335D E91 Touring Project

[balinm 14]

Hi All

Starting this thread to keep track of this project.

My introduction to BMWs started while looking for a daily that would tick all the boxes. The important ones for me were: must be a wagon, must be auto (after driving a manual for the last 7 years and having recently joined the rat race of commuting, this point is very important), RWD or AWD, have a little bit of towing capacity for some light trailer/small tinny towing, must look good, and must perform reasonably well (decent power with nice handling). Initially I was looking for something Japanese but there really isn't a lot that ticks all these boxes, a gen 4 Subaru Legacy would be the only one I can really think of but I wasn't super keen in getting involved with boxer engines. So my attention turned to Euros, specifically BMW. I started looking at e46 wagons but quickly moved towards an e91 just with them being slightly more modern. I bought an msport alpine white 2007 325i e91 in August 2024. It had a few bits and pieces I appreciated, style 193 wheels with some newish dunlops, 35% tints all round, msport exterior and interior(silver interior trim is a must) and I fitted a westfalia towbar. This definitely ticked a lot of the boxes for me in terms of the chassis, I love the e91, it handles great, its comfortable, I can throw everything in the back, go camping and sleep in it, the interior is so quiet and rattle free (for the most part, wayyy better than anything japanese). But... I wasn't happy with the power, especially given the fuel consumption. After driving the car for 4 months I decided life is too short to drive a car that is both very thirsty and underpowered.

So I bought an artic metallic 2007 335d e91 in January 2025. This car came with quite a few bits and pieces that will definitely save some time in the future. It has hybrid turbos, upgraded intercooler, upgraded aluminium intercooler pipe (from turbo outlet to intercooler, this one usually causes issues), tuned to make 300hp and 660Nm at the wheels, has mca procomfort coilovers and lvvta cert for all the mods. There aren't that many of these on the market so I had to scoop this one up from Christchurch and drive it back. I would've had it transported but I had never done the drive from christchurch to auckland so I figured it was a great way to get to know the car. What a good car! It averaged 7.3L/100km on the drive up and its fair to say I wasn't going easy on it.

First thing on the agenda after a good wash was switching out the interior trims. Unfortunately it is not an m sport car so it came with wood grain interior, not my favourite. I switched this out with the door still and interior trims from the other car and it immediately changed the feel on the inside. I also switched the door speakers out from the other car, I upgraded the door speakers to aftermarkets in the 325i do I figured I would swap those across.

There are a few more things I've done since getting this car and the time if this post but I'll save those for the next post.

Edited Thursday at 06:46 PM by balinm

[Vass 937]

Great to have another touring afficionado on board. Love it! Did see this car for sale a wee while back, did look like a mighty fine package. Congrats on picking it up, the turbo diesels in those are absolute beasts. Love the wheels & body kit too. 

[balancerider 802]

Welcome @balinm - sometimes I feel like Bimmersport is the last bastion of the station wagon / 'touring' in NZ. M57 is a great engine and as you say even giving it the beans the fuel economy is still impressive.

That front bumper looks aftermarket - ? M3 replica. Would be nice to take it back to an OEM M-sport look, though I doubt M-sports came with that colour (Tasman Green?) as standard so would need to get the m-bumper painted. LCI halogen headlights and flush fit (vs the raised ones you have) roof rails would be nice cosmetic improvements as well.

[balinm 14]

@balancerider yeah from what I can tell it is an M3 rep bumper, a normal m3 bumper wouldn't fit non m fenders right? I would normally put myself squarely in the oem+ category but the m3 rep bumper is growing on me so far. It does have some real ricey imitation carbon mirror caps which will have to go at some point, or at least be painted. The colour is arctic metallic which is a pretty rare colour from what I understand, depending on the light it seems to be about 4 different colours. What do you reckon about halogens vs xenons? The raised roof rails will stay as it will end up with roof racks at some point.

[balancerider 802]

The flush rails probably make less sense if you are going to run racks permanently, but they are a cleaner look with racks off (see below)

pretty sure the xenon’s need self leveling (and maybe headlight washers) if you are going to run them properly which turns into an expensive exercise, pre-facelift lights aren’t too bad now but the retrofit would be a big job, whereas I think the post facelift halogens are plug and play and look a lot better as have angel eyes.

the colour is nice actually, haven’t seen any others.

[balinm 14]

Here is a longer update from the last month so...

The first point on my agenda was tearing into the engine bay to wrap my head around it, I've read and watched plenty online about these but nothing beats the real mccoy. From what I've read the things I wanted to check are: the turbo oiling system and the vacuum system. Checking how bad the CBU and oil in the intake was also on my list.

After pulling the engine cover, airbox and ducting it was pretty easy to inspect the turbo oiling system. It looks like the line from the engine to the distro block and the line from the distro block to the hp turbo have been replaced with AN line equivelants, just the lp turbo oem line remains, it looks a bit weepy around the rubber hose and seems to be leaking as the undertray has a decent puddle in it under the turbos, more on this later.

Getting further into it, pulling off the cowling, strut braces and rear engine cover there is easy access to all the intake manifold bolts. A few connectors, intake hose and nuts and bolts and the intake was off. Surprisingly the CBU isn't too bad, much better than I was expecting, definitely still in need of a good clean. Looks like there is plenty of oil getting throught the manifold seals and leaking down onto the engine, rocker cover gasket needs replacement too. A catchcan system is definitely on the cards to reduce the amount of oil getting through to the intake.

