335is Build - Rebuilding a neglected 335is
- Thread starter dyezak
- Start date
So I did a boost leak test on Friday and found two leaks. One was from the shop not tightening my charge pipe (easy fix) and the second was crankcase pressure...a lot. So I decided it was time to get in there and plug those internal PCV ports in the intake runners and put a new gasket on the valve cover. A few hours later and I couldn't find any leaks!
How did you do the test? I've been meaning to do mine since I've changed every pressure connection, but the test is kind of a pain in the ass. I was thinking putting my air compressor at 20psi, hooking it up to the meth nozzle plug on the charge pipe, and listening.
Your pressure will leak out through the compressor inlets (i.e. your intake) if you do that. Just take off your cone filters, cap one of them, and the other one you put your pressure through. Don't go over 6-7psi as that might blow off your intakes on the turbos themselves. Takes me about a half an hour to do a pressure test.
If you're single turbo top mount it's even easier. Just take off your air filter, cap it and pump in pressurized air!
Full paint correction performed today. I'll make a post with pics and details later but let's just say 8hr behind a buffer, buffing the whole car 3 times with three progressively finer polishes capped off with a fresh coat of wax.
Going to take my son to his first Cars and Coffee in the morning
Going to take my son to his first Cars and Coffee in the morning
This is what a black car looks like with perfect paint, not a scratch, swirl, or hologram to be found:
I'm getting the other pics off my phone. Phone died, have to charge it.
The factory 19" 313s wheels are sitting in the garage. The original owner curbed checked the shit out of them repeatedly and they look like rolling cheese graters now. I'll be sending them to R&R Wheel next spring to be re-machined and powdercoated back to factory specs. I'll then use the 19" 313s wheels as street wheels. These 18" black 437 wheels are wrapped in Hankook Venus V12 Evo2 rubber....275r 245f and are great for now. I'll then throw some slicks on the 437 wheels for track days. I wanted black 18's for track wheels cause they'll hide brake dust the best and 18" cause light weight.
The factory 19" 313s wheels are sitting in the garage. The original owner curbed checked the shit out of them repeatedly and they look like rolling cheese graters now. I'll be sending them to R&R Wheel next spring to be re-machined and powdercoated back to factory specs. I'll then use the 19" 313s wheels as street wheels. These 18" black 437 wheels are wrapped in Hankook Venus V12 Evo2 rubber....275r 245f and are great for now. I'll then throw some slicks on the 437 wheels for track days. I wanted black 18's for track wheels cause they'll hide brake dust the best and 18" cause light weight.
Not to get off topic, but I picked up a salvaged Chevy Volt the other day for $4k, so I got myself a little project as well
I'm a bit too lazy to bar and wax my car, them ceramic finishes though...
I'm a bit too lazy to bar and wax my car, them ceramic finishes though...
Ok, so I'm not a professional body man, but I have buffed hundreds of cars and used to do this on the side back in highschool and college to pay for partying and beer. I've been using the same products for 20y now ever since the 3m rep came out to the body shop I worked with and showed me this stuff. Back then it was 3m Perfect-IT, then it went to 3m Perfect-IT 2000, and it was finally reformulated to 3m Perfect-IT II. Some general information about paint correction:
You are removing paint when you do this. On modern (newer than 1995~ish) cars you are removing clear coat. Leveling it and smoothing it. This process should only be done on modern cars, older cars you'll be removing the actual color layer, so a different technique is suggested.
You always find a test area first and test your paint correction there first. You test your finest polish first and then get progressively more abrasive until you find the least abrasive step that will correct the paint in your test area. These are the general steps to paint correction from most abrasive to least. Remember, the more abrasive step you use, the more paint you remove.
1 - Wet sanding, the most abrasive. If you have to wet sand I would suggest 3m Trizact wet/dry paper. Nothing is better. I'll not be covering wet sanding yet, as I corrected 90% of my paint with less abrasive techniques. I will have to go back and wetsand/buff/polish my decklid because it has some imperfections that compounding couldn't clear up. Once I do this I'll cover it in a later post.
2 - Rubbing Compound. This is where 90% of all your paint correction will start. When you hear someone say "it'll buff out" they are almost always talking about buffing with a rubbing compound. Rubbing compound should always be applied with a specific compounding buffing pad. The pad and compound are married and should never be used with other products.
