Karter16's Silbergrau E46 M3 Journal

[0-60motorsports]

Over the break I've been pretty busy working on the house and having fun times with the family. Since finishing the rear view mirror I've done a few bits and pieces on the car.

I've pulled the 6CD changer and bluetooth module out of the boot. I have no need for them right now, and indeed I have to pull the CD changer apart and figure out what's wrong with it. I've therefore packaged them up and shelved them, along with the two big brackets. Might as well save on the weight while the car is not completely stock.

Relatedly I've also been doing some CAD work to mock up some brackets for the OE amplifier. I could buy the BMW part, but it weighs half a kilo and would cost me $75, whereas if I 3D print some brackets they'll weigh next to nothing and will be free.

I've done a first mockup to check fitment etc. and even at 3mm thickness it's held in surprisingly well. I'll make a number of design revisions and add a bunch of reinforcement and hopefully get a final design.







I also took the passenger seat out of the car today to do a bit of work on the back seat. I've removed the ISOFIX fittings as they have surface corrosion and need cleaning up and repainting. While the seat was out I also took the opportunity to examine the tilting bracket.

The CSL seats seem to have a tendency over time to develop a bit of a clunk, which doesn't really come up in normal driving but if you move fairly violently in the seat, or are driving very spiritedly then it can occur. From my investigations this seems to be caused by two things.

Primarily it is caused by the catch on the tilting mechanism, this seems to wear a little over time and then allow some movement which causes the clunk. I don't know if there's already a community DIY fix for this as I wasn't able to find anything on CSLRegistry or the like about it, other than an acknowledgement that it happens. Anyway, I was able to come up with my own fix, a short length of fleece tape wrapped around the fixture like this:








The second, more minor, contributor to this is the front pegs that the arms which attach to the tilting mechanism rotate on. The pegs are surprisingly small, and again seem to wear over time. This allows for a small amount of movement. In practice I don't think that this really contributes much to noise or felt movement, but thought I'd have a go at addressing it anyway.




It's only a very small amount that it needs to be cylindrically shimmed. To address this I used a small amount of tin foil wrapped around the peg. This compresses when you fit the arm and takes up the gap. Being aluminium I expect over time it will wear as the tilting mechanism is used (which will probably only be once a year when the WOF man checks the rear seat belts). Hopefully though the aluminium wears away and the steel doesn't further.





It seems like a fairly ghetto fix, but once it was all back together I gave it a good wiggle and it seemed solid. I did a few back and forths on the tipping mechanism and it still seemed good. I then put the seat back in the car and sat in it and jerked about and the clunking is gone! Mission accomplished!

I'll do the same to the drivers seat when I take it out to do the wiring for the side mirror controls which should be imminent. Just waiting on delivery from Schmiedmann of replacement clips etc. for the drivers door, which I'll do at the same time to address the clunk in the door. Hopefully by the weekend I'll get the brackets for the amp sorted and the G7AT rear seat into the car, plus the wiring done for the mirror controls.

Thanks for posting this! I have this issue with the driver side CSL seat and will be trying this fix for sure. Cheers.

[karter16]

Over the break I've been pretty busy working on the house and having fun times with the family. Since finishing the rear view mirror I've done a few bits and pieces on the car.

I've pulled the 6CD changer and bluetooth module out of the boot. I have no need for them right now, and indeed I have to pull the CD changer apart and figure out what's wrong with it. I've therefore packaged them up and shelved them, along with the two big brackets. Might as well save on the weight while the car is not completely stock.

Relatedly I've also been doing some CAD work to mock up some brackets for the OE amplifier. I could buy the BMW part, but it weighs half a kilo and would cost me $75, whereas if I 3D print some brackets they'll weigh next to nothing and will be free.

I've done a first mockup to check fitment etc. and even at 3mm thickness it's held in surprisingly well. I'll make a number of design revisions and add a bunch of reinforcement and hopefully get a final design.







I also took the passenger seat out of the car today to do a bit of work on the back seat. I've removed the ISOFIX fittings as they have surface corrosion and need cleaning up and repainting. While the seat was out I also took the opportunity to examine the tilting bracket.

The CSL seats seem to have a tendency over time to develop a bit of a clunk, which doesn't really come up in normal driving but if you move fairly violently in the seat, or are driving very spiritedly then it can occur. From my investigations this seems to be caused by two things.

Primarily it is caused by the catch on the tilting mechanism, this seems to wear a little over time and then allow some movement which causes the clunk. I don't know if there's already a community DIY fix for this as I wasn't able to find anything on CSLRegistry or the like about it, other than an acknowledgement that it happens. Anyway, I was able to come up with my own fix, a short length of fleece tape wrapped around the fixture like this:








The second, more minor, contributor to this is the front pegs that the arms which attach to the tilting mechanism rotate on. The pegs are surprisingly small, and again seem to wear over time. This allows for a small amount of movement. In practice I don't think that this really contributes much to noise or felt movement, but thought I'd have a go at addressing it anyway.




