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Hi all Very pleased to find a NZ Bimmer community. I just purchased my first NZ Bimmer, a 2017 F30 340i M-Sport, after driving my Nissan Skyline 350GT Manual for about ten years. I previously owned a 1989 325i which I loved dearly, then a 1998 523i, then a 2001 530d and now, finally, my now-dream-car. I'm also originally from South Africa, and have lived here for 12+ years, now a Kiwi citizen. Very keen to peel back the layers on this car soon and get some more of the unexposed power brought to the surface. Hope to see you all out there. Riaan

Upgraded the work (and play) from home office as I decided the E30 wasn’t enough of a money pit. As close as I’ll get to driving Group A DTM E30 M3!

Quite a few bangers out in force at Skope. Here's a couple more.

https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/motors/cars/bmw/listing/3984272500

I would bet on the opposite. Clusters fail, the displays get dead pixels, the stalks on them are delicate and break, the needles fade and start to look like trash etc. SMG clusters are usually cheaper and more available, probably just had one swapped in. The vin decoders are usually accurate for E46 M3 unlike the non-m with regards to what trans because SMG doesn't show up as manual or automatic, it shows up as option "S793 Sequential Gearbox M Drivelogic" and they don't usually get specific options wrong. This is almost certainly a factory manual unless the vins wrong.

Here’s a few more from the Skope Classic…

I've been around the rally scene for a few years, both as a competitor and am organiser. I started competing at age 12 in my father's Mk1 Escort, eventually progressed to an AE92 Corolla FXGT and won the local club championship as well as doing a few club rallys, and then did the usual mid-late 20's thing of getting married, having kids etc. So motorsport took a back seat for a while. Now that the kids are a bit older and the mortgage is under control I decided it was time to get back into doing some competing. Or perhaps it's just a mid-life crisis thing. For me motorsport is about having fun driving the car fast. Some people are out there trying to be as competitive as possible and winning at all costs. That's not me. Heck, on one gravel rally I was lifting off on the straights (doing 160km/h) because that was more than fast enough for my tastes! And when I did go after the club championship I didn't enjoy the racing because I put too much pressure on myself to get a good result. So coming back into the sport I want to build something that is fast enough not to get boring, slow enough I'm not going to scare myself silly, is reliable and, most importantly, goes sideways. Because going straight is boring and sideways is much more fun! After looking at what existing competition cars were out there that met my requirements (not many) and were within my budget (even fewer) I decided to go the route of building my own. I'm not a very good mechanic, so building a rally car from scratch means I'll be leaning on lots of my car club friends to assist with the trickier stuff. And I don't have an unlimited budget so this is going to be a case of spending money where it's going to be worthwhile (eg: good suspension) and forgetting about things that won't materially add to the enjoyment factor (eg: adding carbon-fibre roof scoops). The candidate vehicle I identified? An E87 130i - with 260bhp without making any modifications to the engine and rear wheel drive, plus ample parts availability for the inevitable meetings with banks and fences, I decided this was the best route to take. Here's the car I bought, in full lowered, boy-racer spec: The rough plan for the build is: Safety gear - rollcage, seats, belts etc Suspension - something strong that will handle rough rally roads without requiring repairs after every event Brakes - work out what can work with 15" wheels without having to replace the entire setup with a pedal box etc. And of course a bias valve to get some braking onto the rear. Diff - you can't go sideways properly without a LSD! (not without welding it anyway, which isn't the plan) Other - sump guard, under-body protection etc. And all the electronic nannies need to be exorcised from the car. Bureaucratic stuff - it's going to need both a MSNZ Authority Card and a LVVTA Low Volume Cert. The latter is always fun to sort out... As of starting this thread I'm already part way through the build, so I'll add posts over the next few days with what's been done so far. Thanks to family stuff the build isn't going particularly quickly but the car should be in a state to at least get out of the garage sometime before winter - I hope!

Got some photos from Ray (Chubb racing Ltd) who's doing my rollbar/halfcage, its looking great so far, really friendly/helpful guy would definitely recommend him to anyone looking into getting any sort of cage done, all to MSNZ spec.

Nice car! Welcome

@Gaz yeah i thought so, wasn't expecting to get it for that price, he dropped it of for an extra $40 all the way from Motueka.

That was a good buy I felt!

