Here's how bodywork is done. (fixed pictures) - Detailing and Car Care Forum

Ok, a while back I posted a tutorial about how the repair process is preformed in terms of painting on a 91' 850i.

This time it's my own car (98' 540i6) and it required body work, so I figured it would be a good idea to do another write up.

I wasn't allowed in the shop this time, but my friends doing the work took pictures for me.

Here's the damage. Without getting into a lot of detail about how what I was doing was stupid, lets just say the jack stand fall and left a nice dented rocker panel (aka side skirt) Usually this would be a part you would just replace, however, BMW in it's infinite wisdom decided on the E39 5 series they would build the rocker panel into the B pillar of the car. This means there are two options to fix it. One: pull out the dent. Two: buy a new rocker/B pillar cut out the bad section and weld in a good section of the new panel.... I think I'll take option number one thank you very much.

This wasn't done by me, but it seems the previous owner had put the car on jack stands but not in the right place.... this left a nice dent as well on the under side.

Because the dent was right on the jack point, a jack could not be used to lift the car at the correct jack point. Instead a block of wood was used to disperse the weight across a larger area.

Ahh, the grinding begins. Basically this is done to remove all of the paint and get down right to the metal. You'll see why in a little bit.

Nice shot of all the damage with not paint.

Here are the tools used to do all of this work.

In this step he puts the rods from the last picture into the green welding gun and tacks them to the body (this is why there can't be paint.)

He uses this tool to latch onto the rods and actually pull the dent out. It's not shown, but once the section of the dent is pulled out, he cuts the rods off and then grinds everything smooth.

More rods, pulling and hammering.

And here's the finished body work.

The next steps are covered in the write-up I did on the 850 so I'm not going to go into detail. Basically to make everything smooth and look perfect, he skim coats the work in bondo. and then sands everything down to make it perfectly smooth. He'll do this several times before everything looks perfect.

Here we jump to the paint booth where everything is masked off and ready for primer.

Primer

Base coat and clear.

If you want to see the paint process in much more detail, here's the link to the write-up I did on the 850s repair job.
http://bimmer.roadfly.org/bmw/forums/detailing/5065536-1.html

Matt Atkins
Vice President
Seattle5s
98' 540i-6 blk/blk
94' Pathfinder Green/gray