Ownership - 06/09 / 10/13

Spoiler Alert! I didn't hang onto this one for long. I'll save my reasons for the next section.

Unlike my other cars I didn't have the time to do a bunch of projects on the E55. I had planned to do a stereo upgrade but in the end I only ended up doing a substantial detail + some paint correction. While on the topic of the stereo upgrade, the roots of this upgrade ended up transferring over to the 540i's upgrade, so it wasn't a completely wasted effort.

The car was relatively clean for a 12 year old car but not up to my standards. I spent ~ 12 hours on the exterior and 6hrs on the interior over a 3 week period. The interior was pretty straight forward. Just a lot of time brushing out dirt from every nook and cranny then scrubbing with a bucket of soapy water. I also vacuumed, shampooed, vacuumed again, cleaned glass, cleaned the leather, conditioned the leather, and applied protectant where applicable. The exterior was a little more of a chore. I could tell when I saw the car in person that I had days of paint correction in front of me. I started with a concentrated bucket of liquid dawn and scrubbed her down. I then claybarred the whole car and windshields. Finally I scrubbed the car down with another liquid dawn bath, rinsed the car, then dried it and moved it into the garage. For about a week and a half I spent my nights and weekends filling paint chips with touchup paint. After I got them filled and ~ level with the car’s paint I spent a few more nights knocking down all the spots with sandpaper working up to 3000 grit. During this time I also removed the fender’s “V8 Kompressor” emblems. The PO had removed the E55 and AMG emblems off the back and I’ve always liked the look of debadged cars (my RX7 being one of them), so I took it a step further. Here are some pictures of the process