Vass

Followed this beauty all the way to work yesterday. See the older gentleman driving it past my place on a regular basis, have to stare every time. Nice clean example and great to see it still properly used.

Have been drooling over this for a while now. What a gem!

Awesome man, that's a mighty fine offer, thanks so much! If you have any clue about what it might cost to freight, let me know, I reckon that might be what it'll come down to. I'll message you to discuss further. Thanks again!

Great news! We've got an update. Got a call from the machine shop today. They've finally gotten enough bodies back in the shop to clear away some backlog and get onto my heap of junk. They got the head cleaned, checked aaaaaaaaand... it's warped and gone soft from being overheated at some point. Lovely. Checked the block as well, said that a good block is usually 100, maybe 105. Mine is 90, which isn't ideal but apparently still usable. 90 and 100 what, exactly? I didn't think to ask, of course. Took a good 2.5 months to get to this point, and it's back to square one. At the very least, I'll need a new M54 head. As far as I know, both the B22 & B25 have the same one as the B30, so would make it a bit easier to find. The main guy at the shop said he'll shake a few trees and see if any of his contacts have one laying around, might be able to get one for a couple hundred bucks. If anyone else has any leads, throw them my way. Can always strip one off from Pick-A-Part but that's another wild stab in the dark. Another option is to just strip the head off the current B25 engine and go with that. Haven't had the temperatures spike in my ownership, not even on long drives, so assuming it'd be a fairly safe bet? Otherwise, what's an M54B25 with 226k km's, bit of oil burning and suspected vacuum leaks worth anyway? $500 max or something? No idea what the market would be for something like that, in that condition. Haven't thought too far ahead to figure out what I'd have done with it post-conversion. Getting the head off it might actually be the best use for it. No clue, I'm just spiralling at this point. Been a long silly workweek this with a damp squib of a conclusion to it. Happy Fridayyyy?

Pretty chuffed with my sudden plunge into 330-life. Having only had 325's so far, I never actually felt a need for more power, but have been pleasantly surprised by the difference. I haven't really pushed it yet, only doing city driving this past week, but even still the power delivery is so smooth and feels way more effortless. A great taster of what the wagon will be like in the (hopefully) not so distant future. Probably my best car purchase yet. Both bumpers are a bit banged up and needs bringing up to speed maintenance wise, but by and large is fairly tidy and unmolested, and only cost me a third of what I paid for the wagon with 50k less km's, so I'm totally over the moon with that. Drives beautifully well, engine feels healthy, no clunks or bangs apart from a wee vibration from the brakes when going around 80. Also already left a few puddles of oil on the driveway from the leaking valve cover as well as the oil pan as advised by the PO. Will be tidying those up shortly. Have already chucked in a new air filter, replaced the front badge with a cheapo roundel I had spare and clipped in some black kidney grilles I had left over from the engine donor as the old ones were held in place with a web of wires. Love a good side-project. As if I didn't have enough sh*t to do 😄 On the Touring front, have been combing through the schematics, compiling a comprehensive shopping list. The question I ran into was with this one. I'm going to be installing the exhaust off the 330i but won't bother hooking up that butterfly flap in the tail pipe. So with that, does it mean it renders this whole system obsolete? Is that vacuum canister (#9) used for something else as well or can be lost altogether?

Another one I just discovered today. More aimed at the design aspect, quite a few cool videos on Bimmers in there. Dude analyses and redesigns some classics and a few modern models and such, been binging on it all day. The Sketch Monkey If you ever wondered what an E39 M5 Coupe would look like for example..

A bike rack, maybe

If the E46 was made today...

Did it not? Had it on my watch list (not that I could afford it), got a fixed price offer of $55k after it closed and a minute later got an email saying it's been accepted by another member... 🤔

You're not alone. Gain - for me, personally, grasping onto a bit of analog driving experience in an ever-increasingly automated world. Over the top cost - basic supply and demand. For whatever reason, manuals are a rather rare breed in NZ, unfortunately, hence people being able to ask silly money for something that's fairly abundant in the old world. I wouldn't be able to justify it to myself if I merely saw it as a mode of transportation. It's more of a hobby project at this point. That's why they call us enthusiasts I guess.

True that. Ideally would want something with yearly WoF's though so would prefer something from the 2000-2002 period. Speed isn't that much of a factor when all you're doing is driving 10 minutes to work through a 60-zone.

Depends if you're doing the work yourself or taking it to a shop. If the latter, then I suspect the labour will be the killer part in it. Parts wise, I've seen conversion kits sold locally for around $4.5k of late. That's with a ZF box. Personally, I got my kit shipped from the UK and came out to around $3.3k with the full driveshaft and a 2.93 diff (not strictly necessary). Add to that something like $750 for the certification if you want to do it properly and get it fully compliant. Plus all sorts of tools, consumables like oils and whatever bits you might want to replace preventatively (clutch, flywheel, slave cylinder etc.) whilst you're at it. Depends on how far you want to go. At a minimum I'd say you'd want to budget for $4-5k.

Ahh phew, got me sweating for a minute there with my two '03 e46's. Luckily they're both M54's 😄 Good to know though, was thinking of maybe getting a wee 4-pot one as a cheap-ish daily at some point but was afraid they might all have the dreaded N42/46 disasters in them. Will know to keep a lookout for the older ones 👍

Wait, what happened post-2002?

