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Finally had a spare moment to fill the diff and refit the exhaust on the m3 last night. Also fitted my new intake. Now need to redo that hose to the booster round the back to make it look a bit nicer.

There is also a strong case for older cars that benefit from upgraded performance parts that were not widely available or were not fitted to the factory edition such that a modern equipped older car will arguably be a much 'better' drivers car than when it left the factory. Bigger, newer brakes for starters. MUCH better tyres!

I thought I'd do a quick shout out - backstory is I wanted shift paddles for the E61 and I managed to get my hands on a M-Sport steering wheel from an E60 but it was in rough shape. Before I spent any money on repairing the wheel I got the shift paddles working which was easier said than done (the factory wiring diagrams were wrong and I had to spend a fair bit of time reading up on the right way to go about it.) I'm a massive fan of the shift paddles and I'm really happy with them now they work! I don't drive the car in manual mode but I do like to shift gears now and then - e.g. going up or down a hill the transmission doesn't always drive the car the way I want it to. Anyway I struggled to find someone in the Wellington region that could do a steering wheel. I was initially looking for someone to re cover it as I thought it was too far gone, but I ended up reaching out to Erika @ The Leather Doctor https://www.myleatherdoctor.co.nz who said she could fix it up without re covering. I offered to remove the wheel from the car which made the job a lot easier for her. The Leather Doctor is a mobile service so they came to my house meaning I didn't have to faff around dropping the car off somewhere for the day etc. I'm really happy with the result, it looks a million times better now! Here's a before and after photo. Apologies in advance for the background, I took the photo on the front steps and in hindsight that wasn't a good spot, but you can still see the difference , it's night and day.

Details here . https://silodrome.com/custom-bmw-e9/