Vass

Also interested. Have low-key been stalking on eBay but haven't come across one that wasn't stupidly expensive.

Alternatively, I'm considering getting one of these. Doesn't get rid of the CCV but at least it's a bit more solid being aluminium instead of plastic.

3 minutes ago, ciderbeard said:

debating between 17's or 18's.  I need new rear tires so if I go up to 18's its a good time to do it.  Also planning to switch from run flats to normal tires either way.  What's a good value tire?  Seems like people just default to the Michelin PS4's.

Check out Hyperdrive, they often have some good deals going. PS4's seem to be the top of the range go-to, in terms of value tho not sure if they're the best bang for buck.

I'm trying out Dunlop Sport Maxx 50+'s on my 18" set. Haven't gone on the car yet but judging by reviews, seem to be good value, especially at 40% off.

18 minutes ago, gjm said:

And now you know why I posted a rear 3/4 shot...

J.Lo in the back, Judith Collins up front

That goddamn front end. f**king why!?

Continued tidying up the daily by making the interior somewhat habitable. Stripped out the seats and gave the carpets and floor mats a good clean with some drill brushes and a Bissell spot cleaner. Some real nasty spills and stains on both but cleaned up rather well.

Also gave the leather seats a wee refresh with a deep clean and some moisturiser cream to bring them back to life a bit, as well as ripping out the remnants of some dodgy old aftermarket alarm system that wasn't working anyway.

Will get onto destroying my fingertips through stripping the rubberised finish off all the scratched up centre console plastic bits next.

Just got done with the wrenching marathon that was changing the oil pan gasket and some other bits on the daily. What an absolute PITA of a job!

Kicked it off Sunday morning, finished 1am that day, continued Monday after work until finally having her back on her wheels at 3am... Even with the subframe dropped down, so little space with all the power steering and trans cooler lines in the way. Quite a few hiccups along the way. The most annoying one being getting the dipstick back in. Cleaned up the oil pan, got the new gasket on, RTV'd the joins on the underside, struggled wiggling the pan in place, started it on a few bolts and then spent half an hour trying to get the right angle for the dipstick to slide into the oil pan with no luck, just too much crap in the way on top. Ended up giving up and dropping the sump back down, cleaning everything up and starting over with the dipstick in place. Bloody frustrating game of tetris.

Also changed out the valve cover gasket, oil filter housing gasket, engine mounts and alternator. Probably spent half the time cleaning up all the oil that had caked everything up. Not a perfect job but near impossible to get to everything without taking off the intake, which would have gone well beyond the scope of this mission.

After a good 4 hours sleep, set off for work in the morning. Car started up fine but got the ABS and brake lights go off on the dash, as they sometimes do with the wheels off the ground for a while. Drove out onto the street, parked up and tried turning the car off and on only for it not to start again... Flat battery. Ran back home to grab the spare, got her running but from the voltage saw that the alternator wasn't kicking in. Figured the new one must have been faulty. Dammit. Pulled into the driveway and started pulling the intake back apart to put the old noisy one back in, only to discover I'd forgotten to plug the alternator cable back in... Classic 3am brain fog.

Hopelessly late, finally set off for work only to hear a clunking noise coming from the front. It then hit me I'd also forgotten to tighten the wheel nuts after I'd dropped the car down from the jack stands... Bloody hell

After catching up on lost sleep, tidied up some of the loose ends today so hopefully that's the end of my oil leak dramas for a wee while at least. Thank f**k that's over and done with.

What a stunner! Would love one, maybe in a good 10 years time though.

Out of interest, what does the sport mode do, with it being a manual?

GLWS

Yeah my bad. All of my e46's have been black so it all just blends together, somehow somehow never noticed that it's just bare shell there.

Good effort that, cleaned up really well, must have been a hell of a scrub with years worth of road grime ey. 

Came close to widening the garage door whilst almost wrecking the sedan today.