It's only a very small amount that it needs to be cylindrically shimmed. To address this I used a small amount of tin foil wrapped around the peg. This compresses when you fit the arm and takes up the gap. Being aluminium I expect over time it will wear as the tilting mechanism is used (which will probably only be once a year when the WOF man checks the rear seat belts). Hopefully though the aluminium wears away and the steel doesn't further.





It seems like a fairly ghetto fix, but once it was all back together I gave it a good wiggle and it seemed solid. I did a few back and forths on the tipping mechanism and it still seemed good. I then put the seat back in the car and sat in it and jerked about and the clunking is gone! Mission accomplished!

I'll do the same to the drivers seat when I take it out to do the wiring for the side mirror controls which should be imminent. Just waiting on delivery from Schmiedmann of replacement clips etc. for the drivers door, which I'll do at the same time to address the clunk in the door. Hopefully by the weekend I'll get the brackets for the amp sorted and the G7AT rear seat into the car, plus the wiring done for the mirror controls.

[AntRyv]

Phenomenal work truly!

[karter16]

When I bought my car in 2015 the auto-dimming mirror glass in the rear view mirror had already failed. For the last 8 years I've been driving the car around with no auto-dimming and a big bubble in the mirror. Because I like to address things promptly I recently ordered a replacement electrochromic mirror glass unit. There are a couple of vendors who specifically supply these, I believe that MirrorJohn is the most well known. My research also brought up some discussion that the unit that these vendors sell is the same thing as is available for significantly less from the likes of AliExpress.

I decided to take a punt and ordered from AliExpress. A week or so later this showed up:





It looked the part. I did notice that the two layers of the glass were slightly offset and initially thought this was due to poor assembly. In actual fact it is intentional and is how the positive and negative rails are exposed and attached.

The last few days I have gotten around to doing the replacement. It's a fairly easy process so long as you are careful and take your time. I wrote a DIY guide which you can find here: https://nam3forum.com/forums/forum/m...g-mirror-glass

Removing the mirror from the car is easy, removing the front bezel less so. The bezel is held on with a series of little plastic clips. With the plastic having become fragile over time, and BMW not designing the unit to be taken apart, the clips have a tendency to break.













With the unit disassembled it's then just a case of removing the PCB bracket from the old mirror glass:




And then preparing it for affixing to the new mirror.




The existing writeups on replacing the mirror glass are then very light on this next key step which is to affix the PCB bracket to the new mirror. It's important to get this right so that the forward facing light dependent resistor is aligned correctly. I solved this by essentially reassembling the unit with the PCB in place. I then clipped the bracket to the PCB and used the front bezel to help align the mirror.

Then it was just back to reassembly. As I mentioned I broke some of the clips when disassembling (this seems as though it's pretty inevitable). MirrorJohn's advice is to glue the bezel back on, but I didn't like that suggestion as it would stop me from opening up the mirror again in the future. So I decided to come up with something better.


I used some brass pins from a 2.54mm PCB header and heated them up and embedded them into the stubs of the broken clips. I then used Araldite to secure them in place. This worked beautifully and the bezel clips securely in place. Very happy with the end result.




The rest of the mirror reassembly is straightforward and in no time I had it back in the car.

The auto dimming feature is really cool - the AliExpress unit seems to work well (not that I can talk to longevity) - I'm glad I didn't fork out more than twice as much for what certainly appears to be the same thing!

[heinzboehmer]

Would the difference in ram be noticeable if only using the unit to boot directly into wireless Carplay as soon as the car is on?

Carplay (and Android Auto) is basically just a screen mirroring service. Your phone does all the graphics/audio processing and then streams encoded video to the display. The display does send some info (like touch input, light/dark mode, etc.) back, but all the heavy lifting is done by your phone. 2GB should be enough for Carplay duties.

This of course assumes a properly optimized OS, video decoder, etc. on the nav unit. As far as I know, all these aftermarket Carplay headunits are running a lightly modified version of AOSP, so you should be good there too.

[karter16]

Would the difference in ram be noticeable if only using the unit to boot directly into wireless Carplay as soon as the car is on?

I can't say for sure as I've not got both units to compare between. 2GB doesn't seem like much these days, but as you say it doesn't have to do all that much. It would be useful if there was more information available as to what differences there are with the automotive grade hardware as then could make a more informed choice.

Maybe we can convince Obioban to open his up 🤪


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Slideways]

Yeah I did actually - looked at both options and decided that 8GB of ram on the IX (as opposed to 2GB on the PE) trumped the “automotive grade” hardware of the PE - not that I could actually find out much about the difference.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Would the difference in ram be noticeable if only using the unit to boot directly into wireless Carplay as soon as the car is on?

[karter16]

Looking forward to your review on the headunit. Did you consider the "automotive grade" version? - https://xtrons.com/bmw-rover-mg-andr...b-rom-pe8246bl

Yeah I did actually - looked at both options and decided that 8GB of ram on the IX (as opposed to 2GB on the PE) trumped the “automotive grade” hardware of the PE - not that I could actually find out much about the difference.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Slideways]

Looking forward to your review on the headunit. Did you consider the "automotive grade" version? - https://xtrons.com/bmw-rover-mg-andr...b-rom-pe8246bl

[karter16]

Just ordered the same unit. Going to try and use your splash screen!