3 - Polish. This is where 99% of paint correction ends. Rubbing compound will leave microscopic scratches in the surface that will be seen in direct sunlight as "holograms". The hologram effect is worse when a wool pad is used, as foam pads are generally less abusive. Here is an example of some BAD holograms (not my car):
The darker the car the worse the hologram visibility. You'll almost never see holograms on a white car, and a black car it's almost impossible to NOT get them with rubbing compound. I'll show you a pic of my holograms during the correction step soon.
4 - Ultrafine polish. This is for that last 1% of POP and only useful on dark colors. Everything before this step has been abrasive grits. Sometimes called glaze, this is generally gritless and is almost always used to rub the finest of finishes onto your surface. The softer the surface the more glaze is beneficial and the darker the color the more glaze is beneficial. So on plastics, this is really good stuff. Headlights for instance when buffed out will benefit greatly from glaze, as will tail lights. And every black car can benefit from good glaze.
5 - Sealant. You can use wax, and most people call this layer the "wax"....but most products available today don't actually have wax in them. Chemistry has progressed and we have things better than wax now days. This will actually add no depth or clarity to the color, it only serves as a protectant.
Whatever you use, buy it as a set/kit. Manufacturers make the abrasive grits match each other perfectly. I like my 3m Perfect-IT stuff but Mothers makes some good stuff and Zaino is hard to beat.
If you have never buffed a car before you can't begin to understand the level of physical labor involved in this. And the hardest part is cleanup, because you are already beat down from 4-6hrs of slinging a 7lb buffer around that is trying to rip itself out of your hands every time you pull the trigger. So do yourself a favor, and while you are fresh and rested tape up your car! cover anything and everything that you will not buff with the buffer.
This isn't a paint job, so you don't need to be perfect...but compound/polish/wax has a way of staining rubber that makes cleanup extremely frustrating. Cover it with tape and plastic. The product I use is called Tape-N-Drape and a single roll can tape two cars up like this for buffing with extra left over. It's $9 for a roll at Wal-Mart...spend the $9.
Something else to hit on here as well. While you are doing your paint correction you don't want to ruin your job. You'll want to match your product (compound, polish, wax, etc) to its own buffing pad, AND its own cleanup cloths! Go to Wal-Mart and buy the 25ct microfiber towel jumbo pack, it's like $10. Use clean microfiber clothes on every step, and if a cloth touches the ground immediately retire it and don't use it anymore. When we worked in the body shop microfiber clothes were one time use items that were discarded after use and never re-used. Once a towel is contaminated with rubbing compound it has that abrasive imbedded into it...and you'll never get it all out no matter how much you wash it. If you ever use it on perfect paint again in the future you will induce swirl marks as the embedded abrasive causes new microscopic scratches in your previously perfect paint. You can reuse your glaze and wax towels. Polish and compound towels should be downgraded to underhood wrags or interior cleanup duty only.
Here are a couple examples of the bad paint issues that were on my car. These are a combination of oxidation, hard water stains, and acid etching.
I'm not a photographer but I tried the best I could. You can see next to the reflection of the light in each picture a "stain". You can also see how poorly the light reflects in the direct reflection. The stains are from hard water on the first picture and bird poop on the second one. The hard water is mineral buildup on the clearcoat and the bird poop causes acid etching that eats away clearcoat. The oxidation is just general poor maintenance.
The first step after taping the car up is to grab your buffer of choice and attach your compounding pad and start buffing the car with rubbing compound:
Buff the entire car. The biggest issue people have when they start buffing is using too much product. You should only buff a 2'x2' area at any given time, and only use enough product to wet coat that amount of paint. If your buffer pad is slinging product around you used too much. Really a dollop the size of a quarter should cover 2'x2'. Buff until the product is gone and never let rubbing compound dry on the paint.
