Hello guys and gals. Long story short. I traded one of my bikes for a 98bmw 528i. It’s a decent car though unfortunately an automatic. Being an easy coast car it has some rust. Really nothing major with the exception of the drivers side rocker panel. It’s rotted out right at the rear and front lift points. I’ve tap laced rocker panels before in many different vehicles but never rockers that were designed as lift points. Does anyone have experience replacing this type of rocker panel? Is there an internal structure to worry about? Also, any advice on where to obtain a replacement rocker panel?
I did this on my e46. Does that car have the plastic side skirt covers?
What I did is I pulled the plastic cover off, cut out all the rusted out portion, then sprayed the hell out of the inside with weld through primer. I then took new plate steel about 2x thickness of the original and shaped and cut to fit an area of about 1’ long (rusted portion was only a few inches) and welded it in plating the side and bottom of the area to reinforce it and then coated it prime/paint/undercoat. on the top edge for that “rail” between the plastic side skirt cover and the door I did some bc/cc as that had a little bit of rust bubble that I just ground down and smoothed out.
Make sure you get the carpet out of the way so you don’t set it on fire from welding the backside. You’ll be surprised how much worse it is than it looks when you pull those covers off.
You should have some “inner” frame rails closer to the center of the car that you can jack the car up from.
Edit…If that side is rotted expect the other side to be going out soon.
Thanks 95. The odd part is that the opposite side is actually pretty solid, aside from some surface rust. But i will be looking it over more closely. I don’t have the plastic covers in this. I’m familiar with rocker replacement. I just can’t seem to find a set of replacement rockers, all I seem to stumble in are plastic covers. I’m also not sure if there are any internal reinforcements or not.