Despite the stereotype, car guys can exist in New York City, where parking is expensive and annoying, and good workspaces are harder to find than a cab on a rainy day. This is the story of how one car enthusiast prepped, primed and wrapped his BMW in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn.


Aleksey Korzun, 24, had a typical New York car guy's dilemma: How to do the bodywork on his E34 BMW 5 Series on a shoestring — and without a garage. He had all the necessary prep materials, the flat-black vinyl wrap and DIY skills honed with help from his BMW bros on the r3vlimited board. He just needed a place to get the work done, and the only place the software engineer had available was his one-bedroom apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

As most New Yorkers know, you can cram a lot of living into tiny spaces, especially when there's an important job to be done. And so Korzun slapped some Chinese-language newspapers down on the parquet floor, smack in the living room of his tiny, 579 square-foot apartment, and got down to work. Korzun's take on using his spartan living quarters for automotive projects sums to the simplest of gearhead truths: "No wife, no problem."


Naturally, he couldn't fit the entire car into his apartment, so, little by little, Korzun disassembled the body panels and brought them inside — a few parts at a time — leaving the BMW parked in its usual spot on the street outside. He performed the much-needed body work — those rust holes weren't going to bondo themselves — and then sanded with only a 3M mask for ventilation. Then, after some trial and error, he primed the parts and finally pulled taut a vinyl wrap in flat black with help from a heat gun and the occasional hair dryer.



But what about the doors? As safe as NYC is these days, a BMW on the street with no doors would just be needless temptation for the city's remaining car thieves. And then there's the rain.

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"I had an extra set of doors from a car with front-end damage," he tells me as we slog through Manhattan traffic on a recent afternoon. "I put those on so I could still park it on the street." Good call.

Naturally, the roof work had to be done outside, and so Korzun picked a cool, sunny weekend in the fall, and handled the top job as the car sat at the curb.


The body work was only the latest work Korzun's done to the sweet-sounding 540I he's had for six years. He's got a rebuilt M60B40 V8, he's swapped out the original autobox for the donor car's six-speed manual, among other mods — including a Dinan ECU and, naturally, French yellow highbeams.

In all, the job took two-and-a-half months of late nights, cramped quarters and shuttling parts in and out. It looks great, and the landlord is none the wiser.


(On-road photos by dknewyork. Show photos by Danny Tam.)