Vass

Yeah that's well sh*t, they sent out a survey a while ago asking for opinions on such a proposed change, I spoke out against it back then too, but obviously to no avail. The BPC was one of those awesome perks that endeared me to SCA when I first started using them back in the day. Have had a few instances of buying stuff I needed just a day or two before the same stuff becoming discounted. Felt awesome getting credit for it, would have otherwise felt a bit cheated. Shame it's getting scrapped. Wouldn't mind the Spend & Get thing as much if it weren't for the 28 day expiry period, that's awfully off-putting.

It's been a topic of debate around the forums for a good while. Some see it as an "upgrade", the logic being lower pressure = less strain on the plastic & rubber components in the cooling system = longer life for the cooling system components. The counter argument is that lower pressure = lower boiling point = higher chance of vapours in the system. Gases don't transfer heat nearly as efficiently as fluids, leading to localised hot spots or hot pockets in the engine, which obviously isn't good. I'm far from an expert but from what I gather you'll probably be fine running with either option if the car only sees light everyday use. It'd take quite a bit of bashing to get it to the extremes where the difference would start to show so you get two camps of people who claim to have run with their preference for years and have never had issues. Personally, I like to preventatively replace the main failure prone cooling system components and stick with the cap the car was designed for.

It's been kicking around for a wee while. Pretty sure the KiwiCarLife fella sold it not too long ago for $5k so this fella is being a bit cheeky listing it straight away for $1k on top of it having seemingly done nothing to it. I actually had a chat to him about it when he had it, it's far from perfect... It's been repainted, the quality of which is questionable. Apparently will need injectors imminently, amongst other things. He was gonna keep it but seemingly saw that it's too much for him so flicked it on soon after. Probably the same story for the new guy too. It's sporting an N53 so is direct injected, with comes with some pros but heaps of cons. Cheap for a manual BMW, but there's a reason for it.

"Mature senior owner" with a goddamn nightclub on wheels, and some rando asking about cruise control Peak TradeMe

X5 is back up and running but the wallet did take a bit of a hit. Turns out those Denso units are quite uncommon and my mate struggled to find the correct brushes to suit. Had a few options but some weren't tall enough and others were too loose in the casing. Could have continued with the trial and error but was keen to get the thing back up and running ASAP so opted for a new unit instead. Denso units look to be discontinued, I was tossing up a Bosch one off Spareto which would have worked out to $480 shipped and an extra week of waiting but the same mate got me a trade price on a SparkShop unit which worked out slightly cheaper and I got my hands on it the same day. Bit of an unknown of a brand but looks decent quality, comes with a local warranty and a test sheet, plus it's 2.2kW compared to the 2.0kW of the original. Winning. Turns out the car is also sporting a SparkShop alternator, courtesy of the previous owner, and that's working well enough. Everything went back together quickly and without issues. Loving how easy the intake manifold is to remove and reinstall on these. Started up effortlessly on the first go. Job's a good 'un.

Don't mint the fact that the grilles are black, it's the wannabe F-series slotted design that's utter cringe. Ohh I feel you buddy. Doesn't do much to increase its value these days tho.

Loving the content James is making since leaving Donut - quirky, weirdly informative, a tad cringe at times but always funny and entertaining. Find myself craving an X3M40i all of a sudden.

