Back in October 2022, I bought my first-ever BMW when our Daydreaming Designer, the Bishop, sold me his 2001 BMW 525i Touring for the princely sum of just $1,500. I have since given the car to my wife, Sheryl, and we both enjoy the stately machine immensely. Unfortunately, much like any aging car in the Midwest, the car has some rust. Iron oxide is just a part of life in the Midwest, so you’d think there would be plenty of places to get it fixed. We’ve called every body shop we can think of in a 50-mile radius and many in neighboring states and have found very few even willing to look at the car.
Something wonderful happened back in October. The Bishop had a car to sell and I had money to spend. I looked the vehicle over and it was in nearly immaculate condition despite being a daily driver for 21 years. The paint glistened, the interior looked perfect, and the 2.5-liter straight-six under the hood quietly hummed away like a fine sewing machine. This was a car that seemed to prove the BMW naysayers wrong. Everything worked from top to bottom, including the notorious door handles and window regulators. This car had 120,000 miles on the odometer but felt and drove like it had half of that. Oh, and it came with nearly two decades of service records. You can tell the car has been loved.
This E39 wagon was ready to continue its next chapter with its new loving parents.
The Car
During my short period of ownership, I did exactly nothing to the E39. I thought of the wagon as nearly perfect and all I planned on doing was fixing what I thought was minor rust (more on that later) and getting window tint. Other than that, I enjoyed the car as is.
If you’ve never driven an E39, I highly recommend it. After years of owning Volkswagens, Smart Fortwos, and various American and Japanese vehicles, this BMW changed me. When you hop in, you’re presented with an interior and layout with driving in mind. BMW didn’t care about such luxuries as usable cupholders or a center control stack weighed down with buttons. No, you plop yourself down in a sporty-ish leather seat, slide that shifter into gear, and hit the road with a clear and large instrument cluster helping you guide your way.
When you put your foot on the throttle, the E39 responds immediately and sharply. I’ve yet to drive any other car with the level of finesse offered by the E39’s accelerator pedal. The throttle pedal is so sensitive and offers such minute adjustments that you feel as if the engine and your brain are perfectly in sync. If you hate having a delay between commanding the vehicle to move and the vehicle doing it, the E39 hits the sweet spot. The only vehicles I’ve experienced with sharper throttle control are EVs.
Once moving, the E39 provides heavy steering that delivers the same kind of on-the-point accuracy as the throttle. Provided the E39 is in good condition, you will always have confidence that your motions with the wheel have an immediate and direct impact on your course. Even the suspension is tuned for driving enjoyment. The E39’s stock suspension is firm but still takes hits well enough that it’s a fine road trip vehicle. I don’t normally buy into marketing slogans, but BMW was onto something when it used to say “The Ultimate Driving Machine.”
Sheryl perhaps loves this E39 more than I do. In fact, Sheryl loves the E39 so much that she says she likes how it drives more than her Holy Grail, the Oldsmobile LSS. Sheryl pretty much broke my brain when she said that. For the entirety of our relationship and then marriage, she couldn’t stop talking about GM H-bodies, and now she can’t stop talking about BMWs.
When the car came into her possession, she decided to do something she’s never done and Sheryl decided to make the car her own. As Sheryl told me, she really hasn’t been as attached to a car as she’s become to her BMW. So, now she keeps tinkering with making it closer to how she wants it to be. Since getting the car, she’s installed new blacked-out kidney grilles, sequential side turn indicators, a new stereo, sport package wheels, nifty LED headlight modules, window tint, 3D-printed cupholders, BMW logo puddle lights, and more.
Sheryl’s become so obsessed with “pimping” out her BMW that she decided to replace the cracking factory wood with Muschelahorn trim from Germany. She also replaced the cracked wood center console with black trim to match the Muschelahorn. Oh, and the car’s name is Wanda.
Along the way, Sheryl’s been fixing broken stuff. As I noted above, the factory wood trim was cracking and splitting, so she replaced it with the Muschelahorn trim. The vehicle itself also had a few drivability issues as it didn’t have working traction control or ABS, triggering what is known as the “Trifecta Lights.” A diagnostic scanner blamed the front left wheel speed sensor, even though the Bishop replaced the sensor twice.