Tried to drive the front onto the ramps to give it a quick check-over before going for WoF on Thursday. Decided to chuck some planks under the rear wheels as well to make it a bit easier to slide the jack in. Stupidly, put the planks long ways along the car, so when the wheels hit them, they jumped up and got wedged between the wheels and the backs of the side skirts. Stupidly, tried to get out of the situation by giving it a bit more gas. Even more stupidly, did it with the left foot whilst being halfway out the car to see how far up the ramps I was. So of course the car lurched forward, overshot the ramps and ended up with the nose inside the garage. Luckily, through a combination of hitting the brakes a split second later and by then being beached on top of the ramps, managed to stop just in time before breaking my shin in half. Just a wee dent on the driver's door from hitting the frame and a wee bruise to show for it.

Got out only to realise what a lucky bastard I am. Could have been absolute disaster had the wheels been facing even a fraction more to the right. Barely 5mm between the door frame and the fender. 

Just absolute stupidity on my part all around. Lesson learned with just some minor damage and a wee fright. The paint marks on the door hand polished out quite easily and the door itself was already a bit banged up since before I got the car so an extra wee dent doesn't detract much from the aesthetics anyway.

On a positive note, switched out the faulty, crusty old washer pump so she should be all set for WoF.

Winning.

Token bimmer at the Canterbury Rally. Ya little beauty. 

14 hours ago, SmackJackTheCrackerMan said:

I also gave the under car a good clean today too. 
Quite impressed with the quality of this car. Everything came out like new with very little effort. 

Are you missing all the fender liners or just took them off for cleaning? 

2 hours ago, gofaster said:

or have an N54 130i 😁

Ahh you beauty! I remember I saw it in Addington some months back, thought I must have seen the badge wrong or something, had to go back and re-check. Glad I wasn't tripping  Looked mint.

227,8XXkm

Well, looks like Barbara's on her last legs. Showed no signs of trouble coming to work yesterday, on the way home however, the engine felt really rough and sputtery right from the go. Sure enough the yellow engine light soon lit up. Somehow managed to limp home without having to get a tow truck but car is essentially undriveable in its current state and it doesn't seem like a quick & easy fix either.

Suspected her to have a vacuum leak somewhere, but now with fuel cutting off as well, it could instead be a fault with the injectors/fuel pump or any number of other issues. With the new engine in the process of being built, it doesn't look like chasing down the issue is worth the hassle, so might be time to park her up and start prepping for the engine swap.

Was fun while it lasted. Managed to squeeze a whopping 13,000km out of her in my ownership so far. What a solid return on investment. f**k me.

I've been guilty of taking dragging this project along at an overly relaxed pace up to now, was honestly due a good kick up the ass. Unfortunately, a few weeks back  I  we decided to use up all of my remaining budget on some silly, childish endeavour of getting all the windows double-glazed at home. Something about the cats being cold in the winter and whatnot. Ridiculous. Still a few weeks out now before I can order in the rest of the parts on my shopping list, but do have quite a bit to sort out in the meantime anyway. Long weekend will be fun.

Just hoping the new 330i won't need much for its WoF this month, otherwise I'll be left with my pushbike...

32 minutes ago, ciderbeard said:

Thinking about selling my 130i and getting a 135i N54.  Crazy?

Yes.

Damn! That is one clean box. Was just going wild with a brass brush on mine earlier today, 20 years worth of road grime and oil doesn't want to come off too easily. Is this the way you got it or what did you use to clean it? Pressure washer or something? 

Damn man, shame to hear that. I wasn't too happy with the package arriving beaten up but luckily no real damage was done. Didn't think too much of it. Not ideal of course.

The reverse light plug looks to be the same as any temperature sensor one so I just went and cut on off at Pick-A-Part. I'm still a fair way away from installing mine but believe it should work fine, just the two wires to hook up.

With the clutch module, I think mine just came mounted to the clutch pedal. It's that small black rectangle thingy I thought? Was yours completely missing. I know there's two different versions of them depending on the model year. Will have to check again now, not 100% sure it's all there.

Love these oldschool weapons! Was cool meeting you and seeing it in the flesh on Sunday. Keen to follow the build journey.

The comment section on that listing is guaranteed Grade A popcorn material. A good combo of the seller being blatantly deceptive/misinformed and a very eager, passive aggressive wind up doll.