The past few months have been real hectic, we've been too busy developing a new human for me to spend any real time in the garage so haven't made enough progress to warrant an update. Should finally have a bit of time this weekend though so will see if I manage to get anywhere with it. Coincidentally, yesterday marked 1 year since we bought it but it's no closer to being back on the road. The co-owner mate had lost interest in it and being parked up in another mate's paddock on the opposite end of town I've just had too much going on to take on an hour long round trip every time I wanted to work on it. So about a month ago the mate loaded it onto a trailer and dropped it into my driveway so now I can slowly tinker away at it whenever I have a bit of time. All I've done so far is disconnect the DME and inspect it. What I found was some oil on the main engine harness plug that had migrated along the wiring from one of the sensors/solenoids all the way to the DME, which is apparently a thing that happens... In our case it's just a tiny amount that I could see but the car hasn't run in a good 4 years now so it might have had more there and it's just dried out over time. In any case, I sprayed both ends down with contact cleaner spray, then took the DME out of its casing to inspect for any other damage that might stand out but all looked fine to my unscrupulous eye. That's about as far as I've gotten with it so far, am yet to reinstall the DME back into the car to see if that did anything. I want to again remove the intake manifold and give everything a going over before attempting another start, will then check/clean the ignition switch and try resync the DME to the EWS and eliminate that as a possible culprit. This car would make a nice base for an M54 swap but with a barely 3-month old daughter keeping us on our toes and being down to one income I won't have the time nor the finances to turn it into a proper project any time soon. So my hopes are to get this thing running well enough that I can daily drive it for a few years, then see how I feel about it further down the line. If I don't manage to bring it back to life soon then I'll unfortunately be forced to put it out of its misery.

Must be 1 of 1.

I mean to be fair, if you were to recreate what was done there (strip down to bare shell, rust treatment & full repaint, interior retrim, adjusties etc.) you'd probably end close to a similar figure, so I don't see it being as egregious as some out there that are asking $30k+ for cars that need another $10k+ spent on them. Looks to be a very tidy and well sorted car with some subtle mods. Doesn't mean it's worth what he's asking to someone out there but I don't see it as a blatant flip or a cash grab. For example, my E46 genuinely owes me close to that figure at this stage but I'd be lucky to recoup a third of that if I were to ever sell it...

Ohh I just noticed you got those door & fender inserts painted white at some point. I remember you mentioned wanting to do that at the beginning but don't think you went into specifics on it. Minor detail but would be keen to hear about the process. Those strips feel like a weird material to paint since the plastic looks a bit porous, they're also real flimsy so wondering how best to make the paint stick and retain a nice finish. What sort of prep did you undertake, sand them down somewhat or just clean up and spray? Did you paint them masked up on the car or removed them?

Some more tiny details that I've tinkered with recently. Did a few tweaks to the stock DME tune, main one being the thermostat target temperatures. Originally pioneered by @Eagle and I just followed suit. On my android headunit the coolant temperature display is always just 2 clicks away so I've been monitoring the running temperatures quire regularly. I believe they've always been within the norm but were constantly on the higher side, hovering around 99-100°C city driving and 101-102°C motorway cruising. With the below changes they've now gone down a tad to 97-98°C city driving and 94-95°C on the motorway. Eagle reckons some brand thermostats just run a bit hotter than others, in his experience he hadn't seen any M54's consistently run above 97°C so 102°C did seem a tad excessive. This tweak seems to have brought the temperatures down into a more comfortable range. Next time I change the thermostat I might give another brand a go, currently running a Borg Warner unit. Originally, both tables had identical values, as per the right side AC ON table above. The screenshot is halfway through the process with only the left side AC OFF table values modified, the AC ON values were then also modified to match. On the topic of exhausts, I stumbled upon a little titbit of information in Bryson's thread over on E46 Fanatics about the vibration dampeners on the stock exhaust system. Turns out automatic cars had two of them, both #4 & #12 on the schematic below, whereas manual cars only had #12. Mine being converted, I decided to unbolt the #4 dampener from the rear of the muffler. Can't say it made a discernible difference but it's now a tiny bit closer to a factory manual. The power steering reservoirs on these are notorious for weeping and creating a mess. Mine is still fairly new and hasn't succumbed to this inevitability but as a little piece of security from a potentially messy situation I got myself a cheapo wrist sweatband and draped it over the reservoir. Fits well and looks quite inconspicuous being all black without any tacky logos. The idea was of course blatantly stolen from Garagistic but cost me a fraction of the price.

Yeah good shout, that's probably what I'll end up doing next. Just scrolled back through your thread again, for some reason at first glance I thought you had the secondary cats cut out instead of that resonator. Good to know it is an improvement even with the cats still in place. Having gotten rid of the stock manifolds I'm hesitant to get rid of the secondary cats too, don't want it so smell like a bag of eggs left out in the sun...

