2001 M3 Journey: Laguna Seca Blue Edition

[bavarian3]

Last pic is awesome! Nice work and DIY tips and tricks in your post. Cheers.

thanks! hope it can help some others.

Cold start will be getting a major revision this winter! My car warms up before the end of the block right now, so it's too warm to tune Glad you're out there enjoying it!

looking forward to it !

[Casa de Mesa]

Just read this entire build thread. Fantastic job with this car. Car looks absolutely mint now. Glad you're actually driving and enjoying it!!

Also, agree with that last pic with the 993 being pretty epic.

[bavarian3]

Just read this entire build thread. Fantastic job with this car. Car looks absolutely mint now. Glad you're actually driving and enjoying it!!

Also, agree with that last pic with the 993 being pretty epic.

Thanks! too kind. Hope to be on your restoration abilities one day.

[Arclitgold]

Too bad our diffuseurs aren't selling cause fitment is spot on. Better than the first MEC production batch/mold

Now you give me motivation to work on my LSB and get my CSL parts painted!

where might one pick up one of these diffusers?

[Gt4]

where might one pick up one of these diffusers?

Just send me a pm here on this forum

[bavarian3]

Been a while, friends! It's been a winter of enjoying the car as we got little rain in CA.

I did work on a couple small projects, and have some big ones coming. So I'll get back to things here to get warmed up.

ZCP steering wheel trim retrofit

The titan grey steering wheel was part of the plan to go with black interior. As I switched gears to cinnamon, I preferred more black accents to go with it.

I got a cheap set of beatup zcp trim on ebay and immediately sent it out to our trusty TexaZ3 for refinishing.

Removing and assembling the NOS button.



Ebay special



Nice!





The nice thing is I don't have to pull the steering wheel. Just unplug the battery, wait 30mins, then pull the airbag. The trim can then be removed. A look at the old, which I'll keep around if things change.




Now the tricky part. Wiring this up was a bit of a brain exercise. So heinzboehmer was gracious as always to help me problem solve a perfect solution. The reason for the added difficulty is I wanted to avoid splicing into factory wiring.

The TLDR of the solution:
Tap into the sport button ground at the DME side into the cruise control ground. To avoid splicing anything, you can simply use a Y connector harness solution as shown. So to be clear if you were splicing you would depin the cruise control wire from the dme, then splice it into the sport button wire at the dme.

The harness is simply to avoid splicing, acting as a y connector.








Just for reference - For non-smg cars, another solution is you could splice into the control center sport button ground(or any button you wish to activate with the i/o button), and the run a wire into the empty slot in the clock spring. This is a reasonable and easy solution, but if you have an early model like mine, the slot is actually blank with no pins!

All other models should use the same clock spring for cars that have smg or manual, but only smg cars will utilize it for the paddles I believe.





Looking good!





Everything works great. Now when I want a big NOS power boost I have it at the tip of my fingers. In all seriousness, hope this helps non-zcp folks that also want to wire their i/o button to something.

The one caveat to this is you won't have cruise control(well obviously since I won't have the button controls anymore), and if I did the Z4 stalk retrofit I would need to run another wire from the clock spring to the DME (no big deal). For whatever reason I rarely touch cruise control, even on road trips. On this vehicle cruise control would be used 0% of the time, so I'll opt to not do the retrofit.

A couple more shots with my cam even though the forum butchers quality.






Stay tuned. I'll show the install of my strut brace since my car never came with one.

[TexaZ3]

Looking good!

[freshprince2421]

Boooooooooring... wake me up when the matching Cinnamon Recaro Sportsters arrive.

JK this car is freaking awesome! Amazing restoration.

[bavarian3]

Boooooooooring... wake me up when the matching Cinnamon Recaro Sportsters arrive.

JK this car is freaking awesome! Amazing restoration.

Ha ha, patience and you may be entertained! Thanks!