For the amount of money and effort that's gone into that build, you'd at least hope the dude would know the basic certification requirements. Wouldn't have much confidence in all of the work to have been done to a good standard with that sort of attitude on display. Bloody shame as looks a real gem of a car on paper.

Was nearly tempted to go sell a kidney there, a nice E30 Touring is absolute GOALS.

9 hours ago, dirtydoogle said:

Get them to check your  bearing clearances and ring gaps if you're not too confident. There's 3 different bearing clearances used and with a crank polish it's likely increased clearance by 0.002-0.005" 

If you're feeling handy, plastigauge/flexigauge is fine for a street engine if used correctly 

All those clean parts look 👌 😍 

Yeah I'll do the clearance checks. Got some plastigauge and a feeler gauge handy. Will take the rings in if they happen to need a bit filed off. Some special tool required for that apparently. 

Yay, shiny bits!

Got all this rejuvenated metal back from the machine shop. Pretty nice seeing it clean enough to eat out of.

Full list of work done so far:

Quote

Acid wash parts, surface block and front cover, hone bores to straighten, measure and expand pistons to suit, polish crankshaft, remove pistons from rods, clean and machine ring grooves, wash pistons, assemble and align pistons on rods, final wash parts, hardness test head and advise head is too soft to re-use.

Will probably cotton wrap it all and put on temporary hold until I get the head situation resolved. Still have the subframe bushes to sort out and gearbox detents to replace so plenty to keep me busy in the meantime.

The shop guys reiterated that the main bearings don't really need replacing but I managed to find a new Glyco set for just around $85 so might still chuck new ones on whilst I'm at it. Still weighing up whether to drop ~$520 on new valve springs though. Would be nice but then again... $520. Money pit problems.

Extremely rear!! 

https://www.trademe.co.nz/3596073085

24 minutes ago, adro said:

mine looked VERY similar and the culprit was the oil return line from the CCV….and the VCG and the OFHG 😝 but mainly the return line. 

Yeah mine's most likely shot as well. Didn't manage to dig that far into it. Unfortunately ran out of time on Sunday as I... had to attend to the pressing matter of... going to the cinema to see the... new Downton Abbey film...

Shut up.

1 minute ago, Eagle said:

Certainly the PS high pressure line to some extent. I don't think ive seen one that doesn't sweat oil at least a little bit. IIRC they are very expensive being RHD specific.

Yeah does look like it. Will have to tick off the OFHG to see how bad it actually is as currently it's all just soaked from above. Level looks steady though so hoping it's just a little weep.

Cheapest I've found so far is around $150 from Rock Auto.

As a bit of a distraction from my engine woes, did a bit of exploring around the underside of the new 330, which was good fun. Oil ahoi!

Needed a decent cleanup, which I'm hoping will help pinpoint where all the oil is coming from, but by the looks of it, the answer is... EVERYWHERE.

No wonder she's been marking her territory everywhere she went. At the very least, the culprits look to be the valve cover, OFHG (easy enough to do) and the oil pan (a bit more involved). Have all those gaskets spare so will see if I can occupy my mate's hoist some weekend to make the task of dropping the subframe a bit easier.

Also chucked some new tyres on the rear. One side had a slow puncture that I thought I'd just get fixed but upon closer inspection I found it had collected not one but FOUR nails all sticking out from different places so didn't bother. Just went with some Laufenn's from Hyper Drive that were on the cheaper side as this is just a neat daily. Actually seem decent enough for the price.

On the parts scavenger hunt, received the new piston rings for the engine rebuild as recommended by @dirtydoogle in the other thread. Went with a set with the M52TU-style 3-piece oil control rings. Should do me nicely.

Compiling the shopping list is still a work in progress, for anyone that might care. Have a few parts already ticked off and a bunch of bits in there are optional that I'm still weighing up. Probably a bigger research effort than necessary, comparing FCP Euro, Rock Auto, ECS Tuning, Spareto and Schmeidmann. I'll likely waste more time compiling it all than the savings warrant but wanted to scratch my curiosity itch anyway. Might be of some use to someone on here as well...

Va-va-woom