That’s when a wise BMW enthusiast told me that if you replaced the sensor twice and the car still thinks it’s broken, it’s probably not the sensor but the ABS module. Apparently, when the ABS module fails, it blames another part of the car for its own failure. A BMW independent technician confirmed this. A used ABS module later and the Trifecta was dead. The two remaining lights on the instrument cluster have been confirmed to be a bad airbag sensor under the passenger carpet and a dying catalytic converter. In a week or so, Sheryl’s BMW will no longer have any warning lights at all on her dashboard.
She loves this car so much that she gave it a total brake job, refreshed the parking brake, and is replacing the spark plugs and coil packs right on time because she wants it to be in tip-top shape. She even replaced the blue-tinted side mirrors after they started peeling. That’s not even noting the replacement of brittle trim or her soon conversion of the cellphone holder armrest to a real storage compartment. My wife is doing things to her car that I don’t even do to my stuff.
The Rust
Unfortunately, there is one hurdle that Sheryl and I have not been able to overcome ourselves, and it’s the rust. When I got the car from the Bishop, he noted that the car had been rust-repaired a decade ago, and now the car was rusting again. At the time, he showed us a few places that were rusty. The rockers were starting to get bad and the trunk was bad enough that tape was required to keep water out. Other than a few unsightly places, the E39 was still far cleaner than most here in Illinois.
I already had a short list of bodyshops that did affordable, but quality rust repair. Reader Shop-Teacher recommended the shop that made his GMC Sierra’s rockers–which had massive holes–look like new again. I saw the quality of the work with my own eyes and it’s great for what he paid.
When I started calling up these shops, I was shocked to learn that not a single one of them, even the cool place Shop-Teacher went to, was in the business of repairing rust anymore. All of them told me that they do nothing but insurance work now due to an uptick in crashed cars. When I asked one of the shops why they don’t repair rust anymore, they told me that insurance work pays out quickly and the repairs have a quick turnaround time. On the other hand, someone paying for rust repair may stop paying and abandon their vehicle. Continuing on, the shop told me that rust repairs also tend to start off with one estimate but get substantially more expensive with complications or additional rust.
Our areas of concern begin with the tailgate. It’s rusting from the inside out. We had the tailgate inspected and the prevailing opinion is that it’s not worth saving. The rust is so substantial that even metal parts of the tailgate’s electrical system are corroding. The recommendation is to find a rust-free tailgate, even one that’s the wrong color.
Next, we move to the rockers. Originally, these didn’t appear too bad. Sheryl has added nearly 20,000 miles to the car since I gave it to her 6 months ago, and the rust has accelerated to worse than we knew it to be. The rear of the rocker on the right side has holes. The left side is better, but isn’t too hot, itself. Aside from those areas, there were smaller zones of rust that weren’t rusted through and could probably be ground down with a grinding wheel.
Then, we discovered more bad news. Last weekend, we began the surgery to replace the vehicle’s cats and when a jack was placed under a jacking point, a thick layer of paint and factory rust protection flaked off, revealing a sea of rust that was hidden underneath. Crap. I checked the other side to see if it’s better. I think this could be whacked out with a wire wheel and paint, maybe?
While some of this rust is within my abilities to fix, the gaping hole in the rocker and the other places with advancing rust are admittedly above my pay grade. The wonderful Bill Caswell did teach me some of the basics of welding, but I’m nowhere near this level yet. Caswell tells me that repairs like these require enough work that not even he repairs rust. That’s all ignoring the fact that I don’t have a place to spend however much time I need to fix rust. My mini warehouse and garages are filled to the brim.
Finding Help Has Been Frustrating
Sheryl and I have decided to turn to the professionals. We figure it’s worth it to pay for someone who knows what they’re doing and get back a clean car that will hold up for years. The problem is that nobody wants to do it.
After I worked through my list, we started asking friends and started reaching out to family-owned bodyshops. Many of them said they used to repair rust and nearly all of them said they only perform insurance work now. A few shops said they would repair rust if they weren’t swamped with insurance work all of the time.
Thankfully, not every shop was a strike-out. One family-owned shop we found was local and it was owned by an elderly metalworker and bodyman with his daughter as his number one. Together, they not only performed insurance work but the kinds of jobs no other bodyshop would take. He quoted Sheryl $4,000 for the rust repair and was actually very excited to do it, stating that rust repair gives him something fun to do for once.
