Vass

Just got the plates today and went to town on the rear bracket. On second look it was slightly different to yours but essentially the same. Mine had a bottom part connecting both sides as well that I've mostly trimmed off now. Here's what's left of it. Can see how far down it extended originally from where the paint is damaged. Will need to touch those up.

No need to get so butthurt over an innocuous comment there, dad. Once you sober up you might realize it was actually a solid recommendation. From personal experience with a few N42/N46's, they're barely worth the effort of DIY upkeep, and never worth it if you're paying a professional to do it for you. Unless making financial mistakes is your favorite hobby? On top of the numerous, well documented issues plaguing the horrid 4-pot engines, the 120i's, despite being utterly gutless, also somehow like to chew though differentials like they're Weet-Bix. There's really no lesson to be learnt from being the 1,000th person to step on that rake. People generally get into BMW's for the perceived prestige of owning a luxury brand, or for the performance aspect. The 120i is not a luxury car whilst offering the performance of a 90's Corolla. Literally the worst of both worlds. You get to swallow the premium maintenance costs whilst not getting a taste of any upsides. The fatherly thing here would be to urge her to sell the damn thing before it inevitably shits the bed on her, and get something with a proper engine. An electric scooter for example. But seeing as you did nothing to prevent her from getting one in the first place, I'm guessing she's not the favorite child anyway?

Yeah the rear is exactly the same as yours. So far I've trimmed off the bit that was protruding beyond the top edge of the plate. Once the slim plate arrives I'll trim off whatever is protruding beyond the bottom, or try to move it up somehow. Unfortunately it seems to only have a thickening where the existing rivnuts are and the rest of the plinth is a very thin slab of plastic so probably not possible to add extra rivnuts where I would want them.

Yeah I'll post it up once done. I've already trimmed the front one once as the Japanese plinth was protruding beyond the standard plate as well. Moved the plate up to line up with a protruding edge, added a couple of rivet nuts to hold in the new position and trimmed off the plastic protruding beyond the bottom edge of the plate. Before After The rear bracket will be a bit trickier as the bracket doesn't seem to have enough thickness to add in new rivnuts where I would want them but will figure something out. Double sided tape option doesn't really appeal to me.

Just ordered black slim plates for mine. Planning to just trim the jap brackets to size and go with that. Luckily I don't have the issue of any screw holes remaining visible on the E46.

I'd take the 120 straight to Pick-A-Part

Saw this featured on Kiwicarlife, cool to see it in action up close. The wheels look mint. Hope you find an Msport rear bumper for it, would tidy it up nicely.

Preach! Stupidly did that once, was holding the slave in my hand whilst a mate was pumping the pedal. Don't even think a power bleeder was involved at the time. The rod suddenly shot out with a vengeance Luckily wasn't aimed at anything important and managed to reassemble it but lesson learned...

EWS is BMW-speak for immobilizer. Sometimes the DME (ECU) can randomly go out of sync with the EWS and refuse to start. Not to definitively say that that's your issue but could be one of a number of possibilities. Have is scanned to see if there's any codes, could be something simple and obvious.

Not sure if related. Saw this pop up that I thought was interesting.

Looks great in white and Msport that. I'm contemplating getting one for the wife to replace her 3.0L Outback. That also gets around 13L/100 of mostly city driving so not expecting much of an upgrade in terms of fuel economy. Thinking more in terms of ease of maintenance of having several M54's in the family. Heated seats are an absolute must too. I'm sure the maintenance items you've outlined will help to a degree. Also remove and clean out the ICV whilst dealing with the throttle body. Worn VANOS seals can also affect low down torque and fuel economy but that's a bit more involved. You'll probably recoup an extra 1, maaaaaybe 2L/100km doing all that, don't imagine it'll make an earth shattering difference though. I was struggling to stick to 12-13L/100km in my old 325ci with the same engine. The X3 being AWD and significantly bigger & heavier those numbers aren't that surprising I comparison.

Keen to see how you go with it. Not that I need bigger brakes on mine but keen to take on a similar project eventually. My plan is to go with a simple 135i setup, mostly because it's tried and tested, adapters are readily available and the brakes themselves are relatively easy to come by locally. My main fear being that shipping on such bulky items will be the biggest killer, not awfully keen on dumping several grand on brakes alone. Wonder how 135i brake performance compares to the setup you're going with. Pretty sure all non-M E46's had the same master cylinder so your 318i one will be the same as on a 330i. From what I've read on the 135i conversion the master cylinder and booster should hold up just fine with the bigger brake setup, so long as they're in good working order. Pretty keen to know whether there are any out-the-box upgrade options out there though.

