benefits ;) )
3. I have finally decided to do something about my ever increasing waistline and now spend an hour a day working out - the same hour I used to spend in the garage.

Anyway, the couple of things I have done are these: I fabricated the mounts and fitted the BMW 3 series steering rack, although it isn't actually connected to the wheels yet as I need to design and fabricate some appropriate rack extensions. Also i need to connect the steering shaft to the rack by means of a long extension piece.

The other job i have started is fitting a new steering wheel. The BMW one is unsuitable as it is way too big and has an airbag fitted. (the law says where one is fitted, it has to work, and that's never going to happen). I picked up a nice 3 spoke wheel from an autojumble last Sunday And today i started stripping the BMW steering wheel down in the hope I could re-use the mounting boss in the centre. This may not be possible and I may have to buy one - but as always, persue the Locost option first!