The bodyman’s plan was to cut the entire rockers out and weld new ones in. His logic was that if he welded in entirely new rockers, Sheryl wouldn’t need to come back in a year because another rust spot appeared on her 22-year-old rockers. His plan for the tailgate was equally ambitious. Like us, the shop couldn’t find any clean tailgates close enough to home. Since he has metalworking experience, the bodyman’s Plan B was to cut out all of the rust and then rebuild the tailgate from the inside out. This small shop also said that the $4,000 estimate would be close to reality, as they do not charge extra because they ran into a snag or something.
In a cruel twist of fate, when it came time to drop the car off, the bodyshop’s number was disconnected and nobody was found at the location. Sadly, it would appear that the shop is in the process of going out of business.
This forced us to try other places. The next shop to even take a look at the car was a hot-rod restoration shop. That shop told us that repairing rust on normal cars wasn’t really their thing, but they’d do it if we paid upfront. We got a quote for $7,000 and were warned that the price was likely to go up if they hit any snags. This shop’s plan is to cut out the bad rust, weld in new patches of metal, and then fill up voids behind the remaining rockers with something like POR-15 to hamper the development of more rust.
Finally, we found one more shop, a Maaco. This shop said that for an initial cost of $5,000, they’ll cut out the rust, replace the tailgate, and replace the cut portions with painted fiberglass. The previous shops said they could do the work in a week or two while Maaco said it would take at least three weeks and up to two months. My only concern here is that my family has never really had good luck with local Maaco franchises. Even the more expensive paint packages seem to last only a year or so.
So, we’ve been looking for more options. The Maaco repair could take two months with unknown quality. On the other hand, I’ve seen the hot-rod shop’s work and it’s phenomenal, but the shop said our daily driver would be on the backburner as it’s already working on restoring classics right now.
Getting desperate, Sheryl and I started an assault on every shop within road-tripping distance of our Illinois apartment. Most repeated similar statements about only handling insurance work while some said they don’t work on cars older than a certain year in the 2000s. Others said they could do the work if we were willing to wait about a year to get to the front of their waitlist. To date, only the three above shops were willing to even give us an estimate. Seemingly, either Wanda is too old or the insurance work is too heavy.
What To Do Next
It’s honestly baffling because you’d think, given the huge amount of rust in the Midwest, someone could make some money fixing rusty modern cars that people love.
Anyway, we’re not entirely sure how to move forward here. Sheryl got so desperate that she considered driving out to California and having the excellent Galpin Auto Sports handle it, but that perhaps makes even less sense than having the nearby hot-rod shop do it. I’ve been searching the nation for clean E39 wagons and have found that Sheryl could probably buy a rust-free wagon from California or down south for maybe $5,000 or so.
Sheryl tells me that just replacing this wagon with a random rust-free car wouldn’t be the same. In the time she’s owned Wanda, the car helped her find new confidence, inspired her to believe in herself, and helped her become a better version of herself. Further, the car’s taught her a lot and most importantly to her, Wanda was a gift from me.
Honestly? I get it. If the engine in my first Smart Fortwo blew tomorrow, I would replace it, even though I know that buying another Smart is the better financial decision. To me, there is only one Tucker. For Sheryl, there’s only one Wanda.
We have two estimates sitting on the table right now, so in the very worst case, the rust can get fixed. But, she feels a bit uneasy about it because, from our personal experience, rust repair was far cheaper than this just a few years ago. It feels like if we just tried a little harder, we’d find one of those shops again. But at the same time, we seemed to have called every single shop with a listing on Google.
Here’s where I toss the microphone to one of you. What should Sheryl do?
(Images: Author)
Support our mission of championing car culture by becoming an Official Autopian Member.
Good news!!! Sheryl has nailed down a gameplan thanks to you lovely readers. Some of you pointed out that there’s a whole rust repair industry in Pennsylvania. Since the state is a safety inspection state, some vehicle owners find it cheaper to have rust repaired than to buy a rust-free vehicle. We found a number of shops willing to take on the challenge.
Even better, after scouring Facebook for days, we were also able to find an old-school bodyman in Wisconsin who still does rust repair. Thus far, his estimate is a lot closer to those low rust repair estimates I used to get three years ago. So, Sheryl’s going to check out his business. If that works, great. If it doesn’t, then we already have a shop chosen in PA that wants to take on the repair.
