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my lawnmower will be 10 years old this year so I decided to give it a birthday, usual annual oil, spark plug and air filter change, plus removed the handle and had it sandblasted and zinc sprayed, then powdercoated, also replaced all the bolts with stainless ones. Then decided to fit a rev counter / hour meter, made an aluminium bracket and fitted it, wire just wraps around the spark plug lead and it has a battery in it, set the service interval at 50 hours and tested it...because why not...

New tyres on and much better with basically no tramlining. Unfortunately the tyre shop scratched the rear wheels fitting the tyres so that’s getting sorted some time next week. They also torqued every wheel up gorilla FT. F’ing muppets 🤦‍♂️ Over sharp bumps the front wheels would squeak which was annoying, but not anymore after cleaning up the brake pad “ears” and their contact points on the calliper, and calliper retaining bracket. Then I applied some anti squeal paste to those areas. Another niggly but annoying thing ticked off the list.

Hey team i got half way through this retrofit before i thought of posting so bear with me lol. the story: Ive done this retrofit before with my old e92 and when i did i fitted the amp before the speakers and the amp alone made a huge difference to audio quality and the 535d was in dire need of better audio. Unlike the hifi option in the e92 the e61 hifi system doesnt have a amp so the only difference between standard and "hifi" is the addition of subs and a small sub only amp. L7 amp VS hifi sub amp: L7 option ($677) consist of a DSP amp, front 2x door speakers , center dash, rear 2x door speakers, 2x boot roof speakers and finally 2x subs under seats Id already swapped 4x L7 speakers i had in front doors and rear roof. Ive yet to pull the rest of the subs, speakers and tweeters from the donor car. I used the non L7 speaker for the center so ill swap all the rest at a later date what i did: front left and right: Because having amp in the e92 meant that all the speaker wires ran back to the boot this was not the case with the e61 but lucky for me the sub amp meant there was a power supply and the sub wiring already run. On top of that 2 line level input pairs looped off the quadlock connector for the iDrive supplied audio to the amp. This provided the front left and right channels. I cut the speaker outputs from the quadlock and joined the front speakers to the 2 pairs that ran to the old sub amp. Then joined to the L7 amp. Center: After that i still needed to add the center dash channel so i needed another pair to the front. The amp is mounted on the rear left of the boot and the rear left speaker ran right past the amp so i cut the pair and the speaker end joined to amp and the other end ran to idrive this was to be the center channel. Boot roof speakers: as mentioned above the left speaker is joined to amp. For the right speaker i ran speaker wire from the left side and under boot floor following factory wiring threading through existing bundles to the right side where it was joined to the speaker wire just below the C pillar you'd never know it wasn't factory just the way i like it. Leaving the other end disconnected. Yellow wire wasnt me lol i cut it and ran it in loom after the install 😅. Rear door speakers: unfortunately the hifi option doesn't include rear door speakers and thus no wiring for any. I have left these 2 channels disconnected for now as its a big job to replace door wiring and connections via door plug. I may do this at a later date as ill get the parts to do so but it the mean time is more than acceptable. Coding: removing option 676 and adding 677 to VO i also removed tv option as i used the MOST connection for the amp. While i was there i updated the usb screen to the nicer newer UI with album art. So i already like the system but what a difference it made no more does the sound distort at high volume even with the missing rear doors and not all the L7 speakers etc. And with the equalizer im able to fine tune the sound to almost perfection. Hopefully this helps someone or at least makes for an interesting read.

He did start with building the e46 / e39 connectors so worth an email. It might be possible that bmw carried the amp connector into the next models. Below is the harness / adapter btw , if looking at Morel check out parts-express. They sell the individual drivers with good discounts. Some models have great off axis response which is important on the drivers side speakers. https://www.parts-express.com/brand/morel/121

A Mainland car recently squirrelled out of Christchurch. Number plate refers to the new owners age. Nice to see it out and about, will be a cherished car.

That's a smart looking car Edward, nice one and welcome! Regular Auckland casual meet the first Sunday of most months, no doubt Feb 2021, see you there. 😎

