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Made a spray booth in the workshop, when will I learn not to do all in-house!! Anyway, extraction and heated... Alpine White. Have a design for the rollcage. Quick patchup on rear guards. Will spray the exterior after the cert. Much more tidy platform to start on. Getting pipes and plates ready for mounting on the rotisserie.

Ah cheers guys. I think I will go for the Single. Sounds like it will be more suited to what I am after. Seems the kits are pretty easy to get these days. https://spareto.com/products/valeo-clutch-kit/835115 Just over $1000 landed.

I then took a detour and decided to try and hunt down the annoying rattle coming somewhere from the passenger door region that had been eating away at me for months. Having taken the door card off I was greeted with this. Guess that's a quicker way of replacing a window regulator. I've of course had the door cards off before but somehow it hadn't registered. It would have been prior to the engine swap so the priorities would have been elsewhere. I then reached into the door and discovered a handful of glass shards. Would never have noticed it otherwise but the window was of some random brand and not stamped with a BMW logo like the rest of them. Only then I discovered that it was also the only side window to not have window tints. To top it off it also had a row of little gashes on the inside in one place from something rubbing against it. Not enough to notice on its own, but enough to annoy me having discovered it. I'm planning on redoing the window tints all round before next summer so figured I might as well have a set of original windows and not lock in some random, slightly damaged one. So, being the lunatic that I am, I set off to Pick-A-Part for a replacement original window and vapour barrier. Having carefully peeled away the vapour barrier and taken out the glass, I discovered that the car I'd been scavenging was pre-wired for heated seats. Score! The seats themselves were already taken, which made access to the wiring that much easier. Naturally I turned a quick half-hour trip for a new window glass into a 5-hour mission of extracting the heated seat wiring all in one piece... Got to satisfy my curiosity in knowing exactly how it was done from factory and have the full kit ready for when I eventually get around to ripping my interior apart again. What started off as trying to chase down a rattle had well and truly snowballed out of control. With the window out, I figured why stop there - I might as well remove the door handle and give the whole door a good cut and polish as well. It definitely needed it. From there on, the window regulator also came out, as did the whole door lock mechanism and everything else along with it until all that remained was the wiring. "But hey, since you've got it all apart, why not install some sound deadening", said my stupid brain. The door panel got the same treatment as the hood, minus the wet sanding. Came out pretty sweet. The door cavity got a proper cleanout with a vacuum and blown out with compressed air. The door lock mechanism, door handle and window regulator got cleaned and lubed up with some white lithium grease. All internals reassembled, I sealed it by taking a heat gun to the butyl tape attached to the new vapour barrier and sticking it on nice and snug. All the door and window rubbers also got some Gummi Pfledge treatment whilst I was at it. Not that there was anything noticeably wrong with it prior but the door handle and window regulator now seem to operate slightly smoother, and the door sounds that wee bit less tinny when slamming it shut. Took it for a quick test drive around the block and... ...the damn rattle is still there. Looks like it might have been the seat belt trim inside the B-pilar all along. Cars are pain.

Have barely driven the car of late, instead choosing to stumble down all manner of wormholes. First was an easy one. The typical cluster clock adjustment arms finally gave out so one of these 3D printed replacements got ordered in and installed. Quick and easy fix, 10/10 product. Then made a start on a task I've been putting off for the longest time - addressing the aesthetics, namely the shoddy state of the paintwork. Having zero prior experience in any sort of cutting & polishing it wasn't a task I'd been too confident in taking on, on a black car no less, but having pretty much resigned to eventually needing a full respray anyway I figured I might as well try my hand at it. Worst comes to worst it would just bring the timeline forward. Armed with some hands-on knowledge through a detailing clinic with United Car Care and a hodgepodge assortment of products I kicked off the journey. I started off on the hood as it looked in the most desperate need for a tidy up. Having done several passes with a heavy cut compound on a wool pad and seemingly not making any progress I went with the nuclear option and jumped head first into wet sanding. Not sure if I was doing it right, and it did look pretty scary at times, but somehow I seem to have gotten away with it. The sequence was as follows: Wash & clay bar. 2000-grit sandpaper on the heavier scratches & imperfections. Several passes with a Koch Chemie H9.01 heavy cut compound on wool pads with a 150mm DA & 75mm polisher for tighter spots. Fill in rock chips, remaining deep scratches and bird dropping etchings with touch-up paint. Menzerna 3 in 1 polish on medium foam pads. Clean down with a quick detailer. Protect with Fireball Pirouette. Still left with plenty of imperfections with some deep scratches going nowhere and touch-up paint making the inherited damage from the etched in bird sh*t only ever so slightly less apparent. Never going to win any awards but still heaps better than the swirly, scratched up mess that it was before. Will make turning up to club meets that wee bit less embarrassing anyway so have to be happy with the effort.

Gorgeous car though. Wonder how this goes with the M suspension - the e39 540i Motorsport was such a good car… I had a boss in 2001 who thought his was actually a M5 because it went so well!

Throw Penrite Progear 75w90 in the box and bobs ya uncle, only real downside is you have to be deliberate and slow when shifting if its freezing out and box is cold, after a minute or so its fine and continues to be even when hot.

Does anyone local (North Shore, Auckland) have this trim piece going spare? I’ve ordered one but keen to keep it covered in the meantime. Cheers.

They haven't yet recovered from our previous govts complete f**kery of maintenance budgets into ideological changes sans good science. Give them time, it'll get unwound.

Disappointed, I thought this would be the 540i “Schnitzer” from Rose City Cars that started at $35k(?).

Paint the spoiler white and slap back on.

How odd. Looking at the official S7 brochure, this seems to be missing a lot of stuff that a "full blown" one would have. No ACS wheels, roof spoiler, steering wheel, pedals, strut brace, and ACS stripe decals. In fact, other than the front/rear skirts, exhaust, mirrors and badges..... what makes it an ACS model? Understandably we cant see the suspension or engine mods though. It looks like a tidy MSport E38 with some off the shelf bits thrown on it.