Karter16's Silbergrau E46 M3 Journal

[Will]

Well another weekend day, another nap time, another short window to get some stuff done on the car.

... I decided that today was finally replacing the gas struts on the boot so that the car no longer sounds like a dying goat when you open the boot lid.

Hahahaha groan like a dying goat. Love that description.

Reminds me that I need to order those struts, too.

[SeñorEnglish]

Great work!

[karter16]

Well another weekend day, another nap time, another short window to get some stuff done on the car.

The plan for the day was replacing the steering wheel with the new OE item that I purchased last year, but while I waited after disconnecting the battery to be sure to be sure that the airbags were clear to work with I decided that today was finally replacing the gas struts on the boot so that the car no longer sounds like a dying goat when you open the boot lid.

The old one






The new one - not genuine because I couldn't justify $50 more each to get the "E46 M3" stamp on the genuine one, given these are probably going to start groaning again after a couple of years anyway.






Then it was on to swapping out the wheel. Pressing in on the clock springs to release the airbag is the trickiest part of the exercise, but even that was pretty straightforward as I had the new wheel to refer to which meant I was able to see exactly what it was I was trying to press on, and how much force was needed to depress the spring. I had the old one out in fairly short order.






And the new one was even easier to install. Pushing the airbag back into place at the end is extremely satisfying.











Am planning on getting the dash and gear surround trim in Titan Shadow at some point so that it all matches/looks original.

[karter16]

Well with a wife recovering from a major surgery and two small children I haven't had a lot of time to get down to the car, but I did manage to grab a couple of hours today while the smaller of the tiny humans napped.

The sports seats were out in no time (surprisingly easier to manhandle out than various forum posts had led me to believe, they're not THAT heavy and unwieldy), and sadly plainly showing how long it is since I properly cleaned the interior 🙈






This finally gave me the opportunity to get the wet vac out and finally clean up the coffee that had presumably been spilt by a previous owner of the car. It looks like it must have spilt on the passenger seat and dripped through to the carpet. (underside of the seat did not show signs of coffee however so 🤷♂️). I did a vacuum and wet vac on the bits that needed it. Just did a fairly quick clean, as still intend to pull everything out and do a deep clean at some point in the future (I was running on limited time today).






That's better!

Then it was time to get the bucket seats into the car. Being significantly lighter this was fairly easy, I used towels etc. round the door to make sure I didn't scratch the seats, but it wasn't really needed as it was easy to fit them through the door and into place.






After connecting the wiring it was on to getting the seat placed properly and torqued down. I followed the advice that M3_Power had given me to make sure you keep sliding the seat back and forwards on the sliders as you tighten it down, to make sure its sliding freely and locking into place correctly with all 4 locking pins when you select a position. That was all pretty straightforward and in short order I had the passenger seat installed.






Then it was on to the driver's side, and again just a case of repeating the process. More straightforward and quicker to do than I was expecting, and THEY LOOK AWESOME!

I haven't had a chance to take the car for a drive yet, but will try to take it for a drive tomorrow. These photos also highlight that I really need to get the new steering wheel installed, as the old one is looking pretty bad now. Might try to get that done tomorrow as well, will see how I go.

In terms of the seats I'm super happy with them, they're exactly what I was wanting and it's so satisfying having bucket seats that are genuine, period correct, look awesome, and are in amazing condition. They were of course $$$, so I wasn't completely sure I wouldn't experience some form of buyer's regret, but I have not so far 😂

Very happy 😍

[karter16]

Great news about your boys, glad to hear everything is on track so far. Good health and success to you brotha, your car looks amazing and the care you show it really shines. Those seats are MINT.

Thank you very much - that means a lot :-)

[WestBankM4]

Great news about your boys, glad to hear everything is on track so far. Good health and success to you brotha, your car looks amazing and the care you show it really shines. Those seats are MINT.

[karter16]

Well it's an exciting week in the life of this project.

Around 18 months ago I decided that I wanted to take a bit of a deviation from keeping the car stock, and look into options around bucket seats. Although I want to ensure that I can always revert the car exactly to stock, I felt that bucket seats would provide a significant improvement to the driving experience of the car. I find I move around a fair bit in the standard sports seats, so wanted something that would hold me better.

