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BIG milestone - Interior is now done: Full retrim in OEM BMW Anthrazit Uberkaro and matching OEM bolster fabric Fresh vinyl on outer bolsters, seat backs + door cards. Rear headrests, Mtech badges, refinished interior plastics, shampooed carpets and new mats. Fully rebuilt front seats - repaired and welded frames / new seat shocks / clips / fresh foam - feel like new seats. The textures and tones in the flesh look absolutely fantastic and like it was always this way - very happy. Might get my shift / gear boot done in genuine Uberkaro to match (they are reproduction Uberkaro at the moment and are a cooler grey) will likely get rear seat Mtech badges and need a new drivers door handle surround as well to finish off.

Put the car back together a couple weeks ago with all new power steering parts. New high pressure lines, reservoir, fluid etc. Also pulled the second hand pump that I got off trademe for cheap apart and it was perfect inside. Got very lucky with that being for sale at exactly the same time as my car decided to fry one. Checked all the internals Also decided that while I had the pump apart I would modify the pressure regulator by stacking the old shim with the new one and reduce the power steering assistance by an additional 12.5% according to forums. Supposedly this would also help to keep temps slightly lower, whether or not that is true I have no idea. Reassembled pressure regulator with the stacked shims: Fully re-assembled pump, looked like brand new: I didn't take any photos of all the refreshed power steering lines but it is nice to have all those finally replaced. They had been weeping since I had bought the car and probably long before. Decided I would re-dye the parcel shelf as a saw a few others do on this forum since mine was that typical faded purple that all E46's seem to get. I totally forgot to take before photos but the after is infinitely better than before. Very happy. Everything back together: Also decided I would buy the m-texture door cards Tom has had for sale for a while now. I really didn't need them but I couldn't resist. I was prepared to get some really beat up manky door cards but they were in much better condition than I initially thought and couldn't believe how well they cleaned up. Considering they were $100 for the full set front and rear I'm stoked. Once I cleaned the alcantara part of the door card up they were in super good condition. Best $100 dollars I've spent in recent memory, even though these are pretty much just going to go into storage. The vinyl on them is pretty beat up so eventually I'll either have it repaired or swap the inserts into a cleaner set of vinyl cards. Couple close-up shots comparing the reproduction fabric from my bucket seats to OEM: Not sure what it is about the fabric but I just have an obsession for it. Has to be one of BMW's coolest interior options imo.

Fell victim to a puncture yesterday. Pretty annoyed as these tyres are pretty new and of course it found the wider (more expensive) rear. shop reckoned it wasn’t repairable so got a new one overnight. Very happy with Tyre Clinics service. Not so happy with PCB builders who have been working down the road where I picked it up.

After 5.5 weeks wallowing around in a clapped out comfort seat and 3 weeks without a front sway bar, can’t wait for the weekend to get my rebuilt and reupholstered sport seats in and my 22mm sway bar with new poly bushings and billet mounts… Looking forward to driving around corners again.

Picked up the new sensible car / wifes daily - 2014 F31 320d MSport in Alpinweiss III. I've always thought BMW do the best looking wagons, so stoked to have one in the fleet in a great looking, low maintenance colour. Fresh import 76km and in absolutely fantastic condition - I don't know how the Japanese manage to keep their cars in such amazing shape?! Early days, but really loving the look and the M Sport interior. Powertrain is plenty in the real world, definitely sounds like a diesel at idle but meh - seems pretty damn efficient! 'Modern' cars are bloody nice with all the fruit for sure. Comfort access / electric tailgate etc. Came on new staggered 19" BMW replica wheels of some sort (anyone know what style?) and some cheapo tyres, but the fitment is excellent and it looks good - may upgrade the tyres in due course but they are brand new and already overspent a little on the car. Plans for it so far (most parts en-route) are: Euro Plate Black Kidneys Black Mirror Caps Paint or wrap the M Performance style front splitter black (AKA sacrificial bumper) Floor mats (didn't come with any) Tints(?) wanting the black and white look and seems to have very light factory tints - look dark in the shade but very light in daylight Wireless Carplay Bimmercode to do all the custom options / disclaimer deletes etc Looking forward to doing some road trips in this!

