I just completed an interior swap on my e30 last night so I figured I’d share some pics. Took much longer than I expected (2 weeks) because of the unfortunate discovery of the rusted floor pan on the passenger front due to a leaky a/c drain. It’s POR-15d for now, planning on having a new floor pan welded in over the winter since it’s off the road then anyway.
So I went forward with the rest of the swap, here’s some crappy cell pics. SOOOO much nicer, the seats are awesome (out of an 89 325is). I have a 320i non-s so my seats pretty much felt like springy folding chairs and the rain and snow for a year into the car didn’t help matters.
Yeah, everything is stock, including the carpet… Not sure what year the carpet is from because I bought it from someone other than who I got the seats from, but the thing is SPOTLESS.
I thought about that right after I installed the carpet, that I hadn’t gotten any POR15 shots…
I basically just hit the affected areas, the driver pan had some very light surface rust and the driver rear had some minor surface as well, but the passenger side is a bloody mess that will get corrected over the winter. i just slopped it on as thick as I could to preserve it’s current state until it’s repaired professionally, and put down the carpet.
All in all, not bad for a car that sat without it’s top for a year and was filled with snow and rain. The carpet had dried, but the pad was still sopping wet behind the drive seat when I finally pulled it out.
It turns out the floor pans suffered only minor damage from that, the real damage was the years of a/c drain hose leakage onto the passenger front pan.
The new carpet was a real bitch to get in. It has the padding molded right onto it. The old carpet had a separate pad which was identical, but not attached to the carpet.
When the carpet comes back out to weld in the new passenger floor pan, I’ll probably por15 everything. It’s a tough call, it’s a can of worms the more you get into it and I don’t want to do a total frame off restoration, at least not yet, it’s not THAT bad…