Once done buffing you'll have buffing dust all over the damn place. Grab an air hose and blow the car off to get most of it off then grab a new clean microfiber towel and dust the towel with your favorite quick detail spray. Just a spritz or two on the cloth itself. Then clean the entire car with your microfiber towel removing all traces of dust from the compounding stage. Once done you'll have a smooth, clean, clear surface. If your car is white, or other light color you could conceivably stop at this point and skip to wax/sealant. But the darker your car is, and the more direct sunlight you allow on the surface, the more you'll see the swirl/hologram pattern left by the compound. Remember the car above? That was horrible. But this is what mine looked like at this stage:
You can see the reflections are all arcing down to the right, there is one arcing up to the right and that's the hologram/swirl. Not really that bad but it drives me NUTS!! So next we break out the polish and my ole trusty polishing pad (which needs to be replaced):
Repeat the entire process on your car now with the polish. Use clean/new towels and a light spritz of detailing spray to clean the car after, and you'll get something that looks like this:
NOW, pull out your microfine polish/glaze, attached your glazing pad, and get to work AGAIN!
Same process, end with a wipe down with fresh clean microfiber towels and you'll end up with this:
It's hard to tell the difference at this point in real life under artificial light. It's easy to see in the sunlight however, the only word that seems to describe what you are doing is adding "depth". You end with something so full of luster it's like looking into a pool of ink. We will see the fruit of our labor in the sun the following day. For now, we need to finalize our detail work.
Unwrap the car, and open all the doors, hood, trunk, gas filler door, etc and with fresh clean/new microfiber towels detail the ENTIRE car paying special attention to all the crevices. Clean everything off the car:
Once everything is clean check out your problem areas extra close. Here are the stains that we took pictures off before. Notice how the hard water stains are gone, the acid etching is gone, and the haze is gone. We have clear reflections in the paint surface on the area(s) that were the worst. The the second picture below you can even see the gold flake in the paint for the first time on the roof. This is the difference between jet black and black sapphire metallic:
Now that the paint surface is perfect, we need to protect it. At this point ANYTHING will scratch the surface and because the surrounding paint is perfect it'll be easily noticeable. When I say anything I mean anything other than microfiber. Even a paper towel will scratch this surface.
Finish with your favorite sealant/wax. I like Zaino the best, but I don't have any right now. So I used some off the shelf Meguires for now.
Now, in direct sunlight look for a direct reflection of the sun and you'll spot any imperfection you may have missed:
That's a mirror finish.
-------------------------
A couple things remain cosmetically on the car.
1. Rear bumper is damaged and needs to be replaced. I'll be doing a full new one with fresh paint.
2. Decklid has scratches that were deeper than buffing could remove...I couldn't get any pics of them, but they exist. I'll be wet sanding and re-buffing the decklid to fix this.
3. I have a small handful of door dings that will need some Paintless Dent Repair.
After that stuff is done over the winter it'll be back to factory fresh!!
You are removing paint when you do this. On modern (newer than 1995~ish) cars you are removing clear coat. Leveling it and smoothing it. This process should only be done on modern cars, older cars you'll be removing the actual color layer, so a different technique is suggested.
You always find a test area first and test your paint correction there first. You test your finest polish first and then get progressively more abrasive until you find the least abrasive step that will correct the paint in your test area. These are the general steps to paint correction from most abrasive to least. Remember, the more abrasive step you use, the more paint you remove.
1 - Wet sanding, the most abrasive. If you have to wet sand I would suggest 3m Trizact wet/dry paper. Nothing is better. I'll not be covering wet sanding yet, as I corrected 90% of my paint with less abrasive techniques. I will have to go back and wetsand/buff/polish my decklid because it has some imperfections that compounding couldn't clear up. Once I do this I'll cover it in a later post.
2 - Rubbing Compound. This is where 90% of all your paint correction will start. When you hear someone say "it'll buff out" they are almost always talking about buffing with a rubbing compound. Rubbing compound should always be applied with a specific compounding buffing pad. The pad and compound are married and should never be used with other products.
3 - Polish. This is where 99% of paint correction ends. Rubbing compound will leave microscopic scratches in the surface that will be seen in direct sunlight as "holograms". The hologram effect is worse when a wool pad is used, as foam pads are generally less abusive. Here is an example of some BAD holograms (not my car):
The darker the car the worse the hologram visibility. You'll almost never see holograms on a white car, and a black car it's almost impossible to NOT get them with rubbing compound. I'll show you a pic of my holograms during the correction step soon.
