My CS Restoration

[gazzol]

Next up came the boot/trunk floor. There were a few reasons for cutting the whole of the boot out.

1 There was bound to be some rusty bits that I wasn't expecting !

2 I wanted to be able to have a straighter route for the exhaust system.

3 I wanted to be able to fit a larger fuel tank completely inside the boot as the original one was half inside and half outside the car and was subject to stonechips and going rusty.


Here's the boot area after I'd finished with the agle grinder, the lower half of the rear valence was also cut away. Also note the corrosion to the bumper mountings, these were welded up as the car was going to be de-bumpered to save weight.

The new boot floor was designed to be as low as the old fuel tank was originally that way it shouldn't suffer from grounding issues.

Any way here is one of the new sections, note that the lower section of the rear quarter panel has been boxed in. Patterns for the new steel were first made from cardboard before being transfered to sheet metal. This one is ready for plug welding in. I like plug welding because the welds can be cleaned up afterwards and after seam sealer has been applied the appearance is (almost) that of a factory job.

Here is the other side ready to be welded in, note that the front of the boot floor has been welded in.

The lip that the rearmost part of the boot floor will be fixed to has been welded in.

Here the parts that will form the sides of the boot have been made and welded in.

From the outset I decided that the car was going to have a roll cage. The main reason for this was to increase the overall ridgidity of the car as the E9 was prone to flexing quite badly. I also decided that if I was fitting a cage then I might aswell link it to the rear suspension mounts and the diff mounting.

Next up the whole boot was painted with Bonda and then a rubberised textured paint. Note the raised sections, the new fuel tank will be mounted on these.

Job done!

 

[blumax]

Impressive workmanship--and structurally

very well thought out. The discovery of rusted inner parts and panels is certainly a testament to Karmann's well earned moniker as

"The King of Korrosion"

My hats off to you for the fine resurrection you are doing!!

 

[Marco]

Nice job
next year i go and start on my e9 and post pictures

 

[gazzol]

The next job was to sort out a few jobs arround the front end of the car, this mostly involved tidying up previous welding work with only one or two new repair pieces being needed.

The elephants ears were cut away as they were redundant due to plastic liners being fitted.

Corrosion from the scuttle panel crept into the wing and required a piece of the front wing (fender) to be cut away to be able to repair the area properly.

For some reason I forgot to take any photos of the repair.


Once the car was finaly solid again I could start getting it ready for painting. In reality it would still be months before colour was applied to the bodywork.
First the floor underneath was stripped to bare metal by using high speed wire wheels in an angle grinder, this had to be done wearing goggles, welding gloves and an old leather coat (in the height of summer) this was protection against the wire bristles which would fly out of the wheel at 10,000 rpm and stick themselves in any part of my anatomy that they could, definately not recommended!
Once the everthing was bare it was painted using bonda, then it was given a rubberised textured coating before being painted body colour.
Here are a few pics

Once the floor underneath was painted I prepaired the floor inside the car.

Here the floor has been painted with Bonda.

Here I am putting masking tape arround the seams so that seam sealer can be applied.

Here the seam sealer has been applied and the masking tape removed.

Next job was to fabricate the roll cage. I decided that I wanted to make my own cage instead of buying one, this way I had the choice of where the mounting points would be. I wanted the cage to stiffen the shell of the car so it made sense to have it mounted to the stressed areas of the shell. These are:- the front bulk head, the A post, the B post, the rear subframe mounting points, the rear suspension mounting points.
A pipe bender was bought from Ebay and 80 Ft of tube bought from a local steel stock holder. The first problem I encoutered was that the pipe bender wasn't really up to the job because it can't bend tight radi without creasing the tube, what I really needed was a mandrell type bender but as these are very expensive it was out of the question. The solution to this was to bend the tube gradually bending a little and then moving the tube along and bending a bit more. This wasn't an ideal solution as it means you get a long radius but it meant that I could carry on making the cage myself.

Here is the rear section of the cage being made, the old head lining has been temporarily fitted to ensure the cage wouldn't foul it. Note the diagonal bar going down to the subfame mounting.

Here the second diagonal has been fitted and the braces from the rear bulkhead (rear suspension) to the subframe mounts have been fitted this area would be further fortified with a brace from the subframe mounting to the B post mounting.