Servicing is more expensive being a turbo diesel. Parts aren't as easily available due to not being as common as M54's. Diesels in general don't particularly like short trips so isn't ideal if all you're doing is commuting 5km to work and back every day. They need a good longer bash at full operating temperature on a regular basis to prevent EGR valves and such from clogging up. The general "tractor" stereotype I guess.

Half the fuel consumption. M57 is one of the most bulletproof engines BMW has ever produced. More torque than an M3.

I've still got a set but down in Christchurch so freight might be tricky. https://www.facebook.com/share/kUNUGaKiQafDBGXj/

I find it a bit hard to believe how bolts tightened to 10Nm can be single use. Sounds more like a cash grab rather than a serious structural integrity consideration. What's the actual indication of a single use item on RealOEM? I don't see it. https://www.realoem.com/bmw/enUS/showparts?id=KG92-EUR-09-2012-E92N-BMW-M3&diagId=11_4112

Nice one! Is the use of an actual flame critical or would a heat gun work just as well?

Doubt you'll find much locally, especially down in Queenstown. Personally I barely buy anything locally nowadays since you get taken for an absolute ride 95% of the time. If they have it, Spareto is usually the cheapest place to get good quality parts. Schmiedmann has more availability but shipping prices can get ridiculous real quick. FCP Euro has the website to use but isn't quite as cheap as the other two. RockAuto is more hit and miss but also good for certain parts. Between those you should be well sorted. Shipping takes a week or less so won't hold you up much.

Nice score on the wheels, do look like a cool design but that black-silver-red and blue combo just looks hella busy. Would be ideal if they were straight silver. Almost a shame they were recently redone since it makes less sense to repaint them now hahah

Went 50-50 with a mate on this spontaneous project car a few months ago and so far have been struggling to pinpoint what the hell it is that's wrong with it. And just to save everyone the trouble of pointing it out - the engine is what's wrong with it. I know. It's an absolute dog of a 4-banger. Hoping to narrow it down a bit from there. Wouldn't have touched it otherwise but what it's got going for it is that it's got 3 pedals from factory, so that brings the score up a bit. We've (seemingly) tried everything to get her running and are pretty much at our wit's end so hoping the wider hive mind might have some helpful ideas to try and save this ugly duckling. BACKSTORY She's a rather gutless little 316ti with the dreaded N42B18 engine and 165,330km on the clock. All we know is around 3 years ago it developed a "rough idle" and was parked up. A local rally shop owner bought it from one of his clients with the intentions of dropping an M54 in it and turning it into a rally car but never got around to it. After 3 years of sitting it now wouldn't fire up at all so having lost interest he decided to get rid after some quick attempts to get her running didn't lead to anything. I was alerted to it by @Eagle, recognised the name of the fella selling it, quickly got in touch and snapped it up. One other historical tidbit is that in 2018 at 160,700km it got brand new timing chains, guides, tensioners and a bunch of associated seals & gaskets, from Christchurch BMW no less, so it's got one of the 3 big ticket items taken care of at least. WHAT WE'VE DONE Started off by giving the car a good wash, chucked in a battery and read the codes. Checked out the VVT motor only to find the lead not even plugged it. In addition some of the sheeting on the wires was damaged that got fixed with some electrical tape. Plugged back in, cleared the codes, the car will crank and crank but won't start. Checked the fuses, checked fuel pump relay all seemed good. No sound from the fuel pump with the ignition on so sounded like it wasn't priming but seems like these cars operate in some weird, different way, more on that later. Left it there and came back another weekend. Hooked up the battery, tried to start it more out of blind hope than anything and to our massive surprise it fired right up after a few cranks. Even held idle nice and steadily. What a weird little thing. Drove it from the paddock into the garage and onto the hoist. It drove fine but it was stuck in limp mode, still due to the VVT (valvetronic motor) and wouldn't rev above 2.5k RPM. Up on the hoist we unhooked some fuel lines, drained the remainder of the old fuel from the tank and put some 10-15L of fresh 95 in there. Dropped her back down only for her to refuse to start up again... Cranked away for ages but no dice. Removed