I looked into many options for seats, and fairly quickly zeroed in on the Cobra Nogaros. I was keen though to keep the look of the seats as in keeping and period correct as possible so I reached out early last year to Cobra to enquire about custom upholstery with Alcantara and laser fabric to replicate the genuine CSL seats. I was pretty excited to hear that they were working on the Munich Edition Nogaros (which were released later that year).

Unfortunately the other key requirement I had is that I didn't want to have to go through the process of getting a cert. I spent quite a bit of time trying to work out whether there was a path to that using OE sliders, Brey-Krauss (or similar) mounts and Cobra Nogaros. Slid all the way forward you get very close to a 300mm gap, but the other key requirement that the sliding mechanism be accessible to the rear passenger was going to be hard to achieve (and pretty much impossible without going down the cert path).


As a result, when the Munich Edition Nogaros were released I ultimately didn't pull the trigger (although I still think they're a cool option)




There was of course one other possible option which met all of my exacting requirements...


I'm now the proud owner of a pair of genuine CSL seats 😍

These particular seats came out of a low mileage car and have sat in storage for the last 10 years, so as a result are in amazing condition considering they are 20 years old.

I only picked them up last night, and probably won't have time until the weekend to get them into the car, but I'll certainly be updating here when I do!

[karter16]

Relocation frame for the climate control arrived today - glad I didn't pay for express shipping as it came super quick anyway.

brand new - manufactured in 2007. Not sure if this is old stock, or they haven't been manufactured since, but anyway, I now have one!






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[karter16]

So the car has always had a fair amount of clunk when shifting load onto the drivetrain (particularly when upshifting under power). It persisted after the full drivetrain rebuild I did a few years ago, and I was beginning to wonder if the diff was knackered.

As I was doing research around this issue I came across this thread: https://nam3forum.com/forums/forum/m...nk-to-no-clunk which reported what sounded like similar symptoms and noted great improvement with doing a full factory reset, bleed and relearning of the SMG system using INPA (as opposed to the soft reset which can be done by pulling back on the paddles).

This afternoon I decided to give this a go (with a helping of trepidation as if your SMG is weak in any way the factory reset has a tendency to point this out during the bleeding and shifting process). This led to the first win of the afternoon:





Green for good. The SMG reset ran no problems.

Second win for the afternoon was my son and I took the car for a test drive and the clunk is completely resolved. Can shift up down through the rev range both on and off the power and the clunk is gone. Would have done this long ago had I realised 🙄 - learn something every day!




Second thing I did was something I've been meaning to for ages. After I did the VANOS rebuild some years ago I ran the VANOS test in DIS, and was noting the intake times were longer than ideal - indeed they were above 400ms. Made a note to test again once things had bedded in, but life got in the way and I never did it. Ran it today and everything looks good. Intake times around 250ms and Exhaust times around 200ms. Not ideal, but within range so I'm happy for now.




In new parts news I've ordered the climate control relocation kit as I can't stand not having CarPlay any longer. After much to and fro I've decided I can accept the non-OE look of a modern unit fro the improved day-to-day usability. I'll box all the original stuff so it can be returned to original as/when needed.

[karter16]

A package finally arrived from Schmiedmann today. Some of the parts probably aren't very high volume and there was a bit of a wait on some of them being available, but Schmiedmann got everything in last week and managed to get it shipped out before their summer vacation.

• Mouldings for rear side windows
• Front door channel seals
• Inner window channels
• inside entrance covering panels
• Entrance covers
• A pillar airbag cover inserts
• couple of trim pieces around the doors
• Washer nozzle for headlight washer to replace the one that bailed on me during a drive 😫

[karter16]

So last night I got round to doing something I’ve been meaning to for a long time - flashed the GDSMG2 module with the ‘255’ CSL binary using WinKFP. I also flashed the DME with the CSL SMG shifting and rev matching parameters and the clutch inertia parameters using BMW Flash and the ECUWorx MSS5X Binary Modification Tool.

To provide stable supply to the battery I hooked the car up to our Subaru with jumper leads during the flashing process to minimise the bricking risk.





I then flashed the GDSMG2 module first with WinKFP:



Followed by taking a partial copy of the DME user data area, modifying it with the ECUWorx tool, and then flashing the modified binary back to the DME:



The MSS5X Binary Modification Tool is great. So easy to use and such a time saver. I am completely confident in my ability to modify the binary by hand, but I spend a fair chunk of my time in the depths of software, so when it comes to extra-curricular car activities I was more than happy to spend $40 to save the time and mental effort that would be required.

