Article by: MPowered02
Article applies to: E34 BMWs
Well, I’ve owned my 1995 E34 525i almost 2 years now (bought it a little after relocating my family to Manila, Philippines for work) and have mostly been doing maintenance and fixing small stuff on it. Here’s the car I’m working with:
Criticize the super dark tint all around all you want, but for Manila dark tint is a necessity. Not just because of the oppressing heat and humidity, but also because of the really high crime rate and to keep prying eyes out. Personally I’d prefer a very light to no tint on the car but have to stick with super dark tint for the safety of my wife and kids when they’re riding in the car.
Anyway, I love the E34’s classic BMW styling. The only thing that kind of irritates me about the exterior is the different width moldings between the front and rear bumpers and the side moldings. The front and rear bumper moldings are much wider than the side moldings. The E30, E36, and E39 were like this as well, but for each of these models BMW changed the look for the M-models. On the E30 M3, they got rid of the side and bumper moldings altogether, and for the E36 M3 and E39 M5 they switched to wider M-Tech side moldings to match the bumpers. The E34 never got this treatment…not even on the E34 M5. So, I set out to see how the E34 would look with M-Tech Side Moldings.
My plan was to find a set of E36 M3 M-Tech Moldings and somehow bond them to the stock E34 moldings and cut, shape and filler as needed. So, I set out to find some M-Tech moldings which as it turns out aren’t as easy to find here in the Philippines. After a bit of searching, I was able to locate a set of moldings…but the only set I could find were for a E36 compact along with a single left driver’s door molding for a coupe:
The Compact is much shorter than the E34 obviously, but with the use of the additional coupe door molding I should have enough to cover all the moldings on my E34. So time to start adding the moldings.
On the inside of the E36 moldings, there are 2 steel ribs molded into the plastic. These ribs are what the clips attach to that hold the moldings in place on the E36. Unfortunately, the ribs are a completely different shape than what is used on the E34, so these ribs will need to be removed from all of the moldings first. The ribs can be seen here:
In order to remove the ribs, I was able to grab the end with a pair of pliers and twist it to break it away from the plastic. Twisting it little by little then caused it to peel away from the molding:
After doing this to all of the moldings (and giving myself blisters in the process), I was left with this removed from all of the moldings:
For the front door side moldings, I would like to keep the opening for the M-tech badge. These moldings came with the standard M-Tech badge (Just the ///M) but I’m not sure what badges I’ll actually run in them. Maybe I’ll run the M-tech badges, but I’d prefer to pick up some of the AC Schnitzer badges I’m using on my E36, but mainly because I’d like to find a complete ACS bodykit for the car eventually.
In any case, since the badges clip onto the ribs behind the molding I chose to section the ribs and keep just the portion of the ribbing just behind the badges:
Now that the ribbing is out of the way, we can get on to actually connecting the moldings. First up is the front left fender. The front fenders of the E36 compact are the same as the E36 sedan, and are notably shorter than the E34’s front fenders. This obviously means than the molding will be too short and will need to be lengthened. So, I’ll be cutting the molding and lengthening it by adding in a section cut from the coupe molding:
I also figured out that in order for the M-Tech moldings to fit over the stock E34 moldings, the back of the moldings would need to be hollowed out some. So, I chucked a grinding bit into my rotary tool and ground out the necessary space on the moldings:
After I made the space in the back of the moldings, I applied urethane windshield adhesive (which is super strong and resilient) to the back of the M-tech molding pieces and stuck them into place over the E34 molding on the fender. Here is a pic of the 3 separate pieces glued over the e34 molding:
Once the windshield adhesive had dried completely, I could remove the composite molding and filler and finish it. Here’s the back of the piece. You can see the M-tech pieces are stuck to the E34 molding with the black urethane adhesive:
I then strengthened the junctions of the individual pieces with 2-part steel epoxy:
The extra space on the back was then filled in with body filler to further strengthen the piece, and I could then get to filling and finishing the outside of the piece. Here some filler was applied on the outer side to fill and smooth the junctions of the sections of the molding:
Same piece sanded to perfection and ready for paint:
After a couple of coats of matte black paint with some wet sanding in between coats and the piece is done:
Next up was the left rear quarter molding. Took the rear M-Tech molding from the E36 compact and measured and marked the cut line with masking tape:
Cut it, ground out the back of the molding, and stuck it into place on the E34 molding like I did with the previous pieces:
Once the adhesive was again dry, the part was removed from the car for finishing. On this piece I had to cut the piece at an angle to replicate the angled overlap used on all the gaps. Measured, cut, fillered and sanded as needed to get it perfect:
The finished piece after paint:
On to the doors. For the doors, I was able to cut and trim the pieces to size, and I ground and clearance the back of both moldings:
Made quite a bit of plastic dust in the process (this is just from grinding the 2 door moldings):
Unfortunately, that was all the work I had time for this weekend. Hopefully I’ll be able to squeeze more work in on them sometime this week or next weekend so I can at least finish one side of the car to see how the completed side looks in relation to the front and rear bumpers. Will post more as soon as I get more work on them done so stay tuned…