jimbo01

The finished result! It has certainly made the car look a lot better. Next projects are to; - get the front Rims re-machined. - get the drivers seat leather re-conditioned - finish painting the brake calipers (3 to go). - fit my German plates

Update on the 9500i Took it skiing yesterday from Upper Hutt to Wellington. All seemed to work OK EXCEPT the "Mark" button, used to mark where a speed camera is, or other 'hazard' doesn't actually work. Tried to mark 3 camera locations yeasterday. When you press "Mark", the display should read "Mark?" and you press "Mark" again to confirm. I'm les than impressed!

I painted the front brake calipers on my E38 today - 1 down and 3 to go. Step 1 - purchase the brake caliper kit - these come in blue, red or yellow. Step 2 remove wheel and clean brake caliper. The stuff in kit works. CRC brake parts cleaner is absolute crap - might as well piss on the parts. I used alloy wheel cleaner on the brake and loosened the brake dust with a tooth brush, then wahed off, then used the cleaner in the kit, again with the tooth brush, and then washed. I dried it all off with the wifes hair dryer. Note - the various cleaners may discolour you brake disk - a couple of stops and this will dissapear. Step 3 - paint calipers - this is 3 coats. Abiout 15 minutes between coats. I used wifes hair dryer again as it was only 13 degrees today. Thi inital coat looks a little dodgy but by the 3rd coat it looks fine. I only pianted the viabale area - it is after all an appearance mod. Step 4 - refit your wheel - then do the other 3 (another day).

Mine is YK8740, and as it's on a 740 it seems like it's a personalised plate but its just a conincidence. However I've got them done so it's YK8 740, this may drive people nuts trying to figure our what YK8 means. I know I try and figure out personaised plates when I see them

I't nice in winter too, just dropped my duaghter off to her school disco (500 meters away), put the top down and took the 12km way back home. Very nice. The heated seats, heater etc keep you really warm even if it's only 5 degrees outside. I imagine it will be very nice in summer though!

Thanks. They are the ones my wife wants - they should look good. Only $899 new on trademe currently - they seem very cheap!

Well rather than spend $799 on some kiwi Euro plates, I followed the suggestion to get some plates made in Germany for the current rego. All up US $88 which is way better than getting the current plates done as a Euro here in NZ!

Attahced are the photos of the wheels I'm looking at - both replica wheels. The are 18x8.5 pcd5x112 with an offset of 35. The correct front offset for the Merc is 37, and rear, 30 - the guy selling the wheels says it will be fine but I'm unsure. Tyres will be 225/40/18 all round (Is 225 on 8.5" too small?) or 225/40/18 front and 245/35/18 rear. Tonys tyre service are recommending Dunlop SP Sport Maxx or Goodyear Eagle F1 GS-D3 - it will be about 1000 for the 4 tyres

I almost bought a personaised plate for my 740, but given the price, I opted for something a little more useful. It's the latest radar detector from Escort. I like it as it has GPS - so provides a real time speed read-out, and when you get zapped it freezes to show you the speed you were detected at - useful for those times you are shure you were not the car doing the speed they claim. The other feature is that you can clcik a button to enter areas of interest - like where the speed limit drops from 70 to 50, has a speed camera, then rises to 70kph again (like on the way to Wellington Airport - cute!) This time I will never leave it in the car. I left my old V1 in the wondow while giving blood, about 2pm in the afternoon, in full view of the blood service reception. A be-hoodied arswipe walked up to my car, took off his hoody, wrapped arround his arm, smashed my window, removed the V1, shook the glass off his hoody and walked off. All to the amazement of the lady who was locking her car in the space beside mine. She called the cops but by the time they arrive he had ambled off. When you are hooked up to the blood machine you dopn't want a couple of cops walking in and askig if anyone owns a.... DAMN.

Good point on tyres - the price of decent tyres for my 20" rims on the 740 woould be 18" rims and tyres for most cars!

Our other "toy" is my wifes red SLK230. This is so different from the BMW 740 but is heaps of fun to drive. As we have 2 young kids we don't often get to enjoy this together, and it is the middle of winter. I'm a big guy - 182cm and I can easily fit in this - unlike the Honda S2000 which I was looking at. With the seat in lowest postion I even have head room. My mate was trying to get me to buy his 2000 Prelude VTIR - but it had less room, less torque, and in the end of the day a sunroof does not match a folding metal roof. Since the transformers movie has come out the folding "transformer" metal roof is great entertainment value for the kids. When the compressor starts doing it's job it realy can get up and boggy. It's not quiet as fast as the 740 but is is way lighter so it is very responive. It has 270kg/m torque above 2500rpm across a wide rev band which makes passing very easy. To drop it down a gear from 5th to 4th you just push the gear lever to the left (like putting a steptronic into sports mode). You can then pull back 1 to drop into 3rd, or back 2 to drop it into 2nd. It's not a steptronic but works well. Arround town we just leave it in 3rd - which has the compressor producing plenty of torque at 50kmph - instant response when you hit the go pedal. The only problems we have had was the drivers window in ours wasn't closing properly when i bought it, and there was a nasty rattle in the back parcel tray. We had it serviced at Wellington Star and the fixed the window and rattle without breaking the bank. The car is now "like new" apart from the few areas where the soft grey surface on the plastic comes away. The stereo puts the stereo in the 740 to shame (ours only has the 8 door speakers). It has 6 speakers, including 2 small oval sub woofers behind the seats. It is a factory Bose system. Even with the roof down, and cruising at 109kph it sounds good - although the volumn has to be wound up a bit. The only mod we are thinking of is 18 inch wheels, although as it has near new 16/235/50 Michalen sports pilots I will wear them out 1st. Apparently the belts needs replacing soon, and it could be an oportunitiy to get a bigger main pully to overdrive the compressor - apparently this unleashes another 40hp or so - although I'm not sure that would make the car any more fun.

