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Took the E30 for a roadtrip up to Russell this long weekend for a lovely roadtrip. Did some spirited driving and bottomed out a couple of times (thank God I put on that sump guard). Overall I covered 567kms of driving and it was absolutely amazing!

Spent a little time on this one over the weekend, removed the wrap and tidied it up a little. A fair few carbon fiber replacement parts are on the way, this should look a bit different again by xmas.

Haven't seen this one before..

Caravans and sh*t old motor homes. Why has this become popular again? I guess there is nothing like parking up a few meters from your neighbour and sharing stories of who was the bigger a**hole by holding up the most traffic the longest.

235,xxx km New Phillips D2S xenon bulbs. I replaced both so they hopefully colour match better. Also replaced the rear badge with an OEM I got with the last parts order. Out with the old. The fishing line trick really works wonders New one: Still checking the oil level since doing the 02 pilot mod and it might have burned a smidge it’s not low enough to warrant a top up so very happy.

Managed to stumble my way into another problem project. With an addition to the family imminent, I started looking at options to upgrade the wife's mode of transportation. Her trusty Subaru Outback is getting rather tired and is not a car I particularly enjoy working on so was keen to lure her over into the wonderful world of German engineering. With her enthusiasm for eventually getting back into riding and owning horses, the criteria was a 4wd with enough ground clearance to at least not get stuck in a paddock, and something capable of towing a horse float. Easy enough. I wanted to keep it in the familiar era of the early 2000's so quickly narrowed the search down to E83 X3's & E53 X5's. The V8 was never an option and despite my love for the M54, I felt that in a big lump of an SUV (SAV?) it might be a bit underpowered and too thirsty, so the legendary M57 became the preference. Not an awful lot of them around as it turns out, and all close to or above 300k on the clock. One 306k example had popped up, went to check it out and although I was impressed with the drive and feel, I decided against it due to the shoddy aesthetics - passenger door handle was missing, a bunch of interior trims were quite worn, the steering wheel was sticky and disgusting and some underbody plastics being held in place with self tappers and wood screws. The condition was reflected in the price but since the car is meant to be for the better half, I'd have wanted it to be a bit nicer. I then went back to a FB Marketplace listing I had saved a while earlier. The ad had been up for a good number of months, the asking price was essentially double that of the car I test drove but was well presented and looked heaps tidier. Before I got around to texting the owner though, the exact same car popped up on a TM $1 reserve auction with a "FUEL INJECT. SYSTEM" error on the dash and a crank no start condition. Despite numerous messages and requests for a viewing, the seller never replied so I was left bidding blind. Not ideal but it is what it is. I figured I'd go low enough that I could recoup the investment through parting it out if need be, and after brief bidding war I emerged victorious at a price I was happy enough to gamble. The next day, I recruited a mate to help out with towing duties, hooked up our rally car trailer that was barely big enough for the job, huffed and puffed pushing the 2 tonne beast onto it and carted the new family member home. And there she is - 2004 E53 X5 3.0d with 288,600 km's on the clock. Overall looks really tidy, the body is straight with a few paint imperfections here and there but still presents really well. I do love the facelift design, doesn't look at all dated even at 20 years old, in my eyes anyway. Interior is in great condition too with the only blemish that stands out is the passenger door arm rest leather coming apart. Even comes with an Android headunit, which is pretty handy. The biggest drawback, for the wife in any case, is the lack of heated seats, although that's something I can try and rectify at a later date. All of that counts for nothing though unless I can get her up and running again. The car had sat since July, the battery had gone completely flat to the point even the gear indicator light wouldn't come on. Took 2 days of charging to get the battery back to full charge but I suspect it might be too far gone anyway and a replacement will be the first item on the shopping list. Ran out of weekend before I could start properly digging into it but did get the battery charged up enough to pull some codes. Definitely something to do with fuel delivery. Whether the code for fuel pressure regulating points to the regulator being faulty I'm not entirely sure. I've learned that these cars have a total of 3 fuel pumps - a low pressure in-tank pump; an inline pump and a high pressure pump - and it could be either one of the 3. Will need to do more research on whether any of the codes might help pinpoint the culprit more accurately. The glow plugs should be easy enough to replace and definitely on the list of preventative maintenance I'm aiming to take care of. Whether the glow control unit is also a common failure point I'll need to also look into. Another suggestion I found was that the fuel sender unit may have gone bad, the gauge would still show there being fuel in the tank but it wouldn't be making its way over to the pump side from the opposite side of the "saddle", causing a fuelling issue. The fuel needle did indicate barely a fifth of a tank so could be plausible. I'll try pour some 20L of diesel in it and see what happens. Would be pretty funny if that's the cause of the issue but I don't dare hope to be so lucky. On the running gear side, a few codes could be a cause for concern, namely the transfer case code for oil abrasion and gearbox shutdown code due to overtemperature. Will see how she feels once she's running and driving but servicing those two will definitely be on the list. Will take some time on the weekend to dig into it proper, see how far I get with the diagnosis and start putting together a shopping list of parts. Pretty excited for my first diesel experience. Time will tell how much of a bargain it turns out to be. Long live the Family Tractor.