As for mileage, Sheryl also plans on getting a winter beater. The idea here is to make the BMW get closer to regular yearly mileage as opposed to the 30k+ miles she’s targeting to hit this year. Stay tuned!
Welcome to my world. I dropped my Datsun at a well regarded body shop 2 years ago. The owner wouldn’t give me a quote but told me it’d cost “between 8000€ and 16000€”, which is hilariously vague. I considered it’d cost 16000€ as I didn’t want to be disappointed. It’s gonna be between 20k€ and 25k€ once everything is finished and it took over 2 years.
Rust is a pain in the ass, and you don’t want to skimp on the quality of the work otherwise you’ll have to start over in a few years. I’d steer the hell away from Maaco who openly said they’d use fiberglass. Fuck that, that’s not rust repair.
Find the best shop you can find, expect to drop twice what they quote you, and basically forget about driving the car for the foreseeable future. It’s a pain in the ass but still better than leave car cancer eat away at your ride.
Clearly it’s time to buy a parts car and pull any body pieces you need off of that.
Perhaps try to find a rust free (west coast, etc) example of a car you love. Even if it costs a bit, you already know you love it. Maybe even look at some other BMW shooting brakes that have a similar driving feel now that you “know”.
I hope you can get it sorted, a well running and shiny BMW really makes you feel like “wow, so this is what they’re supposed to be like” every time you drive them. A solid runner being bogged down by cosmetics sucks, I think this is a good thing to know going into trying to get some body work done on an ’89 Montero.
Bring it to Winnipeg (or manitoba in general) we’re not California far, our public insurance company is on strike atm so body repair places aren’t doing much insurance work for the next bit and the $usd is going pretty far atm. 🙂
I’m not sure what to recommend, but I feel your (and Sheryl’s) pain. When I was 11, my boy scout troop auctioned off a 1972 Super Beetle at the annual fundraising silent auction. I’d wanted a beetle since I’d seen the Herbie movies when I was four, and was itching to learn how to work on cars. For $825, the Beetle was mine.
Unfortunately, it was and is a rustbucket. Even more unfortunately, I didn’t realize this until I had become emotionally attached to the car. (Did anyone read Christine? Yeah, I was the weird kid in love with his car. I related to Arnie a little too much to be healthy). I did some minor bodywork in prep for an inexpensive paint job and paid a local guy to do some minor welding, just so I could bolt the fenders back on. On the invoice he wrote “no warranty on repairs, customer warned of extreme rust problem on car.” The problem was that the rust was so bad that I couldn’t just grab a welder and patch things up. The whole damn car has to be torn down.
I took the car with me to college and accelerated the rust, since it was the only car in our apartment parking lot that could even move after a couple big snowstorms (big for Kentucky anyway). I’ve gone through every system in the car, including a full engine rebuild five years ago.
Well, I’m 30 now and the rust remains. I can’t rebuild the front end, because an attempt to remove some bolts would simply tear them right out of the body. In fact, I won’t drive it any faster than 45mph or so these days. So what am I doing? A better job is on the horizon, which will give me more money than I’ve ever made. Once my Sportwagen is paid off, the Beetle gets those funds too. There’s some local VW people who do welding, and I’m hoping one of them will take my case. The work is too extensive for me to consider doing myself, but I’ll be doing everything else (teardown and reassembly) myself. I’m hoping in the next 5-7 years, I’ll have a rust free beetle that I can finally feel comfortable taking anywhere and everywhere.
Mercedes, I wish you two the best of luck!
Ever watch “Bitchin’ Rides”? Old VWs & Porsches have to get torn down to the bare shell & dipped or blasted (gently) to find all the lace. There’s always a lot.
I haven’t, but I used to spend a ton of time on VW forums and the things people have saved make me feel a lot better about my car!
I have to say that my mom will be VERY pleased to hear how attached Sheryl is to her previous car. She was very sad to see it go and just assumed it would go for parts or worse and it warms her heart that someone likes it as much as she did. Also impressed that the car is REALLY being used!
