Dressing up a Rocker

- April 25, 2022

As mentioned in Ugly Bumpers No More, I'm not a fan of rubber protection strips on my cars. Not on bumpers, not on doors, and not on rocker panels. BMW 3.0 CS coupes have a metal rocker cover with a big rubber strip along the top, below the door. In stock trim, it is painted with a black pebbled stone-guard finish, making the paint color stop about 4 inches above the bottom of the car, thus visually raising the ride height.

New simple rocker trim. Needs chrome plating.

Stock Rubber rocker trim, has a piece of stainless embedded in it

Rubber trim and rubber gasket to hide poor fit

With all the rubber gone from the bumpers, I got the idea of eliminating the rubber on the rockers as well. In fact, the earlier 2000 CS, from which the rubberless rear bumper is sourced, has polished stainless steel rocker trim. It would take a lot of time and effort (i.e. money) to remake the 3.0 CS rocker cover in polished stainless -- it has to fit perfect, with cutouts for jacking points, and has some complex bends. It would be a lot easier to just fill the holes from the rubber trim in the original painted covers, strip them, and paint them the same color as the body. Or so I thought.

Earlier 2000 CS had stainless rocker trim

It turns out the the original covers don't actually fit all that perfectly. There are big gaps where the cover meets the quarter panel and fender. The factory hid this with some rubber trim but that wasn't an option for me since the black would stick out like a racing stripe between all the body colored panels. I had to come up with better solution.

What I ended up with is straight steel trim with a curved profile that runs along the top edge of the cover, making it fit perfectly to the body and into the door sill area. This was difficult to make and still needs to be chrome plated but the end result is clean.