The 130i failed its warrant due to a blown shock and the pads were contaminated from the oil from the shock. I decided to go all in and give it a glow up. BTW 3d design suspension is made by Ohlins. For those that remember my old 330ci, it had 3d design suspension, and was pretty sharp handling wise.

On the Raptor, what is the deal there ... they seem to have some type of 'exhaust' on them to highlight the fact they are auto and just sound like complete ass ? Twin pipes out the back looks like it can take some extensions to make it into a wheel barrow ? Then there is the alternate (unsure which pile of sh*t it is) which has a massive plastic cheese grater on the bonnet for ... well I'm not sure actually why, but it looks terrible when new I'd hate to see how it ages !!

Finally had a chance to road test the rocker cover gasket replacement I completed a couple of weeks back. No more oil dripping onto exhaust manifold so I’d call that a win! Rocker covers also look a lot better in wrinkle black too, not 100% perfect (due in large part to my skills with a paint can) but a lot better than they were. As mentioned before, I have a set of new non-vanos m62 rocker cover gaskets free to a good home.

This weekend I spent a bit of time finishing up the first cut of my CSL clone tune. Essentially I'm making my own clone along the lines of the approach Bryson has taken with his Mullet Tune, but doing it myself for the entertainment/learning value. All credit to Bryson for pioneering this approach, I'm basically just building my own version of what he's already done. If you haven't read up already I highly recommend following along in his journal. When I do the swap, I'm going to do it in two stages. Stage 1: Flash the car with the base CSL tune. This will give me a baseline datum point and is a known configuration to start with and ensure that the install has been successful. Stage 2: Flash the car with V1 of my customised tune. This is a starting-point tune which blends Ignition, Injection and VANOS tables from my current Euro M3 tune with the CSL tune. The hope is that this will be an improvement on the base CSL tune and a starting point for iterative fine tuning. (I'm getting in to a bit of detail now, so those who know more about this than me will be able to point out my mistakes :-)) Scope For a vehicle with MSS54HP DME (not modified for flap) Vehicle is running a Euro tune Vehicle has a CSL airbox conversion using a MAP sensor (OE 1.0 Bar so no conversion factor required) Vehicle is MSS54HP so does not require IAT conversion factor For Stage 1 I'm starting with Terra's 0401 PD31 Full binary. This binary is a modified version of the 0401 full binary with support for the non-CSL boot loader, error codes, etc. I'll be loading this full binary at the time that I do the install. I'll then be flashing the CSL tune (partial binary) as well. There are a number of changes to be made to the original 0401 PD31 partial. Change 0xE002 from 00 to 01 to make the partial work with Terra’s modified full binary (support for the non-CSL boot loader) Enable Alternator light over canbus Set non-CSL cam offsets Set CSL intake flap control to always be open Disable DTC 124 (CSL flap) I used TunerPro to make the above changes to the partial, and now have this saved ready to go when I do the airbox install. For Stage 2 I then took the partial I'd just generated and then added the modified ignition, injection and VANOS maps that I'd prepared. The preparation of these maps were of course the bulk of the work. The merging of the maps is an interesting maths challenge. For this first version I took the following approach: 1: Take the standard M3 and CSL tables and interpolate both tables to allow for direct comparison. 