When you say "we have supplied" - who is "we". I'm interested in getting some new rear exhuasts for my 740, and doing it so the tail pipes are visable.

I'm looking for an 38 rear parcel shelf , cover etc with the optional rear speakers. My NZ new doesn't have the rear speakers. Thanks

Remember that if you go for different sizes front to back, that this makes rotating your tyres fron the back impossible. If you have wads of cash - cool. If not you may want to think about keeping the fronts and back the same so they can be rotated to give you better tyre life. I found out this is why my 740 has 245/35/20's all round, rather than a more appropiate staggered fitment. I checked out tyre prices yesterday and was "staggered" at the cost of replacing the cheap as dirt tyres "Nexten 2000" with something better - the guy spent so much on the rims he had to ge the cheapest he could for the tyres, and kept them the same size so they could be rotated. Crasy thing is if he had gone to a reputable tyre place, not some magturbocheaptyres warehouse, for the $4000 he spend he could have have staggered rims and top Yokohama tyres.

The prices from plates.co.nz are: 3 letters + 3 numbers, or 3 numbers + 3 letters = $498 - they are "Select" plates Your combo of letters etc = $699 - they are "premium plates" - and you pay an extra $100 for a Euro style plate, or if the palte has red letters. The fee for selling on Plates.co.nz is $153 PLUS 10% commission with a minimum of $135 - that $288 costs ontop of the base plate cost. Most sell for under $1000. They have allthe stats on what plated are selling at. $1000 for a select plate seems expensive.

I sold the bike the week before I bought the BMW - it was in PRISTINE condition. It was very hard top let it go, but I just wasn't using it that much anymore, and we bought the Merc on the understnading that it was a toy we could both use, where-as the bike could only be used by me. My 740 helsp ease my pain Here's our other ride - my 1996 4WD Honda Odyssey. We had it since 2000, and were the 1st NZ owners. It's actually better handling than the 2006 Mitsubishi Outlander. It has a Sony NZ new head unit, an Aux drawer for IPOD, a 2" big bore, K&N, and a stainless exhaust. The wheels are Koya Inox4, running 235/45/17 Federals, the brake pads are racing grade, so it can stop very nicely. The engine is the non VTEC 2.2 with a humble 101kw If I keep it I may do an engine transplant to an F22B DOHC Prelude Engine, 118Kw.

quote name='EFURSTY' date='Aug 4 2007, 08:00 PM' post='131958'] I vote YES as we are paying the same dollar [if not more for a slower speed internet then other similar countries to New Zealand. But hey, our chocolate tastes better... Just because some Australians living within 1km of the DSL equipment can get 20Mbps line Sync speed doesn't mean they all enjoy this sort of speed. Check out the graph from TCPIQ.com - they have a freeware line speed test app. They record the average results for all countries. In NZ it's best to use Xtra as it uses a local server - they don't have a local test server here - however this is good to see what sort of speed you get going out of the country and into the wider WWW. By the way our averages are dragged down by the long copper loops that were put in to give people good voice service in some of our more remote area - people in most of our cities enjoy broadband speeds a lot better that whats on this graph.

Free WiFi is available here too for those who have Xtra Broadband - check out the WiFi hotspots. It's also free in a lot of NZ suburbs as most people don't enable the encryption. There is a saying "There is no such thing as a free lunch". Some one somewhere is paying for the equipment, maintaining it, and someone else is paying for it. If it stays free, and no one pays, it will eventually break down, and become obsolete. Private comapnies may loss lead on a product to gain market share, they may do it to distroy the income of another company, hoping the other comapny will fail, allowing them to dominate. It's like Skyp - free voice calling (yay) - but for how long if it distroys the business model / income that funds the investment in the seriously expensive equipment and under sea fibre optic cables, land based cables etc. In the end if the traditional Telco companies go bust who will replace them? Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, possibly - but think about it - if you have the world to worry about, and huge emerging markets in Aisa etc, would you have a lot of incentive to invest in a small country producing food, wool, and logs? Anyway there is no way I'm ever going to persuade people that think the current broadband is a rip off that they have the service that the country can afford. Unless someone, perhaps the government (funded by higher taxes perhaps, or less health care), Bill gates (get him to retire here), someone, decides to inject a whole heap of cash (with little prospect of making the same return as the investement would return elsewhere), then NZ will never lead in broadband. Just like we will never lead in wages, or GDP.