That rust is progressing surprisingly fast- honestly those were just small bubbles two years ago when the car was literally in the garage all the time except for when it went to get groceries, Target, or church. Also, bear in mind that my parents spent literally five figures on an inch thick stack of receipts for repairs and maintenance over the time the owned it; the vast majority of $5000 ones you will see will not hold a candle to this one mechanically. Still, the rust repairs would be a tough pill to swallow considering the value and one of the reasons I didn’t keep it until my kid gets his license in three or four years.
I think that one commenter is correct in projecting that this thing will likely expire from high miles long before the body issues make it unusable. I say put as much anti-rust magic on the crusty bits (helps that it’s black) and drive it until it dies and Sheryl can inherit my e61 wagon! Come on, Mercedes- don’t you have like twenty other cars and buses to drive? Besides, I’m workin’ on some other soon-to-be-hopeless German car cases to hopefully sell you in the future!
Your momma was pretty lucky that it was just 5 figures there in the Midwest (I’m assuming she took it to dealers/independent garages for repairs). I have spent a sandwich under 5 figures on my ‘12 E93 just for parts over 70K miles.
I guess this explains why so many of my $500 auction finds ended up with an old man from somewhere in the Midwest flying out to CA to drive home in a $2500 Buick that I’d just done like a brake job and plug/coil replacement on…
Honestly I’m on team “find a non-rust belt shell and drag it home as a donor car” here – if you really catch the Bimmer bug (a high-mile e90 335 did it for me a few years back) you’re going to need more parts sooner than later and if space isn’t an issue it seems like a no brainer.
This is a quickest half-ass repair to kick it down the road scenario. The Maaco quote is a joke—you could very likely DIY to better quality for far less and that’s a temporary fix, anyway. I had to dump my otherwise great shape Focus ST due to the Ecoboom TSB problem and nobody would touch even an engine replacement except for one place who estimated it would be back-burner for at least a year. I’m not surprised bodyshops are in a similar boat. The second problem, though, is: will the market get better? When I had my ’90 Legacy repaired with new metal about 20 years ago, it was already tough to find someone who would do that work that wasn’t a custom shop (who wouldn’t work on a “new” car, that is, any work that wouldn’t be non boomer restomod where repro body parts could be ordered out of catalogs if plentiful used originals couldn’t be found). I think the only reason the place that took my car did it was because I was a friend of a friend and paid upfront with overages to be paid at the end (which I lucked out in there being very little as the car wasn’t that bad—nothing like your BMW). Even then, it didn’t make financial sense to do it, I just loved that specific car (I’d gladly trade the GR86 to have it back and restored). Eventually, anyway, death came for that car in the name of returning cancer and f’n rodents making a nest somewhere in it while it was in the garage waiting for the house and monetarily-challenged people to stop stealing its restoration budget. I will forever miss that car. I’ve lost people that didn’t bother me so much. Not all the people I’ve lost, but definitely more than a few of them.
Maybe you can somehow get a hold of that older guy with that $4k quote and get him to do it on the side or something. Otherwise, kick that can and hope the market clears (which I doubt will happen to any appreciable degree until maybe far too long in the future) and, if it doesn’t, you’re looking for a replacement (which I think you will be as the rust will only get worse—you can only slow its progression a bit without metal replacement). Or do that now as who knows what the market will dictate for their value in another few years. Unfortunately, having far too much experience with rust, that looks pretty bad. Rust tends to be something like an iceberg and what you see is just the small of it. There are a few bulges that look like they’re largely holding shape by the paint.
Is that just what car repair has become in the last couple of years? I was about to pick up an absolutely mint C6 corvette that needed a harmonic balancer (super common LS2 issue) and no one dare touch it near me. Ended up killing my corvette search altogether because no one near me wants to work on them.
North of Boston it is and it seems like most other places. People are keeping junkers on the road longer, jamming up mechanics who take the emergency jobs and the smaller ones they can bang out a bunch of in a day. They basically can pick their own jobs, so they’ll refuse the time consuming and or difficult jobs and probably the toilet cars where corrosion and age will make every repair take longer and possibly result in further repairs as others things are damaged in process. In my younger days, I’d have swapped the engine myself, but I don’t have my crane and stand anymore because I’m not interested in doing that kind of thing at this point and the ST engine was 17 hours book—f that.
Is that balancer a particularly tough job to do oneself? Seems like it shouldn’t be, though I’m not that familiar with Vettes to know if it’s an access issue or whatever. Or is it that the balancer could have damaged the crankshaft and that’s what they don’t want to deal with?