Nice one - I've very happy with it so far - better than I was expecting for sure.

FWIW he's a copy of the splash screen sized to fit that unit.

[robgill]

Just ordered the same unit. Going to try and use your splash screen!

[0-60motorsports]

Nice! My car has factory nav so I'll have to order the longer harness if i get this. Will wait for you to post more feedback before i decide. Cheers.

[karter16]

Well that was easy!

Mr 2 went to bed early so I had some time after dinner to swap the new head unit in.

First up is removing the old head unit, the centre vents (the worst bit of the exercise), and the lower console bracket, so that I could install the HVAC relocation bracket.




Console bracket out.




How does so much debris get into a sealed area!!!

The car had had a Parrot bluetooth unit installed, which never worked properly for me, so that had to come out. I was a bit worried about how the wiring for it might have been done. The wiring harness had in fact been cut to put the Parrot unit in series. Fortunately it had been done well and I was able to just unplug the Parrot harness and plug the OE harness back together. I'll tidy it up further in the future, but for now I've wrapped it with fleece tape and packaged it up.

I then swapped the switch strip and cigarette lighter across to the HVAC relocation bracket (photo taken before swapping over):










The Xtrons unit comes with an ISO wiring harness and it makes it ridiculously easy to connect the head unit. Just plug it into the Xtrons and plug it into the car harness and that is literally it. Everything just works. The ISO harness comes with some other tails for other harnesses. I intend to remove these connectors I don't need at some point in the future to tidy things up further, but before I do that I'll just run the unit for a while and make sure I'm happy with it.

Once I'd done a quick test to make sure functions were working I put everything back together, and voila!




It works.

As others have noted the dash trim doesn't sit quite right. This appears to be because the clip is built into the Xtrons (see below) and it seems to be slightly too high up - a quick go with a file will fix this I think - again will get back to this over the Christmas break.







Initial impressions of the head unit?

• Ridiculously easy to install and get setup - you get a ton of wiring harnesses in the box and it seems intimidating. You only need the ISO one and it's entirely plug and play, no tapping to do, no extra wires to hook into, nothing. Just plug in the additional things you want (GPS, Wifi Antenna, etc. I didn't bother with the USB ports, 4G, etc. as I won't use them).
• The unit is FAST. No delays anywhere, the UI is fast and responsive.
• CarPlay seems good so far, I connected my phone via bluetooth and it just worked.

The real test is going to come over the next few months as I see if it reliably works well and quickly, or if there are gremlins. Promising start anyway, will provide an update in a few weeks once I've used it for a while.

[0-60motorsports]

Well this arrived astonishingly quickly considering I ordered it on Sunday night and it arrived from Hong Kong this morning!







Not sure what the quality of the product is like, but the delivery and sales service have been excellent.

I went for the IX8246BHL which is the highest spec option for the E46.




First impressions are better than I was expecting. It seems to be finished nicely, the buttons feel pretty good. The twisty knobs don't have the same inertia feel that the stock ones do, but they're pretty good. The chrome would usually annoy me but I'm kinda interested to see with the SMG whether the chrome on the knobs ties things together a bit.

I feel a bit of a sense of inevitability about this venture as I have, for years, seen others complaining about their "China-sourced" head units, so if this doesn't work out I have only myself to blame.

In the end I went with this option because I wasn't very enthused about the tier 1 manufacturers offerings, and secondly because this gives me a more modern unit without too much of the area taken up with buttons, but also without the "slab glued to the dash" look that a lot of other options have.

As I said previously I'm very comfortable with the tech, so don't mind some fiddling to get it setup, but once it is it needs to be rock solid. Plan to give this a year to see how it goes and will re-evaluate then.

Thanks for posting this. Let us know how it performs once installed. Might also get this.

[karter16]

Well this arrived astonishingly quickly considering I ordered it on Sunday night and it arrived from Hong Kong this morning!







Not sure what the quality of the product is like, but the delivery and sales service have been excellent.

I went for the IX8246BHL which is the highest spec option for the E46.




First impressions are better than I was expecting. It seems to be finished nicely, the buttons feel pretty good. The twisty knobs don't have the same inertia feel that the stock ones do, but they're pretty good. The chrome would usually annoy me but I'm kinda interested to see with the SMG whether the chrome on the knobs ties things together a bit.

I feel a bit of a sense of inevitability about this venture as I have, for years, seen others complaining about their "China-sourced" head units, so if this doesn't work out I have only myself to blame.

In the end I went with this option because I wasn't very enthused about the tier 1 manufacturers offerings, and secondly because this gives me a more modern unit without too much of the area taken up with buttons, but also without the "slab glued to the dash" look that a lot of other options have.

As I said previously I'm very comfortable with the tech, so don't mind some fiddling to get it setup, but once it is it needs to be rock solid. Plan to give this a year to see how it goes and will re-evaluate then.