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Now with a fresh WoF. Flew through, only comments being the tread on the front tires getting close to borderline and probably needing an alignment, both issues soon to be addressed. The guys were impressed with the amount of work done and how clean everything was. Always nice to hear.

Fair enough. Haven't really heard of clusters failing being a common occurrence on E46's. Still, swapping a cluster over is quite an involved mission to get right, having to code several modules for the correct VIN and mileage and such. Next to that, undoing the 4 screws and swapping over the small backing panel from the supposedly bricked manual cluster to make it look legit is piss easy. If that is indeed what happened, pretty lazy to go through all the effort and not put a small finishing touch on it.

Now that I've taken some weight out of the car it's time to put some back in by installing the rollcage. I'm no engineer, so was never going to be able to build the cage myself. Instead I sent it off to a friend of mine, Ray Chubb (www.rollcage.co.nz) to build. He has his own 135i that he's built for the gravel and is a mine of information for my build, so I basically told him "give me what you've built for your car" and sent it off. This is what came back: It's pretty comprehensive, with the only thing I decided to skip being the extension through to the front strut towers. Those with an eagle eye may notice that the seatbelt bar across the main hoop (behind the seats) is not straight across - I'm pretty tall, so one of the advantages of building a car from scratch is that I can (to an extent) make it fit around me. So in this case the main hoop is located as far back as possible and the seatbelt bar on the drivers side raised to get the correct angle over my shoulders. The side intrusion bars are low enough that I can get my long legs over them, and also low enough that the standard door cards can stay fitted without needing any modification. Also, having someone who had built plenty of cages before made everything on the Motorsport NZ side easy - he filled out all the paperwork, took all the necessary photos and the post-build check by a scrutineer (needed before painting the cage) was a breeze. Next job was painting the cage. I've never painted one before, and never will again! It's a long, tedious, messy job and to be honest I'm not that happy with how it came out (it looks fine from 10m away if you're squinting) but it's good enough and saved me a whole lot of money that would have been spent getting someone else to paint it for me. Wrapping the car up. Lots of plastic and masking tape. Primer coat applied. This isn't too bad, maybe this whole painting it myself thing isn't so hard after all! Now to apply the top coat. Hmm, that isn't so easy... For painting it I did the following: Masked/covered everything I didn't want to get paint on. This includes removing any rubbers that may get paint on them. Prepped the cage by rubbing it down with a kitchen scouring pad, to roughen up the surface. I also needed to attack parts with a wire brush on the drill as I didn't get to painting it quickly enough, so some minor surface rusting had started to appear and needed removing. Cleaned the cage down with thinners, to remove the packing grease on the bare tubing Applied a coat of primer Applied the top coat. For this, after doing some reading online, I used Dupli-Colour spray cans from Supercheap in Alpine White. This wasn't a perfect match for the car colour but I decided it was close enough for a clubmans rally car so went with it. Everything actually went better than expected right up to applying the top coat. Even the primer was easy to apply and went on evenly. Then I tried the top coat. Now, I'm terrible when it comes to art, paint etc and so I wasn't expecting much. But this was bad. If I went lightly then the primer showed through. If I went hard then I ended up with runs everywhere. An utter mess! After a couple of days of sporadically attacking it (and going through way more cans than expected) I had something that was kind of okay - that was soon after I decided I didn't care if some overspray ended up through the interior. For someone who knows what they are doing with painting it would probably have come out fine even with using spray cans, but for a novice hack like me it wasn't great. It's fine, it does the job and is (marginally) better than if I'd let my 4 year old do it, but next time I'll just spend the money and make it someone else's problem!

Parts ordered, excited about the process and outcome; should have done this 8 years ago! lol. Any tips on wheel offsets for the standard wheels? Kinda wanna keep that OEM Plus look.

