[kswerks]

so I will share here.

Hi, I am new here and I thought I would share my current project. 1988 E30 M3. The car had a questionable past and already had an S52 swap so instead of me feeling bad about ruining a a classic, I decided it was the perfect platform to make the car what I wanted. I prefer to think I saved this car as opposed to ruining it.

Here she is before she was sent off, again it was a pretty good 10 fter. I liked the look of the car but the details is where she fell apart.



Unfortunately while the car looked pretty good, once the tear down started it revealed there were some pretty rough areas. The worst being a common problem with E30 M3's. The M3 had a bonded windshield and most of the time when a windshield was replaced, the installer would unknowingly fill in the drain holes resulting in this....





There was no evidence that this cancer was occurring . It wasn't discovered until after the car started to be stripped down.

Some other areas of concern



You can start to see how many times this car had been painted.







Time to get down to the nitty gritty and to bare metal.







Getting down to bare metal revealed a badly repaired rear quarter which has been corrected.





Underneath the sunroof

Again, no indication that this was lying underneath.



Car in primer



Cage being started.



In the meantime, while the car was getting body work done, luckily the fabricator for the turbo stuff had an E30 on hand to mock up everything.











Here is the cowl repair and the some paint.



The repaired rear quarter that was a hack job



Some more paintwork





note that the car had painted very crappy an estimated 4-5 times. All new bumper support hardware and plugs to get back to an OEM look. Even though this is located behind a bumper and no one will see it, getting back to proper trim was important to me.



Interior coming together.



Alcantara headliner, rear tray and pillars with a quick shot of how the roll bar was integrated in to the stock rear seats.





Here is a view into the worst part of the car (imho) Under the hood was basically a hack job. The car appears to have been turbo charged at one point and they decided to make clearance by banging in the front strut tower. Just put some heat wrap tape over it.



This is the front passenger front fender area as viewed through the front headlight. ooof.



Closeup of the "clearanced area" for the previous turbo.



Ahhhhhhh. Much better. Previous unused holes and non needed brackets shaved and filled in.







A little insight into the turbo. probably looking at somewhere around 450 whp.

[Dr K]

That turbo vane is a work of art! Nice job on the car - can't wait to see in person.

[Jazzbass]

Holy crap. That is awesome - what a hell of a first post. Great work - hope to see this thing in person.

[Dandelion]

Very nice - congrats!

[vascott99]

Simply WOW...Kudo's to your hard work mate...

[Hunter]

First post award winner.....