Maine here, so maybe it’s regionally worse. Front what I’ve read up on the balancer is a pain to get to. Water pump and fan come out, front suspension has to get dropped, and like you said, potential crankshaft issues. $1.5k-ish job from what I read, but no one near me wants to take it on
Bummer… you’re a couple of months too late. I had an AZ/TX 528i Touring that I got tired of replacing plastic parts on. It admittedly sat too long due to life getting in the way, and well…. 944s and XJs need lots of TLC too. Some local BMW fan showed up in really clean California roof 318 compact and hour after I posted it, and got a screaming deal on it. Not sure if he flipped it, or what. Would have just given it to y’all if it was going to a good home.
Wish I had taken better care of it. It was truly a great car when it worked.
Get a sound rust-free body E39 with bad engine and parts and do a big swap.
Spend money on that to do it right and you end up with the good parts and a good body instead of a patchwork of welding and hacksawing and what not.
Also ; because you only see rust here, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. I guess the whole car is a rust bucket already but it’s covered by dust, dirt, carpet and paint.
Those kind of repair costs really make no sense, for this.
Clean and undercoat the hell out of it and park it somewhere indoors.
Drive something else.
Deal with it in the future. That’s the only way logical way to preserve it with the current situation. Don’t leave it too long though, that’s where barn finds come from. (-;
Pennsylvania, perhaps? State inspections require that rust-through be repaired, so I imagine she should be able to find a place there that could do it.
I’m interested in keeping whatever local-ish options you may find in my back pocket – my ’93 SE-R has a hole in the left rear rocker (from a water leak, suprisingly enough, not road salt) that I’d like to get fixed in a perfect world.
I don’t suppose you have a local tech college that might repair just to show students how it is done? Have you checked non automotive welders? Either way once done Por15 the whole inside where the rust is. Stop it from spreading.
Step 1. Buy an angle grinder and welder.
Step 2: Watch a lot of youtube videos
Step 3: Start tacking random metal together, find scraps in dumpsters
Step 4. Cut out rusty part of BMW, weld in new metal.
The nice thing is you don’t need to do a great job, it’s a high mileage BMW and the repair is near the ground, AND its not structural.
Get out of your comfort zone. Learn new skills. This is the path to automotive enlightenment.
I agree, anybody who would notice a slightly sloppy rocker panel repair would be impressed you did it yourself to learn the process. The tailgate though looks like a PitA to get right.
Step 0: go to Wallaroo or wherever Laurence lives, buy his hot rod buddy an unlimited supply of kangaroo jerky and beer, and watch him fix your car for content on the Autopian.
Wait! I figured out the perfect project car for you specifically.
You seem to love used German/VW products, but you live in the rust belt?
Buy an Audi A8/S8
AWD for the snow? check
Won’t rust? check
Host of VW/German car issues that you are already very familiar with AND will probably regret!?!?? CHECK!
Comes in higher performance trims? CHECK!
I say drive it with the rust and enjoy it until something structural goes!
Rust is a cool badge of honor that gives importance and value to the limited time we each have with a car.
Sincerely,
A guy that’s been driving a $220 Stratus with a rust hole you could pass a sandwich through, in the South, for the past 7 years.
Yes but sometimes a vital piece is the 1st to go so you like die. Of course it solves the rust worries.
You dodged a bullet by not dropping off the car before that shop went out of business.
Oooo – that’s such a good point. Years ago I knew a guy who dropped off his one-family-owned ’67 Impala at a restoration shop. Paid some money up front so the work would start on it. He dropped by a few months later and the place was locked up. After some legal wrangling and detective work, he was able to get in the main building. The Impala was in pieces and he never did locate the engine and tranny. Turns out the shop owner had lines of credit open all over the place, a bunch of unfinished work laying around, liens on his property, and just kind of disappeared.
Sheryl, you seem like a legitimately wonderful person (Mercedes too, of course), so although I don’t normally do this, I figured I’d do a little checking to help you out with the rear hatch.
It looks like SVA Auto Wrecking in Sun Valley, CA has one in black for $150.00. I’m not sure if David or someone out there could secure/ship/transport it to you, but that’s an option.
East Michigan Auto Parts in Ypsilanti has one in blue, for a “$Call” price but they’re only 240 miles away. Dos Amigos Auto has a silver one for $180, but they’re in Aurora, MO (477 miles away).