2: Compare the difference between the tables (allowing for any conversion adjustments between the two) 3: I then manually applied a mask to blend the 2 tables together into the output table. 4: We then finish up with a nice optimisation problem. Finding the x-axis points that best describe the table as a whole and thus minimising the error. The M3 tune tables tend to have more x-axis points in the lower half of the RPM range and the CSL tune tends to have more in the upper half. This of course means that you can't just use all of the x-axis points from both maps. Ideally I would dust off my very rusty Matlab skills and write something to do it, however for now I simply added some calculations in the sheet to identify absolute change, rate of change, inflection points, etc. and then rank them by importance, this made it fairly straightforward to more manually identify the most important x-axis values to bring across. The VANOS maps in particular are quite fascinating. There is a very significant difference in the lower RPM range between the M3 Euro and CSL tunes (example of the difference in the exhaust maps below). It's easy to see why cars with standard cams struggle so much in the lower RPM ranges with the CSL map. Methodically working through these maps took me a reasonable amount of time (although to be honest a lot of that was diving into researching various topics to help make sure I understood correctly. The end result was updates to the following maps: KF_TI_N_RF_VL: Fuel Injection Full Throttle KF_TZ_VL: Ignition Full Throttle KF_TZ_GRUND: Ignition Ground KF_TZ_MIN: Ignition Minimum KF_TZ_LL: Ignition Idle KF_EVAN1_SOLL: Intake Target KF_EVAN1_SOLL_KATH: Intake Target Cold KF_EVAN1_SOLL_DMAX: Intake Target Max Deviation KF_AVAN1_SOLL: Exhaust Target KF_AVAN1_SOLL_KATH: Exhaust Target Cold KF_TZ_MIN and KF_TZ_LL are the ones that concern me most. For both I've erred on the side of taking the values from the CSL map, as for KF_TZ_MIN at least they appear to be more conservative. and for KF_TZ_LL it is different enough that I can't be sure there aren't changes in the 0401 program that interpret this map differently. I'll find out I guess when I get the tune running. It's worth noting that once I have the tune up and running I'll also be doing the VE map tuning process described here. Oh and the Haimus Racing snorkel arrived today. Well packaged and in a lovely soft bag. It seems to be a fairly nice piece. You can certainly see it's 3D printed when you look at it closely, and there is evidence of printing errors in places. The exterior has been post-processed to a fairly nice finish, and unless you look closely it looks good. It also feels nice and light for its size, but seems sturdy. All in all I'm ambivalent about it given the price (especially with shipping to NZ) (that said I haven't actually looked into how much it would cost to get one printed from CAD file), but it will look pretty nice in the engine bay I think once all is done.

Have you driven one? There’s no way it’s passing anything on the straight unless it’s a bicycle.

You forgot Wangers (Ranger Wankers). Pass everything in sight on the straights, then hold everybody up while struggling to negotiatiate corners and STILL endanger the oncoming traffic, spending half their time over the centre line.

A mate installs the council readers. They can't read the plates at all.

Just sold the F30 335i to a fellow up North - has been a brilliant vehicle and I hope he enjoys it

Weirdly, I recently tried NPD100 in my compact and it ran noticably better. Within 10 minutes of driving I could feel it. Revved nicer and pulled better, sounded cleaner. Couldn't believe how noticable the difference was. Definitely going to be my go to gas from now on. I can't wait to try it in the M3.