4 - Ultrafine polish. This is for that last 1% of POP and only useful on dark colors. Everything before this step has been abrasive grits. Sometimes called glaze, this is generally gritless and is almost always used to rub the finest of finishes onto your surface. The softer the surface the more glaze is beneficial and the darker the color the more glaze is beneficial. So on plastics, this is really good stuff. Headlights for instance when buffed out will benefit greatly from glaze, as will tail lights. And every black car can benefit from good glaze.
5 - Sealant. You can use wax, and most people call this layer the "wax"....but most products available today don't actually have wax in them. Chemistry has progressed and we have things better than wax now days. This will actually add no depth or clarity to the color, it only serves as a protectant.
Whatever you use, buy it as a set/kit. Manufacturers make the abrasive grits match each other perfectly. I like my 3m Perfect-IT stuff but Mothers makes some good stuff and Zaino is hard to beat.
If you have never buffed a car before you can't begin to understand the level of physical labor involved in this. And the hardest part is cleanup, because you are already beat down from 4-6hrs of slinging a 7lb buffer around that is trying to rip itself out of your hands every time you pull the trigger. So do yourself a favor, and while you are fresh and rested tape up your car! cover anything and everything that you will not buff with the buffer.
This isn't a paint job, so you don't need to be perfect...but compound/polish/wax has a way of staining rubber that makes cleanup extremely frustrating. Cover it with tape and plastic. The product I use is called Tape-N-Drape and a single roll can tape two cars up like this for buffing with extra left over. It's $9 for a roll at Wal-Mart...spend the $9.
Something else to hit on here as well. While you are doing your paint correction you don't want to ruin your job. You'll want to match your product (compound, polish, wax, etc) to its own buffing pad, AND its own cleanup cloths! Go to Wal-Mart and buy the 25ct microfiber towel jumbo pack, it's like $10. Use clean microfiber clothes on every step, and if a cloth touches the ground immediately retire it and don't use it anymore. When we worked in the body shop microfiber clothes were one time use items that were discarded after use and never re-used. Once a towel is contaminated with rubbing compound it has that abrasive imbedded into it...and you'll never get it all out no matter how much you wash it. If you ever use it on perfect paint again in the future you will induce swirl marks as the embedded abrasive causes new microscopic scratches in your previously perfect paint. You can reuse your glaze and wax towels. Polish and compound towels should be downgraded to underhood wrags or interior cleanup duty only.
Here are a couple examples of the bad paint issues that were on my car. These are a combination of oxidation, hard water stains, and acid etching.
I'm not a photographer but I tried the best I could. You can see next to the reflection of the light in each picture a "stain". You can also see how poorly the light reflects in the direct reflection. The stains are from hard water on the first picture and bird poop on the second one. The hard water is mineral buildup on the clearcoat and the bird poop causes acid etching that eats away clearcoat. The oxidation is just general poor maintenance.
The first step after taping the car up is to grab your buffer of choice and attach your compounding pad and start buffing the car with rubbing compound:
Buff the entire car. The biggest issue people have when they start buffing is using too much product. You should only buff a 2'x2' area at any given time, and only use enough product to wet coat that amount of paint. If your buffer pad is slinging product around you used too much. Really a dollop the size of a quarter should cover 2'x2'. Buff until the product is gone and never let rubbing compound dry on the paint.
Once done buffing you'll have buffing dust all over the damn place. Grab an air hose and blow the car off to get most of it off then grab a new clean microfiber towel and dust the towel with your favorite quick detail spray. Just a spritz or two on the cloth itself. Then clean the entire car with your microfiber towel removing all traces of dust from the compounding stage. Once done you'll have a smooth, clean, clear surface. If your car is white, or other light color you could conceivably stop at this point and skip to wax/sealant. But the darker your car is, and the more direct sunlight you allow on the surface, the more you'll see the swirl/hologram pattern left by the compound. Remember the car above? That was horrible. But this is what mine looked like at this stage:
You can see the reflections are all arcing down to the right, there is one arcing up to the right and that's the hologram/swirl. Not really that bad but it drives me NUTS!! So next we break out the polish and my ole trusty polishing pad (which needs to be replaced):
Repeat the entire process on your car now with the polish. Use clean/new towels and a light spritz of detailing spray to clean the car after, and you'll get something that looks like this:
NOW, pull out your microfine polish/glaze, attached your glazing pad, and get to work AGAIN!
