adro

Definitely need more photos of this beast in this thread. Absolute dream family car! 🤤

Heyyyy this is SUPER cool! Thanks for sharing.

231,866km Wheel alignment by Dave Tunley. Rear right (the one i did by myself) was out by ALOT after doing the RTABS. Car is driving very nicely now.

231xxx Km return hose turned up crazy fast from Spareto. New return hose and reservoir installed. Replaced some rear end bushings. RTABS - Meyle HD Lower control arm to trailing arm bushing - Corteco Upper control arm to trailing arm ball joint - Meyle massive shoutout to @Spinner99 for helping me out in his drive way for what ended up to be quite a few hours last Saturday. will get an alignment next week. also I pulled fuse 58 for the rear hatch glass cause it started being super annoying.

231495km Few things ticked off the list this week. Power Steering pump replaced with a LUK second hand one. New sender hose, managed to snap the plastic clip on the radiator return hose trying to get the cable tie off the reservoir end, turns out the reservoir end was welded onto the reservoir anyway so will swap reservoir out for new one when this new hose arrives in a week. Interesting BMW wanted $850 for this hose.....$100 delivered via Spareto (1 week). Euro Italia were out of stock. I have made a ghetto fix in the meantime so i can keep using the car...hopefully it holds. Steering is feeling better but could also be placebo....nothing obviously wrong with the old pump which i have a receipt for in 2019 (3rd party no brand). Also replaced the little bushings that had perished that hold the hoses to the rack. 02 Pilot mod Nice and straight forward, didn't break any nipples....have just topped up the oil so will know after the next 2000km if its making any difference. O rings Not sure what this is called but I new i had left over Orings from the pcv overhaul when i first got the car and never new where they went until I saw Jon's post working on @Olafs car realised i had never taken this part off the intake. Most of the old O rings snapped trying to get them off. Expansion tank + Thermostat The one that really didn't want to come out was stamped 2013 so it had obviously been done at some point but still 10 years old so no harm in putting in a newer one. The thermostat below it also snapped in half but thanks to the internet i expected that and had a new one ready to go. I also RTV'd the thermostat housing while it had no coolant in it as it was dripping. It's an FCP one so if it keeps leaking ill do a warranty claim. I also got a cheap DA from super cheap a while back and did a first attempt at cut and polishing...Think I went a bit conservative on the cut, as it still has plenty of scratches but it did go quite shiney. Reverse camera is working out really awesome....esp when people park like this... My rear glass hatch keeps randomly opening. I've replaced the switch before so wondering if it's more likely to be in the loom somewhere. Still have soft brake lines and trailing arm bushings to do but that will have to wait for another time ( @Spinner99 do you still have the bushing tools?)

Ah yeah that makes sense. Quite expensive little bushings it turns out.

230,6xxkm oil+filter change with Penrite HP5 5W40. had a bit of an inspection underneath. All pretty good apart from these power steering line mounts are fully perished…bit odd but will get some new ones. car seems louder than I remember, wonder if I have an exhaust leak somewhere. Maybe an inspection when I get round to doing some rear end stuff.

Can’t stand Gazleys , I’ll be going to Sutherland Performance for the Golf if I need more than an oil change. Powerhaus - haven’t used for a while but they use to be good, just real far away from my house. Wellington European - get the job done but I’ve had a few instances where I felt a bit done over. one time we needed rear pads and they up sold me rotors as well, that I wasn’t that keen on and then when I went to pay they gave me a discount because they said it didn’t really need them. Second was a DSG service that when l went to pick it up was way more expensive as they quoted for 6 speed wet clutch and it was a 7 speed dry clutch so they had to get fluid from gazleys, however at 60,000km the dry clutch wasn’t due for 120,000km so I was a bit miffed they didn’t call me, or acknowledge it didn’t even need to be done. ive been using MJ motors in Miramar for anything E46 as they seem happy for me to supply parts and it’s a small local business, my car is old though so isn’t anything to specialized to work on.

after seeing the ‘no signal’ everytime I went into reverse I felt motivated to get this reverse camera in. Quite a bit more involved that I would have liked but overall just fiddly. Few learnings, even if the ad says it’s HD, if it’s going through an RCA you can guarantee its actually only going to be 720p. I got the number plate light and camera and it’s quite fiddly to put together, if I were to do it again I would opt for a camera that screws into the trim, and save mucking round tapping into the number plate lights. I had to do quite a bit of dremelling to get my camera to fit. my camera points down to much. I can live with it as I have a rear window to look out but I would like it tilted up a bit more. the cool thing was the RCA had a little positive pig tail on it which connected straight to the head unit so didn’t have to tap into the reverse lights. I did have to cut the RCA plug off though in order to feed it through the elephant trunk and then attach it again. I routed the USB‘s under the cup holders, it didn't really fit, but once the phone cable is attached it can pop out the coin bit quite nicely. I went through the elephant trunk and taped it to the existing loom running down the outside of the window, then in through the grommet at the bottom (tell me your car is a central Otago car without telling me it’s a central Otago car) a lot of gravel dust to clean up here. Once that was all working and made into a bit of loom with some soft tape I replaced the battery ground cable that I broke ages ago. still working on getting the splash screen working, at the moment the unit won’t recognise the files on my usb stick. Other than that, it’s working awesome. I suspect the encroachment on the number plate might be an issue at some point, I think the plate will just have to be lowered though. quick clean and jobs a goodin.

230xxxkm New headunit Xtrons IA8246BLHS after consulting with @Karter16 I pulled the trigger on an Xtrons unit. I went for a lower spec as I only intend on running CarPlay and a reverse camera so not sure I need 8gigs of ram…but let’s see. Not sure what the difference is between the IA8246BLHS vs IA8246BLH but it was cheaper so I rolled with it. Landed in a few days and at the same time so did the HVAC relocation bracket from @Vass (along with a couple of other goodies, thanks!) Pretty sweet install, but a bit of a jungle of loom back there, have fabric wrapped the loose connectors for now but will be back into connect up reverse camera and route the USB’s through the Center console maybe. Also as Karter pointed out I need to file down the top of the bracket which is currently making it look a little squeezed. car came with an FM transmitter which worked ok but I found my self trying to change songs etc while I was driving which is naughty. Now I’m left with an adhesive circle which I fear will rip the gray painted dash off if I try remove it so might just leave it, the steering wheel hides it from the drives position anyway.

Stretched it’s legs over to the Wairarapa today. She really sings all the way to redline.

This turned up a few days ago and so far seems to have done an amazing job at curing the noise I was hearing, can’t believe it. What a product. Thanks for the recommendation.

Car is behaving as it should now. Have done about 100km round town driving and it's good. I have an annoying noise mostly coming from the drivers window/door. The recommended (thanks bimmersport) gummi pflege looks like it has to come from overseas so might be a while before that arrives. I let the tyres down tonight to 36 PSI (I had pumped them up for storage) and that has made a bit of a difference to the comfort but not to the noise. Will get into some maintenance soon but in the mean time it's back to daily duties. Maintenance items on the cards. - New soft brake lines all round - Expansion tank (pretty sure it's still the original) - Trailing arm bushings - Transmission mounts - Diff bushings - Tensioner spring - 02 pilot mod - RTV thermostat housing to see if it stops the small drip, otherwise replace that.

My E46 sounds like the window glass is rubbing on the gasket / top of the door card. It doesn't do it when the window is down. Anyone had this before? know a fix for it? The noise is something between a squeek and a rattle....and very annoying. CHeers.

Battery was suppose to be trickle charged but when I picked up the car the clock had been reset so I assume it had been left at the back of the facility for a while.