the valve cover, checked & cleaned the eccentric shaft sensor, swapped in a spare valvetronic motor from a newer 120i, hooked it all up, ran the stop limit adaptation procedure with a scan tool - all ran fine indicating the valvetronic motor and eccentric shaft sensors were both operational. Buttoned it all up, still crank no start. Good thing is no VVT-related codes have come back since, suggesting the fault being to do with a faulty old valvetronic motor. Only code remaining in the DME is for the ambient temperature sensor, which is inconsequential. Decided to check compression and found ~50 PSI across all cylinders which made no sense since the car was running earlier that day. Having read about it potentially being due to the cylinders being flooded with fuel from all the cranking, getting washed down and not sealing properly, assumed it was that and left it there. Came back to it a few weeks later and checked compression again before trying to fire up and risking flooding the cylinders again. Found 170-200 PSI this time around, which was more like it. Also checked fuel pressure. Not sure how these cars operate but with ignition on fuel pressure remained at 0. Only after starting cranking it spiked to 45 PSI then dropped down to 40, and kept falling gradually. After a whole heap of cranking we managed to get her running again just the once. Fuel pressure remained steady at 45 PSI at idle, then dropped with the engine turned off and went all the way down below 20 PSI just 20-something minutes later, indicating potential leaky injectors. So we got the fuel rail out to check. VIDEO Weirdly enough, with the injectors unhooked the car actually fired up for a few seconds and sounded pretty good doing it, much to my mate's audible surprise. The spray pattern seemed roughly consistent and we couldn't note any leakage afterwards with the ignition off either. Spark plugs were completely soaked and reeked of fuel so we swapped in a spare set. Also swapped out some coils for newer spares, checking spark prior to dropping them in. Crank no start. Decided to try another weird experiment by dropping the sparks & coils half way down into the cylinders, which did look quite cool. VIDEO Not sure what this actually tells us apart from maybe that the firing sequence looks weirdly random and inconsistent? The Pattern should be 1342 but it looked like it it skipped one or two cylinders nearly every round. Maybe that's just because it's not all sealed perfectly tight, other than that no idea why it would be off. Bolted everything back on but still... Got fuel, got spark, got compression. Crank no start. Our informed approach has since descended into a crude exercise of 'throwing sh*t at the wall and seeing what sticks' with nothing seemingly sticking. We've since swapped out to a good second hand fuel pump, swapped out fuel filter & regulator, swapped out injectors, swapped out the crank sensor... Haven't been able to get the car running again at all ever since the trick with the injectors. And it got some fresh oil somewhere along the way as well. LIST OF POTENTIALS Take apart & clean out ignition switch Check DME connections for oil contamination Check fuses in DME box, swap out DME relay Update DME software? Borrow timing tool & check timing (probably should have been the first thing to do, although would it have run at all if it were off?) But yeah, that's where we're at. Sorry for the long waffle but thought I'd best lay it all out there. Good thing is that if we were to turn around and part the poor thing out we'd still easily break even so we haven't crossed into silly-territory just yet. As frustrating as it's been at least all we've got to lose is our own time. At this point we're trying to get her running more out of curiosity rather than some pressing desperation but we're quickly running out of ideas. She's a nice wee car and would be a shame to strip it for parts. The compacts aren't the prettiest things out there but I do quite like the look of it in full Msport trim, especially after seeing how well @Harper's one turned out. Was hoping to get her up and running to compare and potentially swap it out with my Swift Sport as a daily driver since it's still a much nicer and more familiar place to be rather than the Suzuki. Other idea was to swap in an M54 but at that point it becomes another weird project car that neither me nor my mate need, nor is there any market for if we were to build to sell. As fun as it would be with a 6-pot it'd be a dumb idea for a daily driver since it'd never get anywhere close to the 7L/100km I get in the Swift, and I already have my "fun" M54 car. Anyway, any thoughts, ideas, words of wisdom much appreciated