Same process, end with a wipe down with fresh clean microfiber towels and you'll end up with this:
It's hard to tell the difference at this point in real life under artificial light. It's easy to see in the sunlight however, the only word that seems to describe what you are doing is adding "depth". You end with something so full of luster it's like looking into a pool of ink. We will see the fruit of our labor in the sun the following day. For now, we need to finalize our detail work.
Unwrap the car, and open all the doors, hood, trunk, gas filler door, etc and with fresh clean/new microfiber towels detail the ENTIRE car paying special attention to all the crevices. Clean everything off the car:
Once everything is clean check out your problem areas extra close. Here are the stains that we took pictures off before. Notice how the hard water stains are gone, the acid etching is gone, and the haze is gone. We have clear reflections in the paint surface on the area(s) that were the worst. The the second picture below you can even see the gold flake in the paint for the first time on the roof. This is the difference between jet black and black sapphire metallic:
Now that the paint surface is perfect, we need to protect it. At this point ANYTHING will scratch the surface and because the surrounding paint is perfect it'll be easily noticeable. When I say anything I mean anything other than microfiber. Even a paper towel will scratch this surface.
Finish with your favorite sealant/wax. I like Zaino the best, but I don't have any right now. So I used some off the shelf Meguires for now.
Now, in direct sunlight look for a direct reflection of the sun and you'll spot any imperfection you may have missed:
That's a mirror finish
.-------------------------
A couple things remain cosmetically on the car.
1. Rear bumper is damaged and needs to be replaced. I'll be doing a full new one with fresh paint.
2. Decklid has scratches that were deeper than buffing could remove...I couldn't get any pics of them, but they exist. I'll be wet sanding and re-buffing the decklid to fix this.
3. I have a small handful of door dings that will need some Paintless Dent Repair.
After that stuff is done over the winter it'll be back to factory fresh!!
You almost have me inspired to put in some time on my paint, it could really use it. Body is in great shape, but is covered in swirls.
Today is the day I start tuning with @V8bait! I'll be e85 soon which should hold me over until I make the single turbo move this winter.
You should tune with EMP. His tunes are proprietary... Proprietary to BMS at least. But don't worry, you won't ever know you're riding those knock sensors to redline like a hooker, because you're not allowed to see the BIN or logs.
V8bait did my car. It's been perfect ever since. Chat with v8bait about the ability to run full e85, if your car is healthy enough he can do it. Both his personal car (Which is a 328i half the time) and my 335is are running full e85 tunes.
V8bait did my car. It's been perfect ever since. Chat with v8bait about the ability to run full e85, if your car is healthy enough he can do it. Both his personal car (Which is a 328i half the time) and my 335is are running full e85 tunes.
Last edited:
I use paint polish. Not rubbing compound. Polish on a paper towel and polish the glass by hand. It'll be crystal clear.
V8Bait finished my 93o tune and kept it rather conservative (virtual dyno still says close to 400hp and 460ft/lb on 93o). We will be starting on a full e85 tune this weekend. The goal is to have both my 93o and e85 tunes complete before MHD releases their flex fuel setup. We will then put my 93o and e85 tunes together into a flex fuel flash.
Ordered a bucketless setup from Black Market Parts (I like their bucketless bracket better than Fuel-It). Preparing for the move to E85.
With the newfound power V8Bait has unlocked I've started experiencing wheel hop in 3rd gear now. 1st and 2nd go straight to no traction, but in 3rd I am just on the verge of losing traction and thus hitting some hop at peak torque. If I am putting along at 2000-2500rpm and roll into WOT like I would to do a 3rd gear log, then hop will start about 3000rpm and last until about 4000rpm.
So I decided to help a new SpoolStreet vendor and offered to help @stveclrk test his new diff lockdown on a 335is. Bought Steve's first production unit for the big rear this morning!
So I decided to help a new SpoolStreet vendor and offered to help @stveclrk test his new diff lockdown on a 335is. Bought Steve's first production unit for the big rear this morning!