Had a big scare on Friday morning. Was going about my business, got to a couple of km's from home and the car just died at an intersection. It would then start up, idle for just a second and die again. Video Got a mate to tow me home, fearing the worst. First time the tow hook's come out in my 4 years of BMW ownership. Feel like I've done pretty well. Only code I pulled was 44 Activation, Solenoid Valve, Tank Ventilation, which I didn't feel would be enough to stall the engine altogether but went ahead and switched out the EVAP valve, as well as the fuel pump, both of which had come from the 330i donor car, dated 2001. I put back the EVAP valve and fuel pump original to the car, dated 2003 and looks like the issue's gone away. So far so good anyway. Have now put roughly 200km on the the clock since the engine rebuild, looks like most of the niggly issues have been ironed out, bar one. When slowly coasting up to an intersection in 1st gear and not adding any throttle, when I press down the clutch, there's a weird rattle/thump coming somewhere from the drivetrain, seemingly from the rear. Video Only seems to happen when depressing clutch in 1st gear with no throttle input. Doesn't seem to happen at higher revs when accelerating to switch into second so a bit of a weird one. I suspect it could be the diff or the driveshaft. Not particularly enjoying the 3.38 ratio altogether, 1st gear seems very short for regular driving so could be a contributing factor. Was going to tidy up the factory manual 5-speed 2.93 diff and drop it in along with the refurbished subframe after I've gotten reinforcement plates welded in but might do it on its own before doing the whole refurb to eliminate the diff as the culprit. With the car up and running otherwise, I ticked off a few secondary little missions. Chucked on the front Whiteline strut brace I'd ordered a while ago. Quite well priced and contrary to the product photos, the bar itself is black so fits in pretty well with the rest of the engine bay. Really like the minimal design and lack of any sort of logos or writing, keeps it nice and clean. Also went ahead and switched out the cluster strip / automatic screen block out plate I'd received from some fellas over on the e46fanatics forum. Didn't notice it previously but looks like the US-version has BRAKE and ABS written out in words instead of using symbols. Funny little detail but not too bothered about it. The cluster will have to come out again at some point. Seems like when I was switching out the main big backing plate I slightly misaligned the tachometer needle. Was getting a bit concerned as the idle revs looked to be sitting at just 500 RPM. Hooked up the scanner and they're actually at a healthy 700 RPM so will need to bump the needle up a bit. Just clearing out the garage of all the accumulated spare parts / clutter and will jump onto refurbing the rear subframe and brake calipers.

That is a sweeping generalisation about a very large and broad government agency. Whilst I agree with what you have said in terms of the road maintenance aspect, there is a lot more to it than just that. There has been a recent external review of at least some aspects of NZTA, you will have seen a number of stories about WoF and HT certifiers losing their licenses, these came about as the result of the review. There are a number of very good people in the NZTA battling against many things (including Political interference and under-resourcing) to do “the right thing”.

We need National to come in and privatise the roads. That'll fix it. And give the top 1% some tax breaks whilst they're at it.

I don’t know where to start, black is a fun colour to keep black! Buy yourself a genuine wool wash mitt and a new bucket and use them for the body only, small dirt partials are what ruin black. Wax it every 6 washes and maintain/protect the shine with a quick detailer and make sure you use a high suds gentle car shampoo when washing. Here are a few must have products I have found to be invaluable. Gold Class wax; Best wax I have used. Water Magnet Microfibre Drying Towel; much better than a leather chamois and only requires one wring per dry Versa-Angle Wheel Face Brush; these brushes make light work of keeping your mags clean, go for short handle. Meguiars Ultimate Quick detailer. You only need to gently mist this on (you only need the smallest amount) and wipe off with a Microfibre towel. Hot shine Tire coating; Lasts for ever and doesn’t brown tires, plus it smells good. You will need some applicator pads for applying the wax and some Microfibre cloths for wiping the wax and detailer off. If you get stuck finding what you need at Supercheap/Repco or would like to purchase a bulk lot or anything from the professional range let me know and I’ll help you out, I have a wholesale account. http://www.meguiars.co.nz/

This crash was just after the incredibly frustrating roadworks that run nearly the entire stretch between Carterton and Masterton. The speed limit changes 5 times. 50 -> 70 ->50 ->70 ->50 ->80 This all was once 100kph with passing lanes. All passing lanes are now permanently closed.

Not sure if this counts as a rant or not, but I've lost $25K worth of irreplaceable vinyl to the floods. I'm out of the country, as was my good friend whom was storing it for me. I was waiting for the phone call upon when they got back, and had mentally prepared for it, but I honestly feel relieved. Most of it was single release / no repress, so there's no point in chasing the dragon again. I guess the question is, what the F**K do I do with my record player now?!?!

Struggling to name one government department that is not a complete shitshow of incompetence...

Road to Zero BS. There is now 19 posted speed limit changes on SH2 between Featherston and Masterton. And the cops are loving it! This is a State Highway!