There are certain things that are difficult to discuss in a rational manner... religion, politics, safety and how to save the planet. In what by any yardstick (metre rule just doesn't sound right) has been an incredibly short time, the world has gone from not giving a sh*t about global warming to near panic. The media is full of headlines about melting icecaps, record breaking floods, rampaging bush fires and how we must all beat our fossil fueled cars into ecologically correct mobility vehicles. Adversity is the mother of invention. Not all that long ago there was a war that involved most of the major western countries and when hostilities cut off supplies of certain essential raw materials, necessity drove the combatants to invent/discover/modify/adapt to find alternative solutions. War has the same effect on otherwise complacent scientists and engineers as a cattle prod has on a recalcitrant steer. Likewise, when one finds oneself facing a moral dilemma, like for instance, choosing between freezing to death and running a heater using cheap power from a nuclear reactor, suddenly nuclear power stations don't look quite so threatening So we can expect to see the rapid development of some new technologies and alternative energy solutions when the full implications of the sanctions placed on Russia manifest themselves. Anyone or any country that is foolish enough to think that making life tough for the Russian people is going to cause them to knuckle under has obviously not read about the siege of Leningrad. Putin knows that he has western Europe by the short and curlies and just like Xi he knows that no-one is going to step in and try and stop him doing whatever he decides. What we are seeing today are kneejerk stopgap measures that politicians love as it shows the world that they are doing something. But they are only short term solutions to long term problems. Excavating a hole in a mountain to store nuclear waste or dumping it in the ocean is not exactly doing the planet any favours. Maybe Musk can use his rockets to fire waste into the sun... that really would be an achievement !!! Cheers...

Absolute porn this. That car has a better life than most people. Top effort mate!

Good luck and work on the pump, well done on all accounts. A hundy is very reasonable for those door cards, I recall the original offer was some way off that so good score!

Manual heater controls are the best part. Id take them any day over crappy 90's digital button units (glad they were short lived)

Yeah it is a North American publication. So yeah guess it’s for LHD cars but I never even noticed that till now and I used it for a bunch of trouble shooting on my RHD car.

Problem is, currently Europe are heavily dependent on the gas from Russia to produce hydrogen (Natural Gas Reformation) They will have to do an incredible scale up on renewables to make any green hydrogen, and that's expensive and relatively inefficient The FCEV set up is a lot less mineral heavy and planet wrecking than anything we have currently though. I believe it's approx 50gm of platinum for an average Bosch fuel cell, I would imagine the whole cell has less impact on the dolphins than manufacturing a DPF No eating our cakes.

That platform was rebadged so many times, pretty sure it got uglier with each though. Bringing this back to BMW though - here is the best variant:

And then of course, they filed the corners off a tiny bit and made the Daewoo Cielo and kept making it WELL past it's use-by date: Apparently Uzbekistan was punished with them until 2016 in sedan form 😫

Tempting!

In South Africa they made the Opel Kadett GSI Superboss, which was a group N homologation special. Massive cams for a street car and a 2L engine, it was a brute for an NA and thankfully nothing like the Pontiac LeMans - I have plenty of fond passenger seat memories of these beasts. If you had the coin and could find one you had a Superboss, I just had access to my aunts 1.3 Kadett which made no effort to hide that it was not a "LeMans" car.

To be fair, I’d never heard of them until about 8 months ago when someone here (Mean?) suggested them. I used them last week, 4 days from order to delivery and only 39% of the cost of local including delivery. I should have ordered more parts, the delivery was more than the parts.

To celebrate the car being back under cover again (sorry, still no garage for her) after almost two months in the Auckland winter rain, I washed it for the first time in 5 weeks. Feels good, just need my long delayed interior back in and will be ready to be seen in public again!! Still a bit of landscaping to be done but nice to have a better space for her.

Yes brand spanking new shitbox tyres - dealer special haha