Right, where are we up to... Still waiting on the engine back from the machine shop. Instead of the 3 weeks originally promised, it's now been two months and as far as I know, they still wouldn't have touched it either. Last I called them, was told they're still a couple of weeks away from getting to it, claiming covid sweeping through the shop as a justification/excuse. Not overly bothered by it though as I haven't made as much progress with any of the other missions as I'd hoped. Keep getting distracted and jumping from one thing to the next without addressing things in an orderly fashion. Luckily with tomorrow off, I'll sit down and make a proper priority list. First thing will be to finalise the list of needed parts and put a few orders in. Did tick off a couple of other items though with the help of some fellow Bimmersporters. Got a new clutch kit and flywheel, courtesy of @Eagle and a set of coils from @Kodachrome. Top guys, everything was as described and arrived quickly and securely. Also, got the first set of 193's sold and the other one wrapped in fresh new rubber. Still sitting in the garage, waiting to go onto the car at the moment. Got some Carpro DLUX (as well as some other goodies from Detail Depot) and want to try my hand at ceramic coating them before I subject them to road grime, will hopefully preserve the near-new look for a while longer. Apart from the flash stuff, the rusty old diff is cleaning up pretty nicely. Will still have a few more stabs at it with some brass brushes but looking noticeably less crusty already. Stripped the trailing arms down to the bare shell, will also get some brass brush treatment, a couple coats of black paint and then brand new bushes and bearings. Liberating the wheel hubs of all the bearing bits was a bit of a mission but got to try out the wee rotary tool I'd picked up from SCA. With help from @adro managed to figure out one of the reasons why my rear wipers don't work. The extended list of PO's botch jobs got another addition. He'd changed out the clock spring for some reason and of course replaced it with one off a sedan/coupe, the wiper lever on which you can only pull towards you to activate the front washers, but doesn't have the backwards push function that activates the rears. What it is vs. what it should be Turns out the trusty wee ti's also have a rear wiper (who'd have known) and have the same washer lever. Luckily there was one at the local Pick-A-Part so went an nabbed this crusty old thing. Gave it a good ol' clean, fitted it on, powered up aaaaand... a big fat nothing, with the added bonus of the front washers now also not working anymore 😄 Beautiful. I suspect it's still the sheared ground wire at the rear hatch. Really need to get that sorted already. But instead of doing that, I went out and bought this bloody thing... Shoot me.

Not exactly a pic but..

Stumbled out of Pick-A-Part on Saturday to find this beauty parked next to me. Looked absolutely immaculate, UK-import 330d, sitting on clean Schnitzer's. Absolutely beautiful package, props to the owner, looked really well taken care of.

Damn, that does look mighty fine. Black will probably take away a bit of the bulky look but pretty mean as it is as too. Good buy! Keen to know how easy these engines are to maintain.

I don't believe NZ or Aussie got the xi variant. Nor did Japan I don't think? Have never seen one around these parts anyway.

Sorry to hijack the topic a bit, @BM WORLD would you know off the top of your head which other model seats would be straight plug and play for E46's? I know the E53 X5's have exactly the same connector and rails, wondering if there's any other ones that are compatible without much modification? These look to be 6-series seats?

The "opinion write up" made me want to punch a hole through the screen. Love the post-truth, alternative fact world we find ourselves living in. f**king hell.

And they keep on coming. Looks a beaut at first glance this one. https://www.trademe.co.nz/3548571727

Deary me, look at this thing! That's some effort that's gone in. The sound of it as well. https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/motors/cars/bmw/z3/listing/3543928083?bof=ZIRQvZue

Might be mistaken, but I believe it either had limited functionality or was completely incompatible with e46's.

To take a bigger pircure view, this is the natural and sadly predictable progression of the optimal economic strategy in late stage capitalism. Everything is moving towards a subscription model instead of just selling products, whether overtly or inadvertently. Apple and such were notoriously blatant and shameless with implementing it at first, but now all industries seem to be moving in that direction, wherever they can. If you're not pushing planned obsolescence into the design of your products, it hurts your business in the long run. All sorts of stupid sh*t that does not need to be a subscription service, now is. To stick to BMW-related examples, even something like the Carly app. I was looking into it for my E46 to have some powerful coding features without having to resort to specialist software on a laptop and such, but you can't just buy it and be done with it, instead it's a yearly subscription. Why? There's nothing you're going to develop any further when it comes to working with my 20 year old car, so how is a subscription fee justified on something that isn't going to be improved upon from its current form? Can't remember the finer details of it anymore but I often recall the example of some Swedish military equipment company that produced some sort of armoured people mover. The product was good, the sales went really well, they took all the profits and reinvested them into R&D and improved the product even further. When they rolled out 2.0, they could not get any repeat customers because the original product was so good, so reliable that it didn't break and did not need replacing, so the company ended up going bankrupt. Out economic system just does not reward building things to last anymore. I'd actually argue that it never has, it's just gotten to a point of very high market saturation in most consumer products that it's become blatantly obvious. You can't even blame the companies themselves, these are the incentives baked into the core of the economy. It literally incentivises the inefficient use of resources. Economic efficiency prioritised over technological efficiency when it should be the opposite. It's utterly perverse and quite frankly disgusting. And then were ever-increasingly bombarded with the notion of 'sustainability' at every step, when quite frankly, any kind of notion of sustainability within the framework of an economy fully dependent on cyclical consumption is nothing more than a marketing slogan or an empty platitude. Being sustainable means consuming less, and we can't have that in an economic system hopelessly addicted to infinite growth. How that is supposed to be compatible with life on a finite planet I'll never know. The only way I see myself coping with it all mentally is to just care less and less. Sorry if that's a bit doom and gloom, I've kept myself up at night a few too many times mulling over this topic lately. To get back to cars, this sh*t is the reason I'm rebuilding my E46 almost from the ground up, and I honestly don't see myself ever buying a car much newer than that. At least not an ICE vehicle anyway.