Here is the full cage almost completed with only the door bars left to do.

The completed cage, hung up having been primed prior to being sprayed satin black.

Once the cage was finished the interior of the car was prepared for painting, this involved using body filler to diguise the welding arround the rear floorpans. Once that was done the interior was painted satin black.

Here you can, err, see (?) the interior paint job.

This one's a little better, check out that lovely wiring loom!

 

[haze-4]

restoration

Hi- what color or color code is your CS- great photos on the restoration
thanks

 

[gazzol]

Re: restoration

Hi- what color or color code is your CS- great photos on the restoration
thanks

Thanks for your comments, can't remember the code number but the color is called saphire blue.

 

[chicane]

As shown earlier the doors were quite badly corroded alng the top edge so I bought two new aluminium skins from a guy who makes repair panels for Jaymic.
Before I started doing the roof I took the old door skins off so that the frames could be sent away to be acid dipped. The skins are removed by grinding along the edge where the outer skin is folded round the frame.

Does Jaymic sell Aluminum Door Skins? How much are they?

 

[gazzol]

As shown earlier the doors were quite badly corroded alng the top edge so I bought two new aluminium skins from a guy who makes repair panels for Jaymic.
Before I started doing the roof I took the old door skins off so that the frames could be sent away to be acid dipped. The skins are removed by grinding along the edge where the outer skin is folded round the frame.

Does Jaymic sell Aluminum Door Skins? How much are they?

They do but they aren't listed on their website, however they are twice the price that I paid.
The name and number of the chap you need to speak to is: Ted Teece (remove first zero and add UK code if outside UK) 01543481188

Be warned though they WILL need modifying to make them fit properly. (don't tell him I said that)

 

[gazzol]

At this point I had stripped the suspension and sent all the components away for sandblasting.
The next job was to start the engine bay.
First on the list was to remove the top portion of the bulk head, this serves only as a divider between the engine bay and the heater intake. I wanted the bonnet vents to (hopefully) act as vents to let hot air out as opposed to letting cold air in.
The first job after the bulkhead was cut was to make a box to go arroung the heater intake, this box would itself have an intake which would be piped to the front of the car, alas the piping to the front of the car didn't work out but more on that later.

Here is the box being fabbed.

Sadly I dont have any more pics of the box being made so you'll have to wait till later to see the finished article.

Next up the engine bay was prepaired for paint and then primered with 2 pack high build primer.

This was then flatted down (color sanded in American speak) and painted in satin (semi-flat) black for that authentic race car look, actually its much easier to touch up should you scratch it installing the engine.

Next up, the suspension came back from the sandblaster so it was first painted with bonda before being sprayed satin black and being reassembled with poly bushes.

Several plans were put in motion before the suspension components were painted. For reasons unknown even to myself I had decided to make the hanbrake hydraulic ( I must have a penchant for making life hard for myself) so I used the original front calipers on the rear. The reason for this was that they are a dual circuit 4 pot caliper, this means that one circuit can be used for the hand brake whilst the other will be applied by the foot brake. The upshot of this was that the rear suspension arms had to be modified to take the front calipers. Another obsticle was that due to the design of the rear arms the calipers would only fit at the bottom of the disc, this would pose a problem for bleeding. It turned out that bleeding the rear brakes had to be done before the springs and shock absorbers were fitted so that the arse of the car was in the air with the suspension arm jacked up as high as it would go. In reality this will only be a problem if air gets in the system, for normal annual fluid changes just open the nipples and pump!

New rear caliper fitted.

Note 2 flexi pipes at the rear.

Here are the finished rear brake pipes. Brake and fuel lines run through the car.

And here is the hand brake lever and master cylinder.

This presented me with another problem, what to do for the front calipers, well it wasn't much of a problem really as I had a set of Brembo 4 pots lying arround so it made sense to use these, never the less the uprights needed modifying to bolt them up.

Here's the finished result.