After putting it all back together this wrapped up the first little dive into the engine bay.

Another important item on the list was sorting out the paddle shifters. Who in their right mind decided that pulling on either would upshift and pushing on either would downshift? Anyways, simple fix, airbag out, swap some pins over and leave some disconnected. Now the left is downshift and right is upshift with pushing on the paddles not doing anything.

Onto the next saga, the turbo feed line. After some time I decided to look back into the oil leak on the exhaust side as I had cleaned the undertray and a large puddle had formed after only a week of driving. It looked like it was coming from the lp turbo oil feed line banjo where it connects to the distro block. After attempting to tighten this slightly I had that dreaded feeling of it getting loose again. It looks like whoever was here last had overtightened the banjo and stripped the thread in the distro block (it is only aluminium after all). There was lots of back and forth on this one before Dad and I reached the conclusion of cutting down the distro block to reveal the undamaged threads further down the block. The block was carefully chopped 5mm shorter with a hacksaw and was flattened smooth with a file mounted in the vice. The threads were then cleaned up with M10x1.0 tap and bottom tap (shoutout to Tony for lending and delivering these). Some new copper crush washers (suprisingly Mitre10 pulled through on these, at the end of the hardware aisle is a whole bunch of interesting hardware in draws, a good one to keep in mind) and everything was back together. After a week of driving it looks like the leak is sorted and the puddle hasn't returned yet.

After the last issue where the distro block had to be shortened the oil line down to the lp turbo was now slightly stretched and under some load so I ordered the fittings to replace it with AN straight away. Whitbread performance does aftermarket oil lines for the 335D so I copied their line routing and setup. Was pretty straightforward with some -3 PTFE line, 45deg -3 fittings and two -3 to washer seal adapters, one m10 and one m12. Although probably unnecessary I added some heat sleeving as it gets pretty hot on this side of the engine.

Edited Thursday at 06:49 PM by balinm

[Vass 937]

I imagine that intake would have been cleaned before, that looks veeeery clean. Does it still have EGR?

With uploading photos, I've found that for some reason the website runs into trouble with images above 2MB so I've started bumping down the resolution to get it under that. 

[balinm 14]

23 hours ago, Vass said:

I imagine that intake would have been cleaned before, that looks veeeery clean. Does it still have EGR?

With uploading photos, I've found that for some reason the website runs into trouble with images above 2MB so I've started bumping down the resolution to get it under that. 

Yeah very clean, quite hard to tell what the valves look like, a walnut blast to start fresh is definitely on my list of things to do, probably when I do an injector service. Nah EGR has been deleted.

Ok thanks, I'll drop the res and see if that helps.

[adro 1092]

Love a new pic heavy touring thread! Car looks great, look forward to the updates. 

[balinm 14]

Here is one more update to bring the thread up to speed, only a few minor details.

At some point I'll get some black and white euro plates but in the mean time the nz related stickers have to go. I orignially thought these were painted on but after looking closer they are stuck on afterwards. Peeling these off revealed the euro flag and 'D' country symbol, I was hoping they would be completely white across but it looks like the plates must be imported as blanks and covered in stickers. Ah well, suits the car better than the kiwi flag for the mean time.

 

Something else I wanted to try was swapping wheels with my other e91. With the car being on coilovers and on 19s the ride leaves a lot to be desired. The coilovers are MCA pro comforts and are pretty good but I think switching to 18s with some more sidewall will help.

The current wheels on the car are VMR VB3s (if anyone has a way of telling if they are real or not that would be great). In the front they are 19x9.5 +33 with a 235/35R19 tire and the rears are a 19x10 +38 with a 265/30R19 tire, running Nitto Invos all the way around so quite a nice tire. The fronts are much too stretched for my liking and even the rears have a little bit of stretch. 

The wheels on my other e91 are style 193s which I'm a huge fan of. They aren't as wide but can still fit a 255 in the rear which is plenty enough for this thing for now. They've only got 225s all round on them at the moment but they are dunlop sp sports so I'll run these for now. The offsets of a 193 are a little weak but nothing some spacers can't fix. I've got one set of 12mm spacers at the moment which I used on the rear but I'll get a set of 20mm for the rear and switch the 12mms to the front.

After swapping them onto the car I'm pretty stocked. The overall look of the car is much more OEM+ which I really like. I think at some point I'd like to get them painted a darker colour as they are pretty bright as is, something like a gunmental grey.

 

[elias 303]

So much better on the style 193s. You could get those wheels from OEM in ferric grey. Always thought they looked really good in that color, especially with a meaty tire and some spacers to get them sitting flush. 

[Vass 937]

7 hours ago, balinm said:

 

I thought the font on those looked a bit off. I'm assuming they're not NZ-issued? Just a word of warning, I had a colleague that got himself a set made overseas for his E36, looked to use a similar font and had German colors on the side. Soon after got pulled over and got slapped with a fine for running illegal plates, $200-300 iirc. Yours don't stick out as obviously as his did but just takes one picky cop to land you in trouble.