elmarco

What has been seen cannot be unseen. It cat sick green or weasel piss yellow? I can't work it out.

It isn't quite as simple as that - a resistor gives a linear voltage/current relationship where a bulb doesn't. Some systems can be fooled by a simple resistor, others can't - depends what they are and what they look for. You are correct in that nobody wants to faff around with them though - plug & play is the only way. Hella spent many many thousands of hours and dollars solving this and have a number of patents around it. Some of the elcheapo chinese knockoffs will have a resistor, but it won't work with all of the systems out there. While it is a pain for the average euro car owner, it gets infinitely more expensive (and painful) when the trailer has 12 wheels, weighs 30 tonnes and the brakes won't unlock because the tractor unit uses the lamp circuit to detect if a trailer is attached (and unlock the trailer brake circuit) and won't recognise LED's...

Yeah but doesn't the rule say that you have to turn into the same lane you are already in based on how far you are from the centre divider? I don't remember exactly... So if you are in the lane next to the oncoming traffic, thats where you are supposed to stay. In that scenario, car 1 would have the right of way wouldnt it?

Yee haa.

Excellent question. You should only use H1 bulbs in an H1 headlamp, and higher wattage is bad juju's due to the heat melting things as you mention. HID retrofit kits are illegal for good reason. A couple of the halogen bulb manufacturers offer modified colours to be whiter, and also +30%, +50% & +90% brightness. This is the same wattage bulb, but has a much shorter lifetime. Get some good standard white bulbs (Philips or Osram - sometimes rebranded as Hella or Narva) and make sure your lenses are clean (inside & out), and the reflectors are in good condition. Apart from that, fit a set of driving lights (wired to the high beam - you are only permitted one set of low beams by law). The reason the photometric output pattern is all screwed up is because the filament position is wrong and has a reflector behind it. They are designed for a very specific filament position - even putting the bulb in upside down will mess up the output pattern. Genuine HID lights don't normally have a reflector behind them, and do have a projector lens in front to control the light. They also have automatic levelling and wash systems to minimise the chance that you will blind an oncoming driver and cause an accident. BMW will never endorse halogen replacement/retrofit kits as they are illegal for use on the road in pretty much every country that uses the ECE regulations (so pretty much all of them...). So are they standard halogen H1's or an HID retrofit kit? Xenon (confusingly) is also used in the H1 globes marketing - which you can get in brighter and slightly whiter varieties - which aren't the same as the Xenon HID (or gas discharge) lamps. The Philips BlueVision ("xenon effect") are a good example and are completely legal (and are actually bloody good bulbs).

You realise (I hope) that the reflector runs very hot around the bulb (up to 180 deg C) and has a coated aluminium surface - so anything you put on it has to be high temp. Oh, and glass stain isn't going to help as the lens is polycarbonate....

Yeah BMW actually had an entire marine division back in the 70's & 80's. A friend of mine has an M30B35 (I think) in a ski boat with the BMW stern leg (EFI, tuned length water cooled stainless headers etc). They actually make a bloody nice setup and their stern leg was light years ahead of the mercruisers. Sophisticated and quiet - but having said that a 540ci injected big block on dry pipes does make a certain statement. You still see the occasional BMW around but they are pretty rare now. You may also need marinised valve guides - they tend to run hotter as they are under constant load and if you use std valve guides they can seize a valve (seen it on small block chevys) with ugly results.... You might be better using a Lexus V8 as they are very commonly marinised for jetboats with plenty of support and parts.

27386. You learn a lot sitting on the tarmac waiting to takeoff in a queue 15 planes long with nothing to do but read the inflight magazine for the 4th time that month and hope like hell you make your connecting flight...

Isn't the factory M-Sport suspension just the same as the standard coupe? Might be easier to get some coupe coils from someone like HellBM or Brent.

You don't have a tail lamp full of water do you?

Pretty sure they are all the same - mine came off a sedan and fit my coupe without any problems. The factory BMW ones I have seem to be a bit quieter than the factory VW ones of the wifes golf but not as quiet as some of the aftermarket ones.

Haha - where's your sense of adventure???

I had exactly the same recently with AMI. I refused to let them put an aftermarket one in but did allow them to use Novus as they choked at the Team McMillan quote.... In this case, I think they won't have too many options except an OEM replacement. Just get quotes from multiple sources and specify that they use an OEM windscreen due to the reasons Brent has outlined above.

Nah - just shoot them first.

Did the workshop supply the wheel bearing as well? I would have thought it was a definite warranty claim - 1 month is well outside what I would expect for the life of one.... You might be on thin ice though if you supplied the bearing and they installed it - everyone will point to another party and say it's their fault.

How about Botany/Howick/Highland Park/Farm Cove? Schools are pretty good (MacLeans College, Botany College, and St Kents are all highly rated high schools and there are good primary schools as well), and it is definitely around 30 mins (or less depending on traffic and the route you take) to Mt Wellington. Bit further to the city though which is one downside, but generally a pleasant place to live. Meadowbank, Greenlane, One Tree Hill, Glendowie, St Johns are all good but can get real pricey quite quickly. I wouldn't want to live in Mt Wellington, Glen Innes, or Otahuhu personally. Ellerslie can be quite good but can also be crappy as well - just depends on where the place is. Anywhere in the Auckland Grammar/Epson Girls zones, or eastern bays (St Heliers, Kohimaramara or Mission Bay) is going to be large $$$.

Normally (exact system dependent) the startup voltage is around 20kV which then drops back to around 700V - so no, you can't just connect it to 12V... You do need a ballast for them to fire.

If I had to choose, it would be marmite. But I'd still rather slam my cock in a fridge door than eat either of them.

Bear in mind that the Australians use the ADR rules which can be different to the ECE equivalents. NZ accepts both (most NZ new cars will be to ECE regs), but you may be asked to prove ADR compliance (at your own cost) for a vehicle coming into the country. It may not be a given that a particular NZ new car meets the ADR's.... This looks quite useful if not downright frightening from a paperwork perspective: Linky

Well done for taking safety of your customers seriously. One of my mates was nearly killed when a wheel bounced over the median barrier on the motorway (an inch taller and that would have been it), and I knew another guy through work who wasn't so lucky when a truck wheel landed on his windscreen.

I sometimes ride down to the model airport at Highbrook for a nosey. Never had the urge to try it myself.

Explain that to the family of the person who gets nailed by a wheel that comes off and bounces over the motorway median barrier.

My wife had done around 150km up and down the motorway before we found it. And was 7 months pregnant... The manager apologised (he had actually worked on the car), but their head office didn't give a flying f**k when I notified them. Loose wheels have killed people before now. Everyone should....

Large well known tyre shop managed to leave all the wheel bolts on one side finger tight on wifes Golf last year. I was less than pleased with this and will never use any of the services or product again.

I think of it in these terms: For someone with $1 billion, a $40k bar tab is the equivalent to a $40 bar tab to a person with $1 million (relative to their net worth). I'm certainly not worth anything like $1 million by any measure (maybe in Vietnamese Dong or rupees), but I wouldn't hesitate over a $40 bar tab. Put that in perspective when talking about a $100k car and the people that might be the target audience. Or maybe it says more about how immense $1 billion really is. sh*t that's heavy. Fukit, I'm going back to my rum now....