In the next installment:- another stupid idea turning into mamoth engineering project

 

[gazzol]

A long time ago I decided that I'd like to fit individual throttle bodies on my car with a nice big fat airbox. This pesented me with a problem, my car had not one but two remote brake servos mounted on the N/S (left) inner wing making space tight for that immaginary air box. No problem I thought I'll use the hydraulic "power brakes" system as fitted to the 5s 6es and 7s (E23,E24 and E28) this system uses hydraulic pressure supplied by the power steering pump to boost pedal pressure. So a full second hand system turned up on Ebay and I bought it. Great.
Once my parcel turned up I ripped it open in a great wave of enthusiasm and started to offer it up to the car, hmmmm this was going to take some doing if it was going to work as there wasn't enough room for the hydaulic servo (booster) due to the exhaust manifold (right hand drive vehicle).
Determined to make use of my new paper weight so that I could junk the vacuum servos a plan was hatched. What I needed was to be able to mount the hydaulic servo on the N/S inner wing and connect it to the brake pedal, in other words I had to make a transverse pedal link, sounds easy if you say it quick.
Now I'm sure most of you will understand making something from a drawing ain't too bad. Trying to make something with a part on your right a car on your left and a lot of fresh air in between them trying to visualise how it's going to work ain't easy!
3 Paragraphs and no pictures yet!! hang in there lads.
It wasn't too hard to work out the link had to go through the engine bay and not through the passenger compartment as I would have liked cos I didn't really fancy drilling a hole all the way through the heater box. So the engine had to go back in to make sure I didn't have to make the choice between having brakes or engine but not both!
A trip to a breakers yard to look at transverse links turned up a component from a Ford Escort that would act as a bearing so I got two of them and picked up some thick walled tube on the way back to the workshop.

Here is the start of my brake link

The bits hanging off the tube which is being supported by the red screwdrivers in the photo above are the bearings which will eventually support the tube. All I had to do next was find a way to fasten them to the car. The front bulkhead was out of the question as the bearings would be so high up to clear the engine there wouldn't be any bulkhead in the local vicinity to fasten them too. So it had to be the inner wings then, by trial and error eventually some brackets were made.

Here is one of the brackets bolted to the inner wing.

Once the brackets were in place and the bearings bolted up and the link (tube) was in place I could measure from the tube down to the hole in the bulkhead where the pedal rod comes through, this told me how long my lever arms needed to be. Both lever arms were made exactly the same length so the effort ratio would be 1:1.
In this photo the lever arms have been welded to the link rod and the collars which butt up against the bearings to stop the rod moving from side to side have been welded on.

The lever arms were then cut with a slight taper (just to make them look better) before the whole shebang was painted (you guessed it) satin black and fitted to the car.

Here the transverse link has been fitted and connected to the brake pedal with a rod which I also had to make!

Next up I had to make the brackets which will hold the hydraulic servo in the car and be solid enough that the whole lot didn't flex about when the brakes were pressed. This involved the same sort of trial and error engineering as was used above.

Here's what I came up with.

And here is what it looks like in the car unfortunetly you can't see much cos it's all black.

And thats all I have to say about that period of my life!

In the next instalment:- I finally start the body work.

 

[radosc]

Fantastic work! Can't wait to see it finished. If anyone else is planning on transverse linkage with brakes upgrade it would be easier to use 82 or 83 635CSi RHD coupe mechanism. It has transverse linkage inside engine compartment, later models had linkage inside cabin and since 87 it had brake booster on the right side. So using 82-84 e24 parts would be the best.

 

[uter]

I'm looking forward to the next installment!
Thanks for posting such a detailed narrative.

 

[shanon]

WOW!! Hats off Gazzol!! Great stuff and thanks for sharing.

Curious what the 'ultimate' vision is for the car? Big bore/Porsche assault vehicle? 70s Touring car club racer/historic rally? Flared tribute car of some sort? Grp 2 or 5 or ??

Looking fwd to the next chapter. :wink:

-shanon

 

[sprintevo]

Bonda

Hi

I am undergoing a restoration - I have got some zinc etch primer for the areas I will be stripping paint off, is Bonda better to use? if so where can I get it?

Thanks

 

[gazzol]

Re: Bonda

Hi

I am undergoing a restoration - I have got some zinc etch primer for the areas I will be stripping paint off, is Bonda better to use? if so where can I get it?

