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Alright peeps I have 10x steering joints arrived from the land of Oz. These are all UC Barina / Opel Corsa joints as have been used many times in both my own cars and others when putting purple tag, green tag, yellow tag (E36/M3/E46/Z3) steering racks into an E30. I supply 2 versions of this: 1) Joint as is with end cut off ready to install the E30 upper joint. I will also include a 4 page DIY guide. $60 + post 2) Complete unit - this requires you sending me your E30 joint and I'll send you back a complete joint ready to go into the car. $130 + post I also sell the 14mm rack spacers needed to mount the E46 rack into an E30. These are machined from billet aluminum and are $20 a pair I've done plenty of these setups for people all over the world. Obviously with all steering, braking and suspension components, installation and use is at your own risk. Note the fully polished complete unit was a custom request. Units do not come fully polished.

Collected this today.. was advertised on here with a failing transmission. 2000 540i pre facelift motorsport, ex Japan. Drove it 25km home from Cambridge. Transmission gave me no trouble at all, although I was gently cruising... Generally a well looked after car with plenty of maintenance including chain guides and all the usual suspects. There are a few things going on with it however, and I'll document its progress here as we go...

It seems unlikely that this amount of gas usage is possible. I suggest double checking all of your gas appliances and meters to make sure that nothing is malfunctioning or being misread.

Anyone got any busted up seats with heater elements still in them? I'm not keen on buying complete seats unless they're super cheap and local to CHCH Cheers!

Courtesy of BMW Classic on the ‘gram.

Love the 'shark nose' kidney mod on this bad boy!

Looking forward to the e46/v10 build, that’s the dream right there. Please document it.

Have done that before on the gf’s barina after replacing the head gasket. Missed a trans connector which stopped it from shifting out of first… Dog stepped in my fresh silicone around the new tiles when the census man turned up at the front door 😡🤬 so took the z4 out to blow off some steam (and cobwebs)

The Topaz Blue 540 is now sold and off next month to its new home in Christchurch. I painted the rear bumper again myself and the result came out good.

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!

Time for a bit of an update... The OxfordG 525 turned out very nice and has now been sold to a lucky recipient, excluding my labour I even turned a very rare $299 profit lol... If it weren't for the fact that the X3 is the ideal daily for my work/play at the moment it would not have gone anywhere... Being rather time poor I farmed out the painting of the Topaz 540 to a mate of a mate who did come well regarded... the result was OK, but there is a bit of orange peel correction to be done at some point. It has been assembled, a replacement windscreen fitted, WOF'd and the a/c regassed. Lots of other stuff has been done when assembling such as rear parcel tray re-dye and interior clean, rear windscreen trim, side trims, M5 mirrors. Things to do include repairing an assembly scratch on the rear bumper I just can't unsee, perhaps alloy wheel refresh and new tyres maybe. I can't make up my mind which 540 msport to sell so I just may advertise both and see which one goes first... As a refresher this 2002 topaz one has had a fair bit done, just review this thread... timing chain guides and all stuff in there is the main feature (as is with the Biarritz too), and now the paint and interior. If anyone is interested now in either the 99 Biarittz Individual 540 or the 02 Topaz 540 then please message me. Prices negotiable and will depend on how much more I throw at these cars.... and I can fully expand on the extensive work done... The dark M5 style 65 wheels on Biarittz will not be sold, which ever car sells will come with style 66's as pictured. Oh yeah.. in other news, a 2000 e38 740i Msport has found its way here... much to be done in the e39/8 rescue centre... although my business model /community service of "buy cheap / spend heaps / sell for a massive loss" I realise is unsustainable... just ask the missus... 😂

Barely had the silver 540 departed down the drive when a rather nice (albeit a bit daggy) NZ new 525 Msport came up for sale on the quiet. Nec minute... Cracked bumpers and a pile of engine work, great night in the e39 rescue centre tonight...

Finally have managed to complete I guess this car to a point where I'll take a wee rest... Replacement bumpers and bootlid now on. Did my own painting, sanding, cutting and polishing with a pretty OK result in the end... Remade "BMW582" has gone on and the all important "M" badge 😲 to complete the (now) NZ new type look. Just an annoying oil leak remains which I fear is the driver side top chain cover which I don't think is a small job. It may have to wait a little....

Last update of this year I'm picking. Not too much to report. The wheels have arrived back from painters looking good... they will go on in the new year, along with the new Dunlops. I've started work on the spare bumpers, gunna have a crack at painting those myself although expectations are not high... The dash is all good, even the single line of missing pixels seems to have sorted itself out. I had my spare parcel shelf retrimmed with suitable material. It now looks a lot better than the old fading and lifting one. Thought I had an issue with my spare electric blind, but it's all working good. And just today I took care of an annoying feature the Japan market has, I do not need to be told that I have selected reverse, one plug removed and the gong is gone. Merry Christmas All...