bravo

I was thinking that. Looks light a pre f/l lip modded to fit f/l valance and then painted. The boot lip spoiler has been painted also. Shiny paint job, but pretty acerage looking e30 otherwise - check out those exhaust tips!!!!

Comes up every year or two

If its not leaking, it has to be going somewhere, like out the exhaust pipe. Suspect blown head gasket. Do all usual checks for blown Head Gasket - oil in water, water in oil, etc.

The Q&A sections of this guys auctions are always gold. How is it a dumb question to ask if there are any near-future problems/maintenance issues? I always resist the urge to wind him up, but it is so tempting.

I was wondering that myself.

Car is in Paihia. I have met Paul once or twice and seen the car around. If anyone wants me to go and have a proper look at it and give them some feed back I'd be happy to.

You will love it if you get more into the offroading. They are one of the most capable and popular 4wd's in New Zeland 4x4 clubs. They may not be all that safe round town/highway, but if its an offroader you want there is simply NO better bang for buck. You'd be surprised how many of the competition trucks on extreme 4x4 are chopped up suzukis aswell. Good price BTW.

Are you panning to run in the e30 series or the open series with your white e30. The reason I ask is that you can't enter the e30 series with that bodykit. PS love the wheels on the 325.

Damn you stole my line. Alice the camel has two posts... Welcome to the dark side Alice.

Freakn' mint install!

Sadida has this constant obsession with tracking down m325i's on the premise of buying one, but as far as I know in the past three years he has yet to actually buy one.

Yup. Same thing happened to me which is why I know about the wood trick. I had fuel pouring out over my exhaust and tyres and had a wee spin at a roundabout. Not fun.

That is the standard cat for your car. And yep, BMW factory exhaust narrows to give more clearance past the rear subframe. The dent is in the fuel tank. As long as there is no rust, and the metal has not cracked, then it should pass a WOF OK. If you want to you may be able to beat it out using a clean piece of wood from the top as there is a hole above there where the fuel pump or guage sender is (under the rear seat). But you'll probably just make it worse.

The forum just likes to torment me an remind me that I have no life every time I hit "View New Posts".

ROFL - you have discussed using Ruby before. We had a similar discussion a while back when a member wanted to tow his boat with an e36. Same verdict.

When you jack/lift the motor, first loosen the top nuts on the engine mounts. This will let the motor tilt and lift more. Since you are removing the exhaust I find it easier to quickly whip off all the heat shields and remove the driveshaft entirely. Gives you much more room when doing it on you back on the ground. Not so necessary with the luxury of a hoist and gearbox stand.

Nothing wrong with the RF speakers. RF is a good brand. The Infinity's I suggested are 90W RMS vs. the 60WRMS for the RF's. Also the Sensitivity rating (I won't explain how it works here, but essentially the higher the number the better and louder sound you get before distortion) is 95db for the Infinity's and only 89db for the RF's. Like I said, nothing wrong with the RF's and you will be happy with them, but the reason I suggested the Infinity's is they are good quality for the price - good bang for buck. I'm not 100% sure whether they will fit without some minor modification of the kick panel. Someone with an e36 may care to comment. On an e30, minor modification would be required for the 6" and the 5.25" would fit without mods. I'm pretty sure e36 is the same in this regard. Your amp would be fine for the fronts or subs. Depending on the subs you have you could run one channel each to the fronts, then run 2 channels bridged to your subs hooked up in parallel which would give 400W to each sub, but put alot more load on the amp. It should handle it if you don't ramp up the gain ridiculously high.

A thin 2-3mm spacer (make one out of cardboard if you want) will allow most low-depth woofers to mount in the stock location. you may have to cut the plastic kickpanel to fit over the speaker and use the speaker's own grills. You may also have to trim down the bonnet release lever. Tweeter will surface mount on the door a-pillar sails, but often sound quite bright there. I have seen tweets flush mounted in the a-pillars themselves but have no idea how much work was involved. you could flush mount them in the dash facing slightly toward the windscreen to create a good soundstage but again a fair bit of work here. Mine are surface mounted on the a-pillar sails, but there are factory trim panels for here that allow fitment of the factory tweeter from the BMW business radio package which you may be able to mdify to fit aftermarket tweeters. Hard to get though.