Hi international I think you will find the ISP's pretty mcuh don't promise much at all when it comes to broadband speeds -theres lots of up to, which is like saying my BMW740 can do upto 250kph, in theory possible, but god help us if everyone tried to do it at the same time. Someting thats easy to do is check your line sync speed from your DSL modem to the exchange DSLAM (the other modem that connect to the IP Network (you need to log into your DLS modem stup). In my case it's about 7,000kbps - which is pretty much the top spped DLS will support (DSL2 will go faster). However the line test to Xtra shows my overall connection speed is about 3,000kbps. A line speed lest to an overseas line test service gives a slower result again. What people forget is that the internet is much like a motorway, and so how fast you can get to the motorway doesn't have much impact on your driving time if it's peak traffic time - it will be slow. The other factor that affects speed is the sites you are interacting with - many of them have a limited speed, andf the more peole downloading from them , the slower each connection will be. When many of the site we visit are off shaore, and go through international internet gateways, this can further impact. Also things like YouTube, Bit torrent peer to peer trafic, etc have massively increased the amount of traffic on the net. No one predicted these - and so they use up capacity that otherwise would have been way more than enough.

See my post, I voted no and said why. I bough a new modem and my Xtra line test speed jumped from about 600kbps to 3,200kbps. People can request and pay to have an installer add a proper filter at their home (rather than the filters which are cheap but not as effective) - that can improve speed. The DSL2 technology is being rolled out now which will improve speeds, if you have a DSL2 compatible modem The caps on most plans were lifted with no increase in costs recently. Why have some speeds decreased since speed restrictions were removed? Broadband equipment running at lower speeds runs at lower power. What this means is that all the broadband equipment now runs at full power, all the time. This means there is more electical energy being pumped into the copper wires, which are great conductors, which run beside other copper wires in big cables under the ground. The longer the cables, the more energy, the more electromagnetic interference. So if you have a short cable to the Broad band equipment, great, your connection to the exchange may go faster, however someone else on the same cable further away is going to probably get slower speed now because his modem and the one a the other end are having to deal with all the interference. Previously the power of those on longer lines could be set to full, thus giving them a stonger signal, and as those closer were at lower power, there was less interference. Think of being in a large room with people talking, you can hear thos eclose to you, and the ones far away can yell out, and you can hear them too. If those near you start yelling you will struggle to hear those far away.

(1) Our broadband would seem less expensve if we were paid more (thats right - we languish in the bottem end of the OECD for wages). (2) Our broadband would be cheaper if we had more people / packed more densely into samller area, or a more compact country (not going to happen anytime soon) (3) Our broadband would be cheaper if there was more investment by private industry (other than those based here already), except points 1 & 2 make it a poor investment from an overseas investor point of view. A good investment from ours, but then we don't want to pay that much so it's a bit of a catch 22. They will make more money investing in countries: where the citizens are packed like sardines in appartment tower after appartment tower, or concentated mainly in a few urban centers (thats not NZ folks, although give urban drift a few more decades and it may be). where the citizean are paid a lot better than they are here. So as a % of their countries GDP boadband cost less - however the cost ogf broaband equipment is not priced as a %. The companies selling the equipment want to make a profit (how strange), and won't discount just because NZ has a low GPD. If cheaper, faster broadband is really really important South Korea could be the go - some appartment building have a 5 star broadband rating - you can get 1Gig a second. It's also cheap. Not sure what they use it for - the highest peak bit rate of any service liekly to be avialble is 1080 high definition streaming TV, and thats only 50Meg a second. Personally I'd rather live here - but thats just me! So when we buy a used BMW, because thats what we can afford, do we thing we were ripped off becasue it isn't a 2007 M3? We may wish the M3 was cheaper, we may really really want an M3, other people may be able to afford an M3 - fine points - but it doesn't mean you have been ripped off on your used BMW.

It goes in for it's new paint on Monday morning, and I get it back Wednesday afternoon.

What do people do? Cut the bumper? My 1999 E38 has it's exhausts hidden so you can't see them - I want to fix that. Has anyone done this yet? I'm up for replacing the rear exhausts with new ones, I'm after the quad pipe look, or a big oval either side. Something possibly nice and shinny to complement the alloys and highligh the black paint. How about a pair of these either side?

I'll open it up this weekend and have a look. Thanks. Update Saturday: If I want to add the subs (I'm thinking 8") into the rear parcel tray what would be involved. These doesn't seem to be any speaker cuts outs so did they have a completely different parcel tray for the ones without the rear shelf woofers? What size speakers did BMW fit up there?

Well I've found out my 20" alloys are DTM Penta Mesh (or copies of it). Mag & Turbo estimated about $700 to replace each wheel so I'll get some prices to get them restored - the former owners parking seemed to involve hitting the curb (a lot). The wheel in the photo is the least damaged (I cropped the curb damage out). Nice wheels! If the waether is warmish this weekend I'll paint the brakes red Bremno style - the plastic type paint in the kits from repco come up very nicely - they will show up nicely through these wheels.