Leaderboard

Yep thanks to @Vass for buying these. Lucky (or not) he bought them and had sorted them to save someone the expense and headache of doing it. The LHD versions probably would of been cheaper to modify especially using the slim joint. Malian Exhaust / Kage Trading are easily the worst and most scummy company ive ever dealt with online. Finally got some money back a few days ago from credit card dispute after they stuffed me around in various ways for months. Too bad we didnt have a proper invoice in time to make them pay for what they really owe.

blocked skuttle panel drains,(leaves etc) then floods through the air intake for the blower fan runs down through the blower fan straight over the fuse box and body modules also if window regs are not working and door card membranes ripped

Roof rail delete looks so good on the e46 (and the PFL e91 for that matter)

I've been going through the public XDF for the 0401 binary and sorting out some of the incorrect references. They're usually pretty easy to confirm by looking at whether the data makes sense. This one made me chuckle 😛

Should be able to pinpoint the noise on a hoist etc going by your description. What's the history of transmission servicing?

Great to see it on the car @Vass- I rarely get to see the finished product in place as they go all over the world. Very tidy build, well done!

Probably looked at it and mistook the shitty body lines to be accident damage related...

I did also swap out the amber indicators for a fresh set of clears as some eagle-eyed folk might have noticed from those videos. TYC brand corners and fender indicators are good quality and still pretty cheap from Spareto so got sets of both ambers and clears last year. Paired them up with chrome bulbs from LEDPerf since they were the only ones I found (other than Aliexpress) that carried the smaller chrome fender indicator bulbs. Pricing seemed reasonable but did find dealing with them quite annoying so probably wouldn't bother again. Despite a .co.nz website and NZ flag plastered all over the place, they ship their stuff out from France which in my case took over 3 weeks to arrive with little to no tracking updates along the way. The bulbs look to be random brand and probably Chinese-made anyway so would just go direct to Aliexpress next time. Chrome bulbs do make quite a difference though and give a nice clean finish instead of the egg-yolk look you get with amber bulbs. With the fender indicators I somehow ended up with slightly different ones with one having a pearly white edge and the other more of a beige. Might tack on another pair with the next order to have a matching set since they cost the equivalent of a pack of chips. I've also taken up the practice of super-gluing in those metal tabs after having 3 of them shoot out one after another into the fender cavity when reinstalling them after a polish. Don't need the hassle of trying to fish those out again. Did enjoy the amber look but wanted to switch it up a bit after a a year and a bit on that setup and the car does look way more modern with the clears. Need to take her out for a scenic photoshoot up in the hills on a cloudy day sometime.

Have now put a few hundred km on with the headers installed and they've developed a nice bronze-ish tinge. Looks pretty cool. Performance wise, can't say I notice much of a difference. The engine does rev quite freely but then again I wasn't really complaining beforehand either. My butt dyno isn't awfully well calibrated and I wouldn't have realized it was 30hp below stock power numbers until we put it on the dyno. Gonna try address a few more things and do another power run at some point to compare. Having driven a bit monitoring fuel trims the LTFT's still keep jumping between 5.6 - 6.3 - 7.8 - 8.6 for both banks so doesn't looks like it's made a difference there. Would have been wishful thinking to expect it to have done though. Didn't notice a massive difference in sound either. It did make the tone somewhat deeper but the difference is very marginal and it still sounds quite subdued to my ear. At idle there is no difference at all, at around 4-5k RPM and above you do hear it more but not as much as I would have expected. I was hoping for a more throatier tone but with the rest of the exhaust remaining stock I guess the muffler does what mufflers do. I want to retain the secondary cats so as to not smell like a bag of rotten eggs so might look into getting an aftermarket muffler at some point instead, but that will be sometime in the distant future. Video #1 Video #2 Should have really made the comparison a bit more scientific and taken some 'before' videos and maybe a dB reading but of course only thought of it after the exhaust was already off the car. Here's a brief summary of my experience with the Malian Exhaust RHD headers: The flanges at the engine head end are perfectly straight, fitment is good and they bolt up nice and straight. The flanges on the exhaust side are horrible, it's like they never fitted them onto an actual car before rushing them into production - the angles are wrong, the lengths aren't even and the whole slotted bolt hole design is baffling - even if they did line up and weren't hitting each other when bolted up to the head, I have no idea what guarantees that the tubes remain in proper alignment. They had a previous version of these with stock-style flanges that apparently worked fine, why they moved away from it is beyond me. They've even kept photos of the original ones bolted up on an actual car on their website, yet sell a 'revised' kit that doesn't work. Again to reiterate - these will not bolt up to the stock exhaust without extensive modification. The position of the O2 sensor bungs is way off. Even cut down the Bank 2 O2 sensor is hitting the chassis, even with the heat shields bashed in. Could have clocked them differently since there's heaps of room to facilitate it but guess they never bothered test fitting. They could have omitted the secondary O2 bungs entirely since they're so tight against the chassis they're unusable anyway. I don't believe the stock steering linkage would have cleared even with brand new engine mounts so be prepared to fork out for a slim one. The supplied gaskets are garbage and went straight in the bin. As far as RHD alternatives go, there doesn't appear to be much choice out there. There's Gravity Performance, who don't ship to NZ, and there's Supersprint that are eye-wateringly expensive. There's also Coby ones that look to be mild steel and would still need some welding to mate up to the rest of the M54 exhaust. All in all, with the purchase price, paying for having these re-welded, the slim steering linkage and new gaskets, this exercise cost me around $1.2k, which is still pretty reasonable in my eyes, with @Eagle also taking a bit of a loss on the initial purchase. Despite not quite getting the sound gains I was hoping for, I feel it was still a worthwhile thing to do and a step in the right direction and I'd still do it again if I had to. Just would have been good to know what to expect before jumping into it so hopefully this might help someone else out there.

The next issue I ran into was the steering linkage. Having initially hooked up my stock one with the CMP coupler, there looked to be plenty of clearance... until I turned the wheel and the bolt holding the coupling to the main shaft started hitting on the headers. Video They claim that the clearance is there but might become a problem if your engine mounts are worn. Mine are barely 12k km's old and the bolt is not even close to clearing so I doubt it'd be any better with brand new engine mounts. Luckily, I anticipated this being a potential issue or that the clearance would be tight at the very least so I pre-emptively ordered a slim linkage from @modz. Great bit of kit, arrived quickly and well packaged with handy instructions, would definitely recommend. Glad I had it on hand by the time the headers came back from the shop so it didn't hold me up. Compared to the stock linkage the ends are clocked slightly differently so all I had to do was reposition the plastic alignment sleeve at the steering rack end. It does end up being slightly shorter than stock so the steering column does extend out of the firewall a bit further. Mine seems to have a lot of play in the column so might look to replace some bushes or the whole column at some stage. Heaps of clearance now so I'm happy as Larry.

Today I cleaned up the top front RACP points and sprayed with the e-coat matched enamel I have. First up I masked the area around the mount (photo taken prior to clean up). Then I used a ziploc bag as a miniature spray booth by taping it to both the RACP and the spray can. I also made sure to cover/block every other hole/exit point in the RACP so I didn't get any over spray wafting out anywhere. This approach worked really well, the whole thing only took about 15 minutes to do. And the end result (paint is still wet here): I have some clean up to do on a few rust spots on the seat bench, but will do this once I have the A08 in hand and can touch it up properly. At this point though the front mounts are ready for the installation of the brace (drilling and tapping will be done at the time of installation of the brace as I need to take the subframe off to tap the threads.