Hope that helps!
EDIT: Rocker panel assemblies (left and right) are available from Lamar Auto Salvage in Sumrall, MS (766 miles away).
Yeah, I searched the same site, there are about 50 hatches scattered throughout the country.
find a rust free body with a blown engine and swap in Wanda’s heart
“Anyway, we’re not entirely sure how to move forward here. “
I can tell you exactly the ways to move forward… there are two options:
For quotes that start at $7000+, it might just be worth your time to teach yourself how to do body work, how to work with metal and how to weld.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0M5tUQSaps
True but you missed nowhere to work on it.
Rent a garage somewhere to work on it… OR go with option 1 and drive it until it has a catastrophic failure and then scrap it.
Hi. So, I legitimately did exactly this, also on an old German car, following exactly the same logic. Never did a lick of body work. Never welded, never painted.
Took me about three months with the help of a generous friend and their barn in which for us to work. Did all the cutting, welding, sanding, and painting. In the end, I removed 4 rust spots from around the car and welded in clean metal, and repainted those areas. To that extent, it was a success. I told myself I wanted three more winters out of the car and it’s about to enter winter #5. Having said that, most of the rust spots returned after 2-3 years, and honestly the work just came out awful even when it was freshly redone. Metalwork is a skill that takes finesse, practice, and experience. So is painting. You can’t just YouTube it and have a viable outcome – you need to get it wrong on a few practice vehicles before it starts looking correct.
I’m glad for the experience, glad I did it, and glad I achieved my functional goal, but it did not come out cosmetically pleasing at all. Not even close. There’s a reason professionals charge what they do: you’re paying for experience:
My thoughts after telling you are awesome:
Get it super duper cleaned in the meantime. That winter salt may still be in nooks, and the oily rustproofing would probably help tremendously.
Wow, rust work was our bread and butter at the shop I worked at in high school. Now it’s near impossible to get anything done. I had a similar problem trying somebody to do some work on a couple of rusty areas on the frame of my ’66 Biscayne. I had driven the car over 6,000 miles and figured it would be good to get it patched up. Called the local old dude who did that kind of thing and got a “sorry man, I had a stroke last year and just don’t work on stuff like that anymore”. The other three shops I called wanted to do a whole body-removal and I’m not going to spend $7K on a car worth $3K tops. I finally just soaked the problem areas in POR and went back to driving it – I’ll tackle it myself when I get a chance.
It’s not just rust, but any type of old-school bodywork, at least for a reasonable price. A few years ago I tackled my boss’s dad’s Farmall H sheet metal. It was pretty banged up, but I was able to braze the cracks and hammer-dolly it back into shape. It turned out pretty decent, at least so I thought. Squirted some red enamel with hardener on it and called it a day. A couple months later my boss let me know that his dad had put it in a show, and I could have all the work I wanted – apparently not many folks want to bother anymore. Granted, I didn’t want to either – too busy with my own career and life in general. I guess I don’t have to worry about being bored in retirement!
If I had any spare time these days to speak of, I’d be tempted to take this on (you’re only about a state away) – I generally charge $30/hr and work on it until it’s done. Get it on jack stands, sandblast what I can, cut and grind some more out, start fabricating, bust out the panel-spotter, maybe the wire welder, grind, do some rustproofing where possible when it’s opened up, add a good dose of fiber-glass reinforced body filler over the weld seams, likely a little bondo over that, some primer surfacer, lots of block-sanding, epoxy-sealer, base-clear, 1600-sand and buff… easy-peasy. However, my daughter just bought a 1987 Corvette as her first car and I’ll be helping her out with that during any free time I can carve out in the near future.
Keep looking – there’s got to be someone out there capable of fabricating a few more years of life into Wanda!
For the kind of work you are talking about doing, $30 an hour is a steal. Think about raising your hourly rate to somewhere between $75 and $100 an hour and you would probably still have people begging to give you work!
Thanks! That’s definitely a sort of hobby/friends-and-family rate, and I really haven’t done much for a couple of years or so. It’s also been sort of a “plan B” for awhile now, but luckily the day job has been solid. Overall I’ve found auto-body to be much more fun when my mortgage isn’t depending on the next paint job. The people who I did do work for were thrilled at my pricing! It also allowed me to spend a few extra hours on stuff I just had a tendency to obsess over.