Just wanted to say thanks to Andy and Graham for such detailed posting over the years, it's been a pleasure to read through everything this car has been through over the years. I'm sure the dozens (maybe??) of us that read this appreciate it! I'm a long time reader, first time caller - just managed to pick up a new-to-me 2002 320d Touring m-sport so the info in the thread has been invaluable. Keep it up!

Another four months gone by, done a bit to the old girl so thought I better make another post to update the thread! May have posted in here already that I sourced a minty black headliner for it. Any decent E46 headliner is a hard find these days, let alone a non-sunroof, black, Touring one! After sitting on top of my Tech2 E30 in the garage for at least a year, and the original one deciding to come away completely, I had a spare afternoon and got it installed into the car. I have to say, doing a headliner job on a touring is a breeze compared to a sedan, as it flys in and out of the tailgate! I also decided to service the transmission, new filter oil and pan gasket as no idea when those were last done! At the last Wof I got an advisory that the left front shock had very slight misting and to keep an eye one it. I forgot all about it, but the last month or two I have noticed the car a bit bouncy in the front. So I have ordered some Bilstein B4s, and of course tophats and bumpstops as makes sense to do those while in there. I have a set of M Sport springs here, so I think I will put those in place of the original 320d ones and see how that looks and feels. If memory serves correctly, when Graham owned the car, the front control arms and CABs were changed already, so shouldnt have to do anything more for many more miles! Other than that, just keeps going and going, starts first time every time, happy days!

Yes control units do go faulty. Replace all 6 glow plugs and the control unit

My 2cents...2 things concern me about the listing. The owner somehow 'forgot' it has a sunroof? Sketchy. Also, 'shrek' cam? I guess he means Schrick, again, not what you'd call a detail oriented owner.

30% off Castrol Edge (up to 20L) at Repco.

I saw that on BookFace and whilst it’s a nice older BMW my first thoughts were where are all the Alpina bits? There is a photo of the car sporting the Alpina stripes earlier in its life, but no sign of any other bits being added.

$90k hahhahahahahahahahaha

Thanks all for the help. Ended up in lengthy conversation with Schmiedmann to confirm the 11-12-1-730-951 gasket has a 94.5mm bore size and the design is fine. Onwards!

Where are you and what car/problem(s) do you have?

Damn, that's the way to do it! Top down cruising through Northland. Beautiful ride you have there. We did a family trip around Northland for a couple weeks earlier in the year. Some rough roads up those ways. Glad you got through that unscathed (we had do swerve a horse that I didn't see until getting round the bend - classic northland).

Thanks mate! What were you driving? I got a lot of beeps on the way up! Haha it's going really good at the moment. I loved being able to drive with the top down the whole time. Thank you so much but. I will continue improving it and adding other things to it over time. A full repaint is on the cards in early December so I can't wait fot that!

I passed you between Opua and Kawakawa (opposite direction, not overtaking) and your car is looking and sounding great, an absolute credit to your time and effort that has gone into it! And yes, gota watch out on our Northland roads, there is what I can only describe as a motocross jump in the middle of SH15 at the moment!😳

Hi All, Been a while. Listing here on behalf of a family member prior to going on Trade Me. You'll be hard pressed to find a more genuine, well maintained E46 330i. Asking $9,300 ----‐‐------‐----------------------------------------------------- NZ New 2003 330i Motorsport Purchased from Team McMillan BMW Auckland in May 2013 85,800 km on the clock when purchased and now sitting circa 113,000 km Automatic. Always garaged. Serviced by Jeff Gray BMW Hastings and more recently GH Automative Hastings (BMW and Mini Specialist) with all receipts in hand Work done whilst in current ownership 17/6/2015 – Aircon re-gased 30/7/2019 – New Rocker cover gasket 1/11/2019 – Rear LHS tail light. 27/1/2020 - New battery 17/3/2020 – Support lift (for under car to support car jack) 5/8/2022 – Replaced Intake boot Last full service done at 110,757 km Tyres: Bridgestone Potenza RE003 (plenty of tread remaining) Rego: Expires 20/1/2025 WOF: Next due 16/1/2025 Two Keys. Only known issue is the stereo. Was making an extremely intermittent “popping” sound from the rear speakers. As I prefer keeping everything original I did not want to take the stereo out and replace with some other random head-unit so the wires were just unplugged from the rear speakers.