Thanks, was a long project with a few changes along the way (as I learned what did and didn't work). I don't have any photo's of the internal matrix (anymore) and have never seen inside the B&W speakers. I did pinch their idea though as it makes perfect sense and suspect the insides would be similar. I'll take some pics of the amps later on. They're not painted yet - just white primer. I don't think I've got any pics of the insides though - maybe the input board only. I'm thinking about changing the amps to Hypex so they can be mounted into the base of the speakers. There's room left in the base for amps to go, I just never did it. With the Hypex amps and Power Supplies it would tidy up the wiring a fair bit. Most stereo setups (2 speakers) only have one pair of speaker cables and interconnects (some maybe 2 pairs of speaker cables). For active setups you need one pair of speaker cables and interconnects per speaker - 5 pairs or each in my case. I like to show it off too so anyone who wants a listen is welcome if they're ever in Napier. The next generation will have the amps, and DSP in the speaker with wireless connections. All I have to do is figure out how to sync the two speakers. It shouldn't be too difficult... The only unknown is how sensitive the ear is to left/right timing errors - I suspect as long as the difference is under 1us you won't notice. It should be fairly easy to get the two speakers sync'd to under 100ns. Here's some amps pic's: Front: Still only undercoated... The indicators show power, protection, overtemp and clipping. These pre-date the DSP modelling the speakers and amps so clipping cannot occur. Protect can still occur if there's DC present in the output. Overtemp is in case of fan failure. There's 2 internal low speed high-pressure fans that suck air in over the 5 x 1kVA toroidal transformers , 200,000uF caps per channel and then blows up the heatshink. The fans are variable speed based on heatsink temp and you never hear them unless I've been blasting Infected Mushroom for 20 minutes+ and then only slightly between tracks. Back: Balanced XLR's and 4 Pole Speakon connectors. Balanced Input Board:

A bit on cosmetics today, more mirror covers, door handles, and right sill. More sanding and filling on spare bumpers as well. Took the car to Auckland yesterday to have @BreakMyWindow run his DIS diagnostics over the engine and vanos. All is well. There is a little "miss" at cruising speed and Martin reckons it's the torque convertor dropping slightly out of lockup and picking up again. That with the 5-4 jolty downshift is a warranty issue so in time I'll be having a chat to my transmission shop, but getting more km under it first.

Sorted the broken drivers seat plastic surround today. Broken either by previous owner or upholstery guys, needless to say the latter didn’t help matters as it seriously deteriorated after they had their hands in it. I ordered a set from Schmeidmann they only come as a pair but the price was reasonable even from Germany. install took about 40 mins including removing the old one and transferring all the switches etc. am now looks super fresh and has all clips and bolts in their rightful place. I noted the thigh support switch was missing a component and was incorrectly assembled (the switch cover itself can only go one way). But the small gold coloured metal pieces can fall out easily if not assembled properly. so I robbed a part from the passenger seat. if anyone has a thigh support switch lying around let me know.

Here's a few photo's of bits of the system: Main Speaker: The speaker is 1.8m tall and has no parallel sides + the sides are curved and taper in thickness - no standing waves or resonances are present due to every panel being irregular in shape and thickness. There's an internal matrix to add extra stiffness and create tunnels to absorb all rear speaker radiation by packing the tunnels with progressively dense absorption material. Sub: Above the sub is a 55" TV to give some idea of size - it weighs 330kg. The sub also has an internal matrix to stiffen the sides, top and bottom. The matrix is on 100mm x 100mm centers. It's a stereo sub with a separation down the middle with each half having 2 x 18" driver. Because it's 4th order bandpass you only see the port for each channel. DSP Processor: The DSP is an Analog Devices ADSP21469. There's an Intel NUC PC included as a media player using J-River. The DAC's are PCM1794A with AD797 V/I converters and LT1028 LPF in a balanced non-earth filter arrangement. The volume controls are PGA4311, again balanced with no earth. The 10 x DAC outputs are balanced 600 Ohm. Interconnects are Mogami Starquad into a 600 Ohms balanced input on the amp per channel. The V/I and filter Opamps, R's and C's are under the black heatsink as they run quite high bias and need forced cooling. There's some squishy thermal pad between the heatsink and components. The sound card is a M2Tech HiFace modified with analogue supplies to reduce jitter and the I²S signals are directly tapped off USB chip to the DSP so there's no conversion to SPDIF and back. Power Supply: The amps are: Tweeter: 350W Mosfet 8 Ohms Mid: 350W Mosfet 8 Ohms Lower Mid: 700W Mosfet 4 Ohms Bass: 1250W Mosfet 4 Ohms Sub: 2500W Mosfet 2 Ohms The reason the amps are so big isn't to make the system loud - it's to have 2x the voltage required to apply speaker correction to properly control cone movement and overcome the voice-coil inductance.

Interior update number 3: 1m style gauge cluster plus alcantara covered gauge pod. I wanted the gauge pod to have the orange stitching, and asked for it, but just got sent this plain one. No matter, I ordered another one from a different supplier and this one did come with the proper orange stitching but they sent me a LHD version, despite assuring me they’d send me a RHD version. So the plain one stays for now. Oh well, it actually looks pretty good I reckon. More alcantara goodness coming soon...

Just seen this video on another thread .😬 Cringe worthy