Mercy is awesome for writing this, and I love her so much.
Wanda means a lot to me for a few reasons. She was a present from Mercy after my old LSS (also a present from Mercy) died prematurely. She also is the first proper 21st century luxury car I’ve ever had. I would never ever get a BMW for myself, and I actually got in trouble with the Lawyer Powers That Be once for driving an old shitbox beater because “it reflected poorly on the profession.” I’m a name-your-own-price lawyer for people who otherwise can’t afford lawyers, and I run my own practice because nobody can make much money that way, so a nice car was never really something I thought I would get for myself. Hell, I thought I would reward myself one day with a Sixth Gen Maxima.
Then Mercy looked at me and said “You’re a good lawyer, and you’re a professional, and you deserve to be respected.” And she gave me this car. And you know what? I am, actually, a pretty decent lawyer. I just don’t charge people like one, which for me is the point. Getting Wanda was the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me. So I love this fucking car. She’s like my sidekick as we drive all over the state fighting injustice.
For the time and money you’re being quoted to fix the rust, you can buy a grinder, a small welder, metal, and even a few hours of welding courses. It won’t be easy and it won’t be fast, but you can give yourself the skills to DIY this fix.
The more money you pour into a car, the more your brain grows attached to it. But the more time you put into it, the more your heart falls in love.
You don’t have to become David Tracy. But you can learn a new skill, have a weekend project that you chip away at, and feel the pride as your skills grow.
Yeah, those prices are insane. I guess I’ve lost touch with how much this stuff costs now myself. Just wow!
I think some of those are “we don’t really want to do that” estimates. I’ve seen more and more of those these days. It’s the golden age of DIY because of YouTube, forums, and mostly because you have to if you want to get the job done.
Screw everyone who is saying dump the car. If you want it enough, she can be fixed.
I know multiple repair panels are available for the E39, but I don’t know if the ones you need are made. Have you and Mercedes looked at what parts you can buy and which might have to be made? That might help change the look of how much DIY work it would be.
If you two do decide to attempt some of the repairs yourself (consider buying another hatch that also needs repair, then use that to learn) I strongly suggest you look up Fitzees Fabrication on youtube. His videos are specifically for teaching rust repair techniques and are based on a mig welder, a grinder, and few basic hand tools. He is an artist, but he is an artist using tools just about anyone can get their hands on.
If you ever want to see some truly insane metalwork, look up some of the Barndoor VW Bus resurrections. Absolutely fucking insane. If you want it done and have the money, there is someone out there who will do it for you. It might be a pain in the ass to find them, but don’t lose hope! Anything can be fixed if you have enough time and/or money. Cars aren’t always rational things…
Sheryl, you and Mercy are wonderful. Whatever you end up doing with Wanda will be the right decision. And if you’re driving around the Chicago area and you see a guy in an old black Acura waving frantically at you, that’ll be me. 🙂
I know that I am going to come off as cold and heartless here but I suggest you crush this BMW, replace it with a similar machine and name it Wanda II. I know you are attached to the car, but I have a story to convince you to do the right thing. Or at least the cheapest and easiest thing.
Like your rusty overlord David, I had a cat. Actually my wife, pre-wife, had a tuxedo cat named Bonny. I grew to like that cat, and not knowing much about cats, thought tuxedo cats were rare animals. Well, Bonny died. We were kind of upset, which is kind of silly when you think of it but apparently you can get attached to animals, just like you can get attached to cars.
Well, just about the next day, a stray tuxedo wandered by. (No, I didn’t steal him…he was scrawny and hungry. Kind of mean too.) Anyway, we adopted him and he became a pretty good companion. I named him Bonny 2. Then he died. I was kind of upset, though maybe not as upset as when Bonny 1 died, being as how I liked Bonny 2 a lot more than Bonny 1. Go figure. You get used to cats and cars dying.
About a day later, Bonny 3, another tuxedo wandered by. He’s sitting at my feet now. So my advice is crush Wanda 1 (maybe stripping it for parts or sale of parts first) and obtain Wanda 2. Decals are cheap. Rusty cars are costly, unsightly and dangerous especially if you drive them 40,000 miles a year. And you and Sheryl learn to love Wanda 2.