The flashing process went flawlessly for me, and I was all done in about 45 mins. For anyone doing it my advice is as follows:

1: Ensure that your programming platform is stable and working. I gave my hardware, OS cable, etc a good work out with INPA and ISTA first to get as much confidence as I could that the connection to the car seemed reliable.

2: Make sure you have a stable power supply. Either jumper to another (running) car, Or fork out for a supply mode charger.

3: Read up carefully on the process, make sure you know the steps and that you have everything in place, you don’t want to be messing around figuring stuff out when you’re in the middle of doing it.

4: Make sure you understand that flashing modules over OBDII is inherently risky, and that you can’t eliminate all risk. Make sure you can live with it going bad, and that you have a plan for how to resolve if you end up with a bricked module.




So onto the CSL binary and DME updates themselves…

Everyone says how much better the CSL binary is. I’ve heard lots about how it’s faster. To be honest I wasn’t sure if I was going to like it. The standard SMG software has always seemed pretty decent to me, and it’s plenty fast to begin with, so I wasn’t sure I wanted more speed and harshness.

Oh how wrong I was. The CSL flash is a bit faster, but the real benefits are how much smoother it is shifting under acceleration, and how wonderful the rev matching is on downshifting. It’s a revelation. It significantly improves the SMG function, without taking away any of the character that makes the SMG special to begin with. Suffice to say this change will be sticking round on my car!

[karter16]

Made a bit of progress this weekend. A couple of weeks ago I took the car for its WOF, which it failed for the first time in my ownership, due to the weeping high pressure power steering line. This was annoying but not unsurprising given it’s been weeping since 2017 and I’ve been intentionally avoiding it for as long as possible (given the new ones start to weep again fairly quickly anyway).

Anyhow, needs must, so I placed an order with Schmiedmann for the power steering line and associated bits and new wiper blades (which also needed doing) as well as a bunch of other stuff that fit in the box without increasing shipping cost.

That arrived this Friday just been:




So on Saturday I took the car round to Dad’s to swap it over (Dad’s driveway is a more advantageous angle than mine, so with that as the excuse I snaffled a few hours of his time as well).


I was thankful for a second pair of hands as although swapping the line is very straightforward, it was super annoying getting tools in to undo the vibration dampening brackets and put the new ones on.

The offending item:





It was good to actually do something on the car. Last time I really did any work on it was in 2019 before my son’s operation. It was pretty cool this time to have him helping me as well 😍






With the power steering fluid topped up and new wiper blades fitted the car is ready to pass it’s WOF recheck this coming week. The other items will remain on the shelf for now (except perhaps for the rear boot lid struts because the honking noise annoys me).

The other thing I’ve been doing this week is setting up an old MacBook as my workshop PC (this involved barbaric things such as using a flash drive to install Windows 10 on it, manually installing drivers, and other such horrors that I thought belonged in the 2000’s). Anyway it’s all setup nicely now. Currently using it with my K+D CAN cable but will probably purchase an ICOM interface at some point so that I can hopefully retire my DIS VM for good!





Will be making another order from Schmiedmann this week - I have a fairly lengthy list of parts to get through, so biting the list off in chunks for now.

Till next time!

[Will]

Great work! Thanks for sharing the narrative and photos. The car looks fantastic.

[karter16]

Some “pieces of plastic” in my wife’s words arrived today. She’s right, they are pieces of plastic, but they’re special in that, unlike my current ones, these ones don’t have any scratches on them.

Was struggling to find them in stock anywhere so jumped on a pair I found being sold out of Lithuania.

they arrived and they have a manufacture date of end of Jan this year, so they can’t be THAT out of stock haha.




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[karter16]

Update #27

Dad dropped off the PLA test print on Saturday morning (can’t beat that for customer service!)

It’s turned out really well. I have one small modification to make (points for anyone who can spot what it is), but aside from that it’s spot on.



Dad has ordered a hardened nozzle for his printer (so it can handle the carbon fibre) and some filament so once that’s arrived we’ll be able to do a test print of the end product!


Also....


Nice surprise this morning! This arrived much sooner than expected!






I didn’t realise just how worn the old one was until I saw what they look and feel like brand new!

Expensive purchase, but going to make a big difference to the driving experience.