Decided to revisit this issue since the frequency of it happening seems to have increased of late. I had previously installed new HID bulbs, which made no difference. Next up was the ballast, which I managed to grab a spare of. Fun fact - the E46 shares the same part number with the first gen (BMW-era) Mini, of which there was plenty of at Pick-A-Part so I nabbed a newer 2006 production date one. Seemed to work at first but a few drives later the issue resurfaced. I then dug a bit deeper and took the lid off the housing where the ballast connects to only to discover this: The insulation on the wiring had gone real brittle and was cracked throughout and one of the brown ground wires seemed to be crushed by the seal, leaving the metal completely exposed. Not even sure how to remedy this properly, rewiring seems like a mammoth task to get right looking at the way all the wires are intertwined. For the time being I just cleaned up the most obviously damaged part and wrapped it in electrical tape to at least somewhat isolate it. At one point I also scored a spare xenon headlight from Pick-A-Part when one eventually turned up. Testing it out it fired up straight away without any issues so I'm hoping the internals on that are in better state than my current one. Unfortunately, the casing on it is pretty rough and has several clips and tabs broken off so it's not a straight swap in its current state. I will need to dissect the light and hopefully make one good one out of the two I have. As of a few weeks ago, poor Barbara got kicked out of her cosy garage to make room for this ol' nugget that I'm still trying to resurrect. Ever since sitting outside I started noticing the problematic driver's side headlight also suffering from moisture buildup inside the housing and the issue of it failing to fire up has become noticeably more frequent, failing to light up at all on several occasions in the past week, no matter how many times I cycled the switch. I'll need to order a strip of butyl and reseal both headlights properly, and will combine that with swapping out the internals on the driver's side light. This project has all of a sudden bumped itself to the top of the priorities list, although it's not without competition. So as things stand, I've got a broken 316ti occupying the garage, a broken X5 occupying the driveway and a touring with a broken headlight relegated to street parking. BMW life in a nutshell.

Even after installing the catless headers I wasn't quite happy with the exhaust tone. It somehow feels too subdued and is missing that throatier tone that I'm craving. It may be placebo but I swear I've driven and felt factory 330i's to have a nicer sound to them somehow. When doing the engine swap I had both the stock 325i and donor 330i exhausts on hand and decided to stick with the 325 one since it looked tidier without the 330i exhaust flap, which I wasn't going to bother hooking up anyway. Apart from the flap the two looked identical. RealOEM gives separate part numbers for the front, mid and rear (muffler) sections, despite the full exhaust being one solid piece (in our part of the world anyway) - the front two are the same for both 325 & 330, the rear section with the muffler being different, obviously because of the flap but it got me wondering whether the two mufflers might have also been somehow internally different too. Only one way to find out. @Carbon happened to have a full 330i exhaust laying around and we made it a quick mission to compare it with my 325 one. To make it at least a little bit scientific, I ordered me a cheapo Aliexpress decibel meter. VIDEO: 325i Exhaust VIDEO: 330i Exhaust In the end the 325i exhaust maxed out at 98dB, the 330i exhaust at 94dB. Not sure how much of an influence it would have had but the 325i one had been in regular use and was still warm from having just driven while the 330i had been sitting (indoors) since around Christmas and wasn't fully warm at the time of testing. Whatever difference it may have made, it wouldn't have been night & day so I'm guessing there is no difference in the 325i & 330i muffler internals. Was worth the effort of finding out though. Not sure what made me feel that factory 330i's sound better than what I've got, might be the extra sound deadening I installed in the doors. Still not overly impressed with the soundtrack the car produces, sounds too muffled even when giving it the beans. I know these aren't the best sounding engines in general and will never sound as good as a V8 but just want a bit more of a throatier rumble without being too obnoxious. Might play around with it a bit more somewhere down the line, maybe a secondary cat delete or an aftermarket muffler or something.