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Started this project almost two years ago after I sold the 850i and finally got the car road legal yesterday (cert, WOF and rego). The goal was to build a very fast, comfortable tourer that I can use for daily driving, which meant retaining the automatic gearbox, ASC and AC - which all turned out to be pretty complicated!! Had a lot of help from a bunch of people but a big shout at to Brendon (Assault) and Westy as this would just be a paperweight without them! Car has an M62b44 (non-vanos) drivetrain with custom sump mounted to a modified front subframe. Gearbox is a 5hp24 tiptronic slushbox from the same donor car as the engine (97 E39 540i) with modified driveshaft. It has a bunch of other interesting mods and, at some point, I'll document everything we did to get this thing working. As far as I know, it's the only RHD M62-powered E36 in the world with auto, ASC and AC!!

Probably the spot of the year for me, an early 2wd Sapphire Cossie... But completely stock standard and unmolested with all the patina you'd expect (including the bird sh*t on the bonnet, and random detritus on the recaros). Stunning.

Well that was easy! Mr 2 went to bed early so I had some time after dinner to swap the new head unit in. First up is removing the old head unit, the centre vents (the worst bit of the exercise), and the lower console bracket, so that I could install the HVAC relocation bracket. Console bracket out. How does so much debris get into a sealed area!!! The car had had a Parrot bluetooth unit installed, which never worked properly for me, so that had to come out. I was a bit worried about how the wiring for it might have been done. The wiring harness had in fact been cut to put the Parrot unit in series. Fortunately it had been done well and I was able to just unplug the Parrot harness and plug the OE harness back together. I'll tidy it up further in the future, but for now I've wrapped it with fleece tape and packaged it up. I then swapped the switch strip and cigarette lighter across to the HVAC relocation bracket (photo taken before swapping over): The Xtrons unit comes with an ISO wiring harness and it makes it ridiculously easy to connect the head unit. Just plug it into the Xtrons and plug it into the car harness and that is literally it. Everything just works. The ISO harness comes with some other tails for other harnesses. I intend to remove these connectors I don't need at some point in the future to tidy things up further, but before I do that I'll just run the unit for a while and make sure I'm happy with it. Once I'd done a quick test to make sure functions were working I put everything back together, and voila! It works. As others have noted the dash trim doesn't sit quite right. This appears to be because the clip is built into the Xtrons (see below) and it seems to be slightly too high up - a quick go with a file will fix this I think - again will get back to this over the Christmas break. Initial impressions of the head unit? Ridiculously easy to install and get setup - you get a ton of wiring harnesses in the box and it seems intimidating. You only need the ISO one and it's entirely plug and play, no tapping to do, no extra wires to hook into, nothing. Just plug in the additional things you want (GPS, Wifi Antenna, etc. I didn't bother with the USB ports, 4G, etc. as I won't use them). The unit is FAST. No delays anywhere, the UI is fast and responsive. CarPlay seems good so far, I connected my phone via bluetooth and it just worked. The real test is going to come over the next few months as I see if it reliably works well and quickly, or if there are gremlins. Promising start anyway, will provide an update in a few weeks once I've used it for a while.

IDrive 6 hardware retrofit. One thing in this day and age is having a more native control of iPhone apps I.E carplay. The M3 is a December 2015 build so came with IDrive 4 which doesn’t have CarPlay or enough ram to run BMW Nav and CarPlay at the same time. Going through the options for CarPlay I came up with the following 1, Update id4 software to id6 image , places on the web do this and can be done locally , but price for doing this seems to be $1k more than others charge internationally. Down side is that idrive will reboot if factory Nav and CarPlay is used. Price wise between $500 - $1600 depending on vendor 2, Replace idrive unit with version 4 or 6, optionally change screen to touch screen and replace controller for correct menu buttons. Price wise $1500 - $3000 + 3, get an MMI module , this is typical an Android box that plugs between idrive and screen and has CarPlay. Works via a double press on the bmw controller. With MMi modules there are tradeoffs such as not being able to use factory car microphones or use Aux input on idrive for sound ( not so good ) . I did find a unit called MR12volt that used MOST digital audio , but at this stage no support for native bmw mics. $450 - $800 4, Android replacement screen , so you can get an 8.8 or 10.25 inch touch screen with CarPlay built in . I didn’t look into this in detail as all used aux audio input. I went with replacing the hardware with the later BMW ID6 unit , screen and controller. I looked for an ECE version with DAB tuner which is what is used in NZ New BMW M3, but apparently any version can be recoded to work in NZ. There is a gotcha with ID6 units though, after a certain date BMW dropped the GPS module and for the G series BMW dropped the Most digital audio. So the unit I sourced was for an F3x F8x platform and GPS is covered by the M3s ATM telephony module.

Nice one mate, photos look weird on my phone for some reason but I already know how good this car is

It'll be done properly, all the spacers and other consumable parts replaced. Insurance companies don't like like doing it via a dealer as Smith and Smith will do glass only for $800

@balancerider don't accept anything less than like-for-like. It's an OE screen that's cracked so that's what should go in, no ifs or buts. Definitely dig in your heels when they try and cheap out with a non genuine item. Then there will be the inevitable argument about re-using the original sensors rather than new, which will never work as well as they did from new. Dealing with insurance companies as a supplier to them almost killed my soul - the commerce commission needs to take a blow-torch to the entire industry.

Well this arrived astonishingly quickly considering I ordered it on Sunday night and it arrived from Hong Kong this morning! Not sure what the quality of the product is like, but the delivery and sales service have been excellent. I went for the IX8246BHL which is the highest spec option for the E46. First impressions are better than I was expecting. It seems to be finished nicely, the buttons feel pretty good. The twisty knobs don't have the same inertia feel that the stock ones do, but they're pretty good. The chrome would usually annoy me but I'm kinda interested to see with the SMG whether the chrome on the knobs ties things together a bit. I feel a bit of a sense of inevitability about this venture as I have, for years, seen others complaining about their "China-sourced" head units, so if this doesn't work out I have only myself to blame. In the end I went with this option because I wasn't very enthused about the tier 1 manufacturers offerings, and secondly because this gives me a more modern unit without too much of the area taken up with buttons, but also without the "slab glued to the dash" look that a lot of other options have. As I said previously I'm very comfortable with the tech, so don't mind some fiddling to get it setup, but once it is it needs to be rock solid. Plan to give this a year to see how it goes and will re-evaluate then.

Have you met Auckland??

Rondell 0021 - Kyu aka The Wheel Savant