Post up model of your amp as I am not quite sure whether you are saying the rating per channel or bridged and at what impedance. Pioneer is fine. Infinity and e-audio are good, well-known brands. not cheap sh*t. Nothing wrong with pioneer, RF or soundstream either. Just post up what you plan on buying and if it is really sh*t I'll tell you. In my car I have Alpine, Infinity, Pioneer, Caliber and JVC. JVC isn't all that flash, but as they are just the rear speakers its all good.

It's illegal to tint your lights by spraying them, but heaps of people do it and have no probs. The trick is to do a good glossy job, not go too black, and make sure the 100m visibility thing is adhered to. The WOF rules clearly state it is illegal to apply any sort of spray or film to you lights.

Slower. More low down torque, but less revvy and les HP. The super eta (which more or less used the 2.7 block from an eta and a 2.5i head and differnet cams etc) goes harder than the 325i. THere are also Alpina 2.7's out there that go hard (Ray from HellBM has one). And a few guys have rebuilt 2.7's with 2.5i heads to make there own approximation of a super eta. Using the diesel rods and crank gets the best results from memory. There's an article on it in Performance BMW. I have the mag with it in, but someone scanned and posted it a couple of years back.

Yep - that's what I would do. What rating rms are the subs? You will love your sounds a thousand times more if the front speakers are amped. Running two amps won't have any problems at all. I doubt you will need the capacitor, many think they are a waste of time. I have no experience of them. Maybe try running the system without it and put it in if youneed to. I'd be interested in what you find out. If you are on a tight budget, get a set of 6.5" components like Infinity Kappas for $220 from parallel imported. The Infinity 5000cs are also OK for cheapies and should fit in the stock location without mods. There are plenty of other options, but I've had good experience with Infinity at that price point. If you want to spend more there are better options, but the Infinity's are great buying at that price. It really depends on how much you want to spend, and everyone has a different opinion on what brand is the best. A perfect amp for fronts of around that power rating would be the eaudio 280AB. A awesome quality amp at a decent price. If you want more power a 480 AB or Caliber CA475+ (what I have powering my fronts) with 2channels bridged to each speaker would be more than you need. Or use the amp you have for the fronts (overkill maybe??) and run the 2 subs in parallel off a decent sized sub amp like an eaudio 1000D or 3000D. Again, there are other brands (alpine etc) that other people may recommend - I am simply naming a few common amps that are in my opinion good value for money and very popular on the NZ car audio scene. Try forums.nzicemag.co.nz/index.php for good prices on secondhand gear and good advice.

Use 6x9's in the back if you want, but they are a waste of money if you have good font midbass and tweeters, and a sub. Check on all the car audio forums etc - the experts will all tell you the same thing. But if you must go ahead and use them, just make sure whoever you get to put them in doesn't cut holes in the metal part of your rear tray as that will fail a WOF and is very very very expensive to repair. As for fronts, you need to have a cross-over to split the high frequency sounds from everything else or else your woofers won't perform as well and you will kill your tweeters in 5 seconds flat. You can run a 5.25" or a 6" woofer in the stock location with little or no spacers/modification. Make sure the front speakers are the best you can afford. The front speakers, amp and headunit should be the most expensive parts of your system. You can get away with a cheaper sub and rear speakers if you have those three things right. People think all the bass and volume comes from the sub. It doesn't, all the mid bass and "volume" is from the front speakers - the sub is just for very low frequency bass. It is big because you need a big speaker for low frequencies. Depending on your budget you should be spending minimum of $250-300 on front speakers, and $300-600 on a headunit depending on the features you want. Then a decent amp for the fronts will set you back another $300. If you get a good 4-ch amp you could bridge two of the channels to run a sub, but a separate sub amp in the vicinity of $200-500 would be better. Then Wiring, swub-box and install might run another few hundred depending on the difficulty, whether you get a custom sub-box and the quality of install. Those prces will set you up with a decent quality entry-level system you can build on in the future. it is better to buy quality and buy it over time, than buy everything now but buy cheap sh*t. it's cheap for a reason. As to installers, I can't recommend anyone as I installed all my gear, but as with car alarms and most things if you get someone cheap then you get a chepa job usually.

He has all the women in my house melting. Unlike Gus senior... With the exception of the two I brought with me to chuck those old blue springs of yours in Gus. They are still smitten. Must have been the singlet and tea bagging out the side of the stubbies...