Thomas Slee

The car during strip down

Thomas discovered many interesting details during the strip down of the car. E.g. that the spare wheel was from '82 (the car was produced in '80 and delivered a year later) and that a BMW worker had placed a signature under the rear Seat. Also some less pleasant details appeared: more concealed rust for instance.
The car needed to be indoors to allow work to continue, so it was transferred to a shared garage not far away, every bodypart was removed and stored.

You can see more clearly in the following photos, that despite the car looking very tidy at first, rust had started to take a hold in the panels, I think that a full restoration at this stage, before things got out of hand, was definitely the right decision

Friends helped him remove the engine. It was a quick job, as everything around it was already cleared.

The removal of the nosecone was more work, because of all the spot welds. But he thought: "for the tenacious no road is impassable" ("Nulla tenaci invia est via"). So one by one all the spot welds were drilled out. After that he spent many hours grinding away the rust as well as he could.

In the mean time he was also busy obtaining more parts. New trims for instance, but as some were NLA or very expensive, they were carefully removed and taken care of by specialists (Galvamé). The aluminium trims were deanodized, anodized and the polished. The rest were only repolished. The results are very good.
He worked hard and achieved much, but the car had still a long way to go before it would be ready.