Thanks

I can't honestly say if bonda is better than the paint you have, there are better paints on the market that cost 5-6 times as much as bonda, I read a review on anti rust primers many many years ago in a classic car publication and the paint that beat bonda only beat it in the "scratch" test where after they painted a peice of steel with each paint in the test and then scratched it and left it out in the rain. Bonda came second but as I said the other paint was so expensive it was ridiculous.

 

[gazzol]

Over the course of my resto/rebuild or whatever you like to call it I kept an ever watchfull eye on the Bay for bargains and things which may come in useful. One of the things that happend to be very useful was a lot that turned up one day in the form of genuine CSL bonnet, boot lid and doors. I wasn't too bothered about the doors at the time as I'd already skinned mine with ally, the bonnet and boot were very useful as my old steel items had started to disappear in a manner that would have made Paul Daniels proud so a deal was done and I drove 220 miles and handed over £700.00 and brought my items home. They were in quite a state (although they had been described as such) as they had been removed from a car many many years ago and had suffered over the years for items falling against them etc. By the time I'd finished with the body filler the weight saving probably wasn't as great as I'd hoped but at least I dont have to worry about the metal moth.

Here the bonnet is being prepped for primer

Here is one of the shell masked up ready for primer.

I was determined to get the car painted in high build two pack primer before Christmas so I could take a much needed week off and give the primer plenty of time to cure in the cold conditions.

And so it was, the following pictures were taken just before I went home at about half five on Christmas eve. The car has been shadow coated ready for flatting down.
For those that don't know a shadow coat is a fine coat of a contrasting colour sprayed over the primer. When you flat (sand with wet or dry rubbing paper)your primer any inperfections in the prep work will show up more readily and can then be attended to with stopper.

Ok so there I was, car all primered up and ready to paint and what did I do? Paint it? Nooo that would have been far too easy! What I did was to decide that I wanted a boot spoiler, so, did I do the sensible thing and get on the phone and whip out my plastic fantastic? Nooo that would have been far too easy! With absolutley no previous experience of fiberglass work I decided to make my own!!! :shock: . Yeh I know I've said it before but I have this thing about making life hard for myself.
To do this I bought all the fiberglassing stuff and some chicken wire. A piece of chicken wire was cut from the roll and roughly bent to shape, next it was placed on the old boot lid and clamped in postion. Once I was reasonably happy I cut some fiberglass mat off the roll, mixed up some resin, soaked the mat with the resin and draped it onto the chicken wire, it wasn't pretty!

Here are some pics.

The next phase was to make the base of the spoiler. By now the old boot lid was covered in crusty resin drips and I needed a smooth (ish) surface from which to make a mould so polythene was taped onto my new boot lid and fiberglass was laid up on this. Once the fiberglass had cured it could be peeled away from the polythene.

The two bits of spoiler were then bonded together and filled and sanded till I was happy with the shape, the trouble was it had so much filler it weighed about half as much as the car

The answer was to use this prototype to make a mould from, once I had a mould I made a new spoiler .

Here is the new spoiler being bonded to the boot lid.

Once the spoiler was bonded on it could be filled smooth and the boot lid could be primed again.

Once that was done the car was flatted all over with 600 grit wet or dry rubbing paper and washed down. The next phase was to cover the inside of the unit with polythene.


Finally the car was ready to be painted, the chosen colour isn't a CS colour but it is a BMW one (albeit from the early 80's) its called Saphire blue.

06/02/2007

Here is the car the morning after I painted it I had started to "flat" the car with 1500 grit paper prior to buffing it back to a shine.

Here the flatting (color sanding in America) begins

Once the flatting was finished and the car was polished one of the first jobs was to fit the head lining which I'd had made in black.

Then the rear screen and roll cage

Over the next seven weeks the car was put back together whilst making all the finishing bits like door cards and seat mounting brackets, all the little bits that you think won't take too long but seem to take forever.


A good few of you will already know what it looks like but for those that don't here it is. The turd brown building in the background is the unit

And thats that!!!

The car was actually finished two years ago so I appologise for not completing this thread earlier. I have done a few jobs on the car recently and I'll write up about that soon.

 

[OCCoupe]

Bravo!!!