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Under the front right wing I found some rust that was on its way to ugly. I ordered a new wheel house from ECS Tuning and will have that welded in. The VIN plate is located on that section. That sucks for preserving originality and identity of the chassis. Any suggestions other than a Brother label-maker? Has anyone else dealt with this? With the shock towers being a big rust zone on E12s and the VIN is directly adjacent, I’m guessing lots of this same metal has been replaced on other cars over the years.

Update for posterity - US front wheelhouse NLA but Walloth Nesch has early E12 wheel housing that is not a direct replacement due to the various mount points etc, but entirely serviceable for the shock tower and upper lip.

For the VIN plate I had a seller on Etsy hand-stamp an aluminum blank. It’s not OEM but it’s pretty good.

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Replacement stickers for the engine bay are easy to find on eBay. The Emissions sticker is also available from autodatalabels.com.

-Eric

Wow thats a fairly large repair, you have a body shop doing all this? Or you doing it yourself? Good luck either way.

The one that's stamped in the sheet metal? If you're in that far I'd cut it out and weld it into the new part. Easy compared to the rest of it. And it doesn't sound like there's any deception involved. I have heard of that being done to change VINs, which is not ok IMO, but you're keeping the same number on the same car so to me at least it's all fine and well. Probably even legal.

Thanks Mike - the tag is definitely separate from the sheet metal, although it's thin and the stamping may also show up on the sheet metal under the tag. I'm not sure this is true for earlier E12s. I will try to have it cut out as you suggest and see if it can be cleaned up and/or if the tag, which appears to be aluminum, can be separated from the underlying sheet metal. I don't have any experience in this kind of work, so I'm open to any suggestions. If it gets mangled or ruined, at least I have my Plan B.

-Eric

Is it then the one that's about 2" X 3" and held on by what appear to be pop rivets? Kind of black and silver with the VIN stamped in? In that case I'd just drill out the pop rivets and rivet it on the new part.

No rivets visible. Appears to be bonded. It’s 5 3/32 x 11/16 (hat tip JCat). JCat's is the same as mine (also 1981). It’s not like the squarish replacement ones that CoupeKing sells for E3s or E9s with printing on it, which are cooler. This is a screencap from a video, so forgive the quality:



Dave - I have a body man doing the cutting and welding.

528i-1981 wrote: ↑Wed Apr 24, 2019 6:16 pm Under the front right wing I found some rust that was on its way to ugly.

We're all friends here, so I'll open the kimono.



My body man says he's seen much worse especially around the strut towers. It wasn't at all obvious while replacing the struts.

PS. Notice those manifold gauge lines? I finally got the AC back together and I'm blowing 36 degrees (on R12)!

That's a good idea. My sticker on the door jamb has only 7 digits for the VIN (which is what it's registered as), but by the shock tower there's a full 17-digit that's pretty much hidden under thick paint so it's almost unreadable. I figure my '79 was on the border of introducing 17-digit vins but when it was imported/complied they ignored the first 10 digits. Stamping out one of those plates using the numbers under the paint would be good for 'updating' the VIN with the DMV.

Also congrats on getting the R12 system working. With a recharge and some maintenance mine went from nothing to amazing so I'm sure yours still has life in it yet.

I visited the car this weekend and upon closer inspection the number is indeed stamped directly into the sheet metal of the wheel housing. It is not a separate piece after all, it was just evidently painted an aluminum gray at some point and I was deceived. That does raise the possibility, as Mike W suggested, of cutting it out and welding it into or onto the new metal.

Here's a web page that goes into detail on the VINs on E12s.

http://www.e12.de/chronicle/detail/03a08012.htm

It's in German so plug the URL into Google translate.( http://itools.com/tool/google-translate ... translator )