not an m325i

[m325i 709]

Had to drop it....

Pick it up 2moro

Edited September 4, 2006 by m325i

[Guest Spargo]

Word Son.

[petone 0]

Not too shabby,

Variable center diff? water spray? any other cool toys?

[Palazzo 477]

5 star alarm? Never leaving it alone in public? Garaged? Nice car though.

[Guest Andrew]

Congrats on the buy Nick - will have to have a showdown with your old car in the future

[smithy 0]

arhhh slow car

[nz320i 0]

man wish i couldve bought your old car! nice man, i have to admit its tempting to just buy something new and quick!

[Guest Spargo]

arhhh slow car

Quoted so you can't go back and change it.

[m325i 709]

5 star alarm? Never leaving it alone in public? Garaged? Nice car though.

Yes to all three. Plus the world of 25yo+ insurance is fantastic.

Since this is a BMW site, (and it's a bit cheeky even posting it),here are some things that i have noticed from driving 50bazzilionquadmillion of them.

-Jap cars are so cheaply made (i forgot this)

-STi's are all rooted

-Under steer is immediately apparent

-Nothing jap (maybe an ae86?), feels as raw as e30

-for pure 'funness' to drive, e30 is pretty good.

But 206kw and air conditioning make for a pretty nice combo.

Specs:

1998

V4 sti

75km

3" from the turbo, with a real nice high quality jap muffler. Its pretty loud.

earth kit (wtf?)

I must have driven 15. Piston slap, clutch shudder, clutch slippage, bent pannels, noisey turbo. One even blew up on the test drive (cracked radiator).

will have to have a showdown with your old car in the future

Im keen to track it at some stage... Edited September 4, 2006 by m325i

[*sic 1]

sell out.

[Guest Spargo]

earth kit (wtf?)

Pretty common on the jap / US car modding scene

On the face of it, it sounds ridiculous to be tying the grounds of various pieces of car electrical equipment together with an earthing kit, since by definition they're all tied together by the chassis of the vehicle, in any normal negative-ground automobile.

However, it's not so silly when you consider the lousiness of the earth connections that various devices may have. Most notably, the battery itself in many cars often has less than perfect clips on its terminals - corrosion is common between the clips and the wires that're crimped into them, thanks to the proximity of sulfuric acid. And other things can have bad earth connections too, if there's rust or slight looseness. The connection may look OK when you apply a multimeter to it with the car stopped, but may become crummy when the engine's running.

Most of the people who buy pre-packaged grounding kits, though, are going to install them in a vehicle that's already been dressed up to some extent, and is probably either pretty new or, at least, well-maintained. In these cases, everything should already have a decent earth - or can be given one for free, by unscrewing the contact bolts and cleaning out any corrosion, muck or paint that's between the metal surfaces. If all your battery currently has is one dinky old corroded cable connecting its negative terminal to the chassis, there could be some justification to replacing that with a foot of super-chunky wire and cleaning the contact points, especially if you're running a big stereo and/or lots of after-market lights. But as far as the full earthing kits go, only if you're adding that bling-blingy decorative copper octopus to a car that's not actually in a good state of repair - which I'm sure some people are - is it likely, to my mind, that you'll be achieving much.

Let's humour the earthing kit people, though. What could a kit do?

If all you're talking about is simple DC loads like amps and headlights, I think the improvements people report from extra earthing have to exist only in their minds, unless something was wrong (in a way that could be fixed without extra hardware) in the first place. Bad car stereo installations may have a bad earth path, restricting the current the amplifier(s) can draw. So may badly installed after-market light kits. So may the factory components, of course, and not necessarily only in cars made in England. But, generally speaking, adding parallel earth wires for that sort of gear ought not to achieve anything.

Electronic equipment like engine control computers and their networks of sensors are a different matter; they may well Go Strange if their design assumes a clean 12/13.8V supply but they actually get something glitchy and fadey. Any well designed electronic device should be immune to all normal power input weirdness, of course (which is why super-fancy power conditioning devices for stereo systems, especially very expensive power cables, are such a stupid concept), and the automotive industry's been using electronic control systems for long enough now that they ought to know what their gear is at all likely to be fed. But then again, these things are built down to a price, and even in performance cars a percentage point or two of engine power is going to be very hard for the user to detect, even on the drag strip. If that's all the car makers sacrifice by not running their own fat earth cables all over the place, they may be perfectly happy with the situation.

For this reason, I find reports like this one, which found a massive 1%-or-so gain in peak dyno power with an earthing kit, plausible enough. The complexity of the engine management system, in a modern tweaky performance car, is sufficient that improving the earthing may well actually do something.

If people were claiming really noticeable gains then I'd be very suspicious - if bad earthing was costing 40 horsepower, the manufacturers really would have noticed - but the marginal gains reported, assuming they're not just testing errors, aren't ludicrous.

[m325i 709]

sell out.

Brother...

[cainchapman 0]

So "Hairdryer" would be a suitable new name then.

Nice car though.

Edited September 4, 2006 by cainchapman

[ED1RTY 2]

A mate of mine had one of these a year or so ago, c fun cars, 4wd makes a hell of a difference. He upgraded to a version 8 sti, now that thing hauls ass, ran a 13.2 quarter mile at night wars, sti standard with a boost tap in full street trim, (subs etc) and a passenger in the car! Still Japanese though, just dont feel as 'strong' as BMWs...

Still nice car dude you import it or buy in NZ?

[bumpstop325 0]

Another one for the masses. Those bus's are just as common as corolla's but at night time.

[CaM 0]

good buy man.

no more common than an e30

should be fun...

any mods planned man?

[m325i 709]

front mount

possum link

volk wheels

...I wish