Plenty of them on my way up to the coromandel on Friday. Had a cRaptor trying to prove he was faster than an old 1 series auto. Had to back right off as he was crossing the center line on blind corners. Turned off to Pauwanui (of course he did).

Just sold the F30 335i to a fellow up North - has been a brilliant vehicle and I hope he enjoys it

Yes it's due an update, I'll make a post soon. Yep all certed and legal, surprisingly painless experience to be honest.

@Vass here’s a photo I took just before - unfortunately the camera captured the red quite saturated so not sure if it’s very helpful, but this is what they are currently like. Will try to remember to report back on this in another 6 months or so.

Haha - well currently they look like they've recently had plastic trim protectant applied 😂 so they look great. Yeah I definitely wouldn't suggest repeatedly doing this trick as you'll destroy the plastic. I chose to do it once to "restore" the plastic and am regularly treating with protectant to prolong it as long as possible. Worth noting that I left it untreated for about a month or so to give plenty of time for the plastic to harden up as much as it was going to before putting any protectant on it. Since then they've looked great, but it hasn't really been very long. I'm very happy I did it because it looks massively better than it did before, and in the absence of any other realistic solution the alternative to more permanently fix it remains buying new ones.

Yuuuuur love it, very jelly !!

I am inlove with this thing

@Neal you won’t get clicks and likes and subscribers for your YouTube channel with that kind of positivity. Got to sensationalise things to get the attention. Not sure what age the engine in question was but for ages the servicing and oil changing has been “condition based” and there’s a time factor as well. And that’s all before you get into what oil to use.

A large cloud of smoke. With a 2006 320i inside it.

Yeah man. It sounds amazing. The only things in the exhaust that aren't stainless are the colby hotdog resonators. My old mans stroker is ready to go. 1.5 mm oversized valves, shrick 284 cam. Heavy duty rockers, titanium valve springs, new rocker arms the works. Oh and the ITBs haha. I am itching to finish mine

Sounds freaking sweet mate! Eventually I'll stroke and cam mine, lots of other things first though...

Installed a new Stainless steel rear section the other day. The difference is night and day. I love how it sounds and looks. Also in the process of building my stroker engine. I have sent my cylinder head away for porting and polishing. Quite an agressive port and polish with oversize valves and titanium springs etc with upgraded rockers,oversize eccentrics and new arms. Plus a 292 cam. It should be a really nice flowing head. The bottom end will receive some loving too. Sending everything off for acid dipping them balancing. Will be running a Link, standalone engine management and my RHD ITB kit with open trumpets (with little filters on ofcourse)

80s Commodore interior. sh*t then. sh*t now.

3 series compound. Not a single sun roof, as god intended

In case you missed. Diesel BMW Driver Smashes Solo Coast-to-Coast Cannonball Driving Record (roadandtrack.com) A traffic-free L.A. allowed Stowell to reach the Portofino Inn in just 27 hours and 16 minutes. That time absolutely smashed the previous verified solo record of 27 hours 54 minutes set by Carl Dietz in a Cadillac ATS back in April 2020. Stowell also beats the pre-COVID overall record of 27 hours 25 minutes set by current record holders Toman, Tabbutt, and Chadwick. He managed to do this by averaging a speed of 105 mph, with a top speed of 151 mph. He also had the benefit of only needing to refuel every 800 miles or so, owing to averaging around 23 mpg during the attempt. .... Despite coming from a line of Audi S6 models, Stowell was convinced to purchase a 2015 BMW 535d by a buddy with an E90-generation diesel 3 Series of his own. The car isn’t exactly stock, with a stage 2 tune removing most of its factory emissions controls. An ECU tune brought output to around 400 hp and 560 lb-ft of torque, allowing for great passing power on the highway. A series of aftermarket fuel cells were installed before settling on the final unit, which was outfitted with some tank foam to limit fuel sloshing. This cut a few gallons out of the tank, but left Stowell with around 40 gallons of total capacity. An Insta360 radar detector was the main piece of anti-cop hardware, but Stowell didn’t run the several units we’ve grown accustomed to seeing in these cars. He told R&T that he plans to continue driving this BMW, and didn’t want to tear up the interior for this challenge. .....

