Vass

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.

Dug into the starter extraction first thing Saturday morning. Quite an easy job all in all, with no messy fuel lines to disconnect the intake manifold came off in around half an hour giving decent enough access to the starter/bell housing bolts from up top. Still quite a tight squeeze but not as hard up against the firewall/transmission tunnel than you'd have on an E46 and such. Cracked the bolts loose using a swivel head ratchet and then used a 10mm ratchet spanner to back them out the rest of the way. The intake itself was still nice and clean, just slightly oily, which was good to see. Took the starter to my mate who split it open and to discover brushes that were very much perished, leaving behind an impressive pile of carbon. From what he saw he reckoned it should be back in business with a good clean, regrease and new brushes. That would be a relief as new ones of these chunky starters are $500+. Left it with him to sort out during the week and scooted back home. Still had plenty of daylight left so tinkered on fixing an annoyance I had with the car ever since purchasing it - when pressing the button to fold in the side mirrors, they would fold in and go straight back out again, refusing to remain tucked in. Did a bit of digging and landed on this video which looked worth a shot. Popped off the mirror covers to inspect - the passenger side was fine but sure enough, on the driver's side the little metal lever had fallen off the sensor mechanism and was just sitting there. Gave the area a good clean, bent the tabs in slightly, reseated the lever and fixed she was. Also noticed the power steering reservoir had gotten wet again. I gave the area a good clean when doing the first batch of work on the engine so this was fairly new. The O-ring in the cap didn't look too bad but I managed to find a slightly chunkier one in my stash and threw that on. Hopefully that was the culprit of the leak all along.

Hahahah I thought I'd be clever but someone already beat me to it. Inevitable https://www.carjam.co.nz/car/?plate=nnl573

Tested out the X5 as a tow vehicle the other day when taking the wife's horse float in for a WoF. Handled the task with ease despite the float being a heavy old homebuilt lump from the 80's. Lining up a trailer is an absolute breeze with the addition of the reverse camera. At first I thought I might be in trouble as none of the lights worked with the trailer plugged in so I was fearing another dodgy wiring job with the aftermarket tow module but turned out it was just a matter of the pins on the trailer end being too tightly squeezed together. Spread them out a tad and she was all sweet. Didn't notice the rear sagging with the trailer hooked up so not sure whether airbags would have improved the experience in any way. Then just a couple of days later the X5 got to enjoy a fun ride on the back of a tow truck... It had been a bit sluggish firing up the past few weeks, the first crank would be a lazy one and seemed to take an extra crank before coming to life. Then the other day it refused to fire up at all after a good 4-5 cranks and only started up after cycling the key 2-3 times. Something was up but didn't get around to addressing it at the time. Then today the wife popped by for a visit to my work and the tractor wouldn't start again when she went to leave, would barely crank until it stopped doing anything at all - no clicking, no grinding, no sound whatsoever when turning the key. Prior to that, the last time it drove I tested the voltage through the cluster display which said the battery sat at a steady 13.8-14.0V, and still had 12V with the engine off so that ruled out the battery (and the alternator). My best bet is the starter packing up after 20+ years and 292k km's of service, assuming it's still the original. Can't even be mad if so. Luckily, the wife still had her AA Roadside Assist membership active, which she had completely forgotten about. The only reason I even knew she had one was that I happened to be on the phone to AA earlier in the day making a change to our house insurance policy and them mentioning that we get a discount due to being members... So we got a free tow out of it. Handy. Will dig the starter out over the weekend, once it stops pissing down, hopefully. With any luck it's just the brushes that have gone, have a mate who has a knack for these things and can easily rebuild it if that's the case and get her back up and running pretty quickly. Fingers crossed that's the extent of it.

Yeah that's crazy. Doesn't even have the M5 body kit anymore. If you wanted an M5 racecar, pretty sure you could grab a stock one for ~$40k, strip it and sell interior, body kit and other no longer needed parts that'd pretty much pay for a roll cage. What's a BBK worth, $5k max? He'd be lucky to get half of that asking price.

Sorry to dig this oldie up, I know it's long gone but wondering what was involved with making the E92 seats work in an E46? I imagine seat rails patterns aren't a direct fit and the electronics wouldn't be plug & play either. Was it just a matter of re-pinning some connections or do the E92 seats have modules that require some more intricate tinkering/coding to work?

What ever happened to this one? Still registered and road legal according to rego check, does it still have the S54 running gear and everything?