1974 bmw 2002 turbo

[Envious Eric]

Remember that little car in the garage of the house where I did the Aston Martin DBS correction...the white one...well, here it is! Only two months later now that I have time to get some catch up work done...

At first site, this car looked pretty good from a few feet away. You wouldnt have thought that it needed a bit of work at first glance. But, when you started to look at it in the right lights, you could easily see there was a bit of paint imperfections that needed to be taken care of...oxidation, swirl marks, and a few random scratches.

(noting white is a hard color to get good pics on, let alone this shade of white)

I decided to take it easy on this one and "get what I could out of the paint" while preserving the originality of it. At first the owner thought it was looking pretty good, but then I did a solid two step process on it to really give it its true depth and gloss. His opinion changed after I was finished with it the next day! The color was MUCH more rich and deep, not to mention wet and glossy!

Here is a picture of my work area and lighting situation. Its a lot easier to work in a dark room while polishing. Too many light sources drowns out defects and makes it hard to see them. The 1000W halogens work perfectly in this situation as they reflect off the color of this car better than the LED or fluorescent lights did.


First things first, I removed the badges and license plates and frame to make my polishing adventure MUCH more easy on myself. It serves two purposes: 1 - allows me to polish freely across the entire panel without having to work around them, and 2 - lets me skip the taping process in these areas.

You can see the outlined area from the badges and license plate in this picture above. The color change was HUGE after polishing!

I didnt get too many befores as like I said before, it was hard to capture the defects on this paint on camera (I provide paint correction on cars, not a pro-photographer). Here are some before pictures that i did get:






Before taping off the car and the sensitive areas, I clayed the paint and the windows to remove the bonded contaminants. The paint was clean, but not smooth and this was why!


After polishing the car, I stepped on down to the wheels and addressed them as they were lacking a little luster in my eyes. The owner said I didnt need to address the wheels, but I personally had to...it just completes the job!!!

from this condition


To this with some hand polishing:

I think that next time we address this car, we are going to take them apart and unscrew them so I can just polish all the wheel instead of working around the bolts! (benefits of 3 piece wheels)

Here are the after pics the next day out in the sun: The true color really came out after the polishing steps:









Not a ton of after pics were taken, I had to get on his M3 right after this one was finished up!

[Ridonculous]

Drool......

Nice job man!

Wish that was my 2002...

[IND-Distribution]

What an incredible machine.

[mkPOTO]

Hot love the classics

[GOLFFRR]

holy smokes awesome

[Orjan]

Great job on a fantastic car!