Selling Feature Installer Codes for DIY User Feature Installer is a professional application for Coding through the Cloud system for BMW/Mini cars with a program design that is easy to use and a suite of functions for BMW NBT/EVO4/EVO5&6 head units to generate USB loaded BIN files or Generate Codes to enable functions such as CarPlay, Video In Motion,Region Change as well as unlocking limitations in the system of BMW and Mini Headunits and a lot more for advanced user.The tool is also designed to provide better support for DIY Activation.If you need feature codes please contact me. Selling cheap price for Bimmersport Members Feature Installer Support: -FSC Retrofit Packs(NBT,NBTEvo,EntryNav) -Maps Activation Code(NBT,NBTId4,Route) -Region Change(NBT,NBTEvo) -CarPlay Full Screen/Split Screen -Install BlackScreen / Region Unlock -Enable VO Coding Fix -Enable VIM – Video in Motion -Virginize EVO – Clear V850 -EVO and EntryNav2 Remove Component Protection -Carplay connect fix for X/Y versions -ID4 to ID6 FSC Pack -Open/Close SSH -Clear sweet and many more All you need is a windows laptop,enet cable and good internet connection.I will provide to you the download link for Feature Installer App.Other jobs requires Esys or Launcher to complete. You must know what you’re doing and what to do with the files.All further support will have to be paid if you will run in some problem that are not related. You will receive a different Feature Installer code for every option that you select.Feature Code is tied to your car’s VIN. I offer no warranty, liability, responsibility or offer compensation should anything go wrong.If you don't know how this things works or what it will do, STOP!!!So it is you to decide if you want to take a risk.

The detailing mission still slowly chugging along, I took on tackling the front bumper, which is by far the roughest panel on the car. It's suffered quite a bit of abuse throughout its life and probably deserves a full respray but that's not something I'm willing to entertain at this point so will settle for an improvement instead of perfection for now. The mounting rails that slide onto the hanger brackets were already broken when I got the car with the passenger side one being particularly bad. The bumper was sagging quite badly initially but I managed to align it well enough that it wasn't too obvious. Was about time to properly address the issue though so I used it as an opportunity to further hone my plastic welding skills. Bent the broken bits back in place and melted in some steel mesh for reinforcement. Won't be good as new but will hold much better than before anyway. The paint was badly stone-chipped all over, beginning to crack in a few places and had a few rough scratches here and there as well. I polished it up best I could, touched up the rock chips and the worst of the scratches on the underside. The mesh grille was looking quite faded and rock chipped as well so gave it a few coats of paint to bring it back to black. Only got a before photo of it though. The trim inserts got some Carpro Perl treatment to rejuvenate the front end even further. The result was never going to be perfect but from a few feet away now looks infinitely more presentable, which was the best I could have hoped for without it becoming a full blown repaint. Mint.

Took this on to Hampton Downs a few weeks back to support the Porsche Club track day. A foggy morning presented an excellent opportunity for some cool pics.

Just over 12 months later, dumped all its coolant again.... Not sure if I can be bothered trying to argue warranty (parts) with Skoda NZ/Giltrap again, or I just take it to a indy VW specialist (its due DSG service), or I just do it myself.