You really really really don't need that retrofit kit. Yes, it's not that much money but it's a waste of money none the less for what it is - 3 simple wires with standard BMW pins used in 90% of plugs throughout the car and 2 overly complicated splice connectors. I thought there was more to it so that's what I used the first time doing this retrofit (I bought the same kit for $21 from FCP 3 years ago, and even then it was overpriced) but have found literally no benefit to it. I've done 4-5 of these retrofits since and have never bothered, have just depinned and repurposed wires from parts cars and used a pair of these simple splice connectors instead. They work just as well and the end result is way less bulky than the weirdly complicated connectors that come in that kit. I've got a whole wiring loom sitting in a box in the garage, more than happy to depin some wires for you and post them your way if you don't happen to have any laying around already. Honestly, couldn't recommend that kit any less, not worth wasting money on.

A few months ago I helped @Carbon manual swap his E39 530i. Awesome car, a stunning topaz blue 2001 Msport sitting on Style 65's. Shortly after the swap he stumbled upon a cheap, grandpa spec 530i and just couldn't pass it up. Despite the newly manual swapped one having tonnes of maintenance items ticked off and the newest purchase, although being tidy for its age and price, being borderline neglected, he was adamant about the former being noticeably low on power in comparison. My butt dyno wasn't as well calibrated so I couldn't feel much of a difference but to make it scientific, he organised to put both of them on a dyno power run and find out for sure. To satisfy my own curiosity and to add an extra point of comparison, I tagged along. Three M54B30's put to the test. First one up was the 2001 Msport 530i with around 150k km's on the clock, manual swapped with a 5-speed ZF and single mass Valeo flywheel. Maintenance included a rebuilt VANOS, rebuilt DISA, new fuel filter, new genuine camshaft & MAF sensors amongst other things so by all means well up to standard and running the latest EU2 tune. Somehow, it only managed to push out 250 Nm & 157 hp. The air-fuel ratio held steady up to around 4k RPM at which point it fell off a cliff, taking the power numbers down with it. The drop-off seems to occur roughly at the point VANOS and DISA kick in so we suspect one or the other. Currently in the process of swapping over VANOS units so will see what that does. Second was my Touring. Roughly 10k km's post engine rebuild, all reasonable and unreasonable maintenance addressed and well documented. The torque curve looked a wee bit better but still ended up low on power, pushing out 255 Nm & 166 hp. It seemed to be running on the rich side throughout. The tuner said he usually aims for an air-fuel ratio of around 13 when remapping NA engines, mine were floating around 11. He was fairly confident that with a remap there's easily another 20 hp in there and that he could tune for it but it's best to figure out why the mixture is as rich as it is in the first place. And lastly, the grandpa spec 2002 530i automatic with around 180k km's. Still very tidy for its age but out of the three definitely the least looked after and borderline mechanically neglected. Post-dyno we also discovered the DISA to be completely broken and non-functioning - the flap being completely loose and dangling around the shaft, unconnected. Lucky that the infamous pin hadn't dropped into the engine. All this made the results all the more puzzling... 268 Nm (disregarding the early peak) and 186 hp. What the actual hell. The M54B30 is supposed to produce 228 hp at the crank. Account for ~15% in driveline losses, the figure to aim for should be 194 hp at the hubs. The blue car fell 37 hp (19%) short of that figure, mine 28 hp (14%). The grey "broken" car had barely lost any power whilst we and our pReVeNtAtIvE mAiNtEnAnCe had basically managed to downgrade our engines to M54B25's. I guess the takeaway here being that we've both just wasted stupid amounts of money on upkeep and trivial brand new parts when all they needed was a healthy dose of neglect. Less is more. Grandpa spec FTW. I went back to the readings I pulled when I suspected I might have a vacuum leak, with the LTFT's sitting at 8.6%. Sure enough, the 8.6% actually had a '-' in front of it so I had been running rich this whole time, just wasn't clued up on how to read fuel trims properly to realise it at the time. I've since read up on there being a faulty batch of Hengst fuel filters out there with faulty fuel pressure regulators that produce around 60 PSI of pressure at the rail instead of the spec of 50.76 +/- 2.9 PSI. Sure enough, I had installed a Hengst filter just this past October so suspected it might be the cause of my rich running. I hoped for that to be the cause since that would have been an easy fix. So I went out and got a fuel pressure tester to verify only to find that it sits at a steady 52 PSI at idle - well within spec. With the engine turned off, the pressure quickly drops to 48 PSI and then holds steady for at least half an hour, which would also rule out leaky injectors. I tried clearing all adaptations, then ran the car at idle, logging running parameters and sure enough, after a few minutes STFT's shoot straight into the negative territory, sitting at around -15%. Something's not quite right and I'm not sure how to troubleshoot it further. The lack of power itself isn't really that noticeable since I barely ever push the car to its limit but constant rich running can't be good for it. MAF, O2 sensors are brand new OE, DISA is rebuilt and seemingly operating properly (which, judging by the grey car, might actually be a detriment), ICV cleaned, fresh VANOS seals etc etc. I could just go back to the dyno and have the car professionally tuned to aim for an AFR of 13-14 but would be good to figure out why it's currently running as rich as it is. Otherwise, if the issue eventually somehow fixes itself I might end up on the lean side instead. Could it be something to do with the EU2 tune and it being adjusted to the petrol used in Europe that's somehow different to what we're using here? Then again all 3 cars are running EU2 tunes and 95 octane so that shouldn't be a point of difference. All in all, the dyno experience was a good one and well worth doing, despite coming out of it slightly demoralised. Will need to do some more thorough data logging and keep myself up at night even more. Once the car is ready to see the light of day again that is.

Yes please! That's further down on the priority list for now but keen to know what works for when I get around to it.

It's a relatively straightforward job, no coding required, just 3 wires to run - 1 to the DME and 2 to splice into the LCM wiring. So long as that's done correctly it will just work. This guide is probably the most detailed one out there. I've got a spare set of Msport sway bars (24mm F & 19mm R) but yeah, down in Christchurch unfortunately. Happy to pass them along if you know of anyone heading up your way.

Funny you say that. I recently discovered my B30 isn't as quick as a B30 either 😅 Still enjoy driving it although it's been a good 2 months since I have... I've not done anything on the audio front apart from the headunit so doubt you'll find anything useful.