Karter16's Silbergrau E46 M3 Journal

[01M3Fan]

Wow - mammoth project! Looks fantastic!

[karter16]

Wow, more than two years since my last post…

*trigger warning - children/babies & medical stuff*

A few weeks after my last post my son fell extremely ill. After several long hospital stays he was diagnosed with post transplant lymphoproliferative disorder, in his case caused by the Epstein-Barr virus. At his sickest there were 16 million copies of the virus per millilitre of his blood. He thankfully completed a course of Rituximab (kinda like a chemo drug that wipes out all the T cells in your immune system). By August he was home, and after a couple of blips he has been largely okay since. If things stay good for another few years his doctors will declare victory over the PTLD.

In September of 2020 we found out my wife was pregnant with #2! Our second son was born in April 2021 at 32 weeks, following a rough pregnancy. He spent 5 weeks in NICU before joining us at home.

4 days later he was rushed to Starship with respiratory issues. He got a tracheostomy about a week later (which has been amazing) and then spent 47 long days in PICU battling infections and myriad issues that couldn’t all be tied back together. He finally made it up to the ward, and then a few days later started having seizures. Over the course of a few days we watched our little man lose all ability to move, turn his head, hear, and interact with us.

Since then it’s been a long slow journey of improvement for him. After a couple of weeks he started looking at things, and us, again, another few weeks later he started responding to sound again, by the time we got him home at the end of September he could turn, but not support, his head. Another 8 weeks later and he could fairly well hold his head up, and today I took a photo of him sitting, propped up, in his hospital cot (he’s been in this week fighting a nasty virus) playing with a toy.


The teams at Starship have been incredible. The head consultants from a bunch of different teams have been heavily involved in my son’s care, and their skill and the wonders of modern medicine have been life-saving for both of my children.

I’m forever indebted to them, our public healthcare system, and, by extension, taxpayers of New Zealand.


Wow. That was cathartic to write out. Not very on-topic, but cathartic.



Thus concludes the explanation of why it’s been two years since my last post…

I only drove the M3 a couple of times in 2021. For most of the year I wasn’t even sure if I was going to keep it (hard to make plans or think about what’s fun when you’re constantly in crisis mode). But the last few months as things have trended towards our “new normality” I’ve been enjoying driving the car on occasion and making some more plans for it.

A couple of days ago I ordered a new OE steering wheel. The current wheel is quite badly cracked along the top, and the paddles and trim are in very poor condition. I looked at options like getting my current wheel rewrapped and buying new trim, etc. but for what that was going to cost it made more sense to order a brand new wheel. I found one for a good price, and, importantly, cheap shipping and pulled the trigger. It’s coming snail mail (hence the cheapness) so, given the current state of global logistics it should arrive sometime between the beginning of April and the end of time.

I have a bunch of other items I want to get as well, but they’re all significantly cheaper, so I figured it was best to buy the expensive thing first, so I don’t keep putting it off!

I also have a couple of little projects in mind to keep me busy as well so will hopefully be posting those up here soon!

Matt


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[karter16]

Update #26


Well I got notification today that the new steering wheel has shipped - should be here in a couple of months!


The other day I decided to re-investigate why the rear bumper/diffuser sits so terribly on my car. I say re-investigate as I did look at it a few years ago when Dad and I were doing all the under-body work on the car, but I'd forgotten since what the issue was.

Got under there with a torch to see that the plastic brackets that are glued to the Kevlar support bar had all detached, and only a couple of them were still screwed to the bracket on the bumper itself. I removed one, and did some investigation on the internet (although I suspected I already knew the answer).




Because the brackets are glued/plastic welded to the kevlar support the whole thing is one part number and you can't purchase individual replacements.

I could hunt down a wrecked one and try pull the bits, but didn't particularly like my chances, and thought it was a good opportunity to try putting Dad's 3D printer to use.

The original part is helpfully labeled as PA6 GF30 which means it is a Polyamide 6 plastic with 30% glass fibre.

There is a 3D printer filament available which is a Nylon 6 (Nylon is a type of Polyamide, so Nylon 6 is pretty similar to PA6) with 25% Carbon Fibre. The printed end result is supposedly stronger than the same thing made out of aluminium, so it should do the trick for this application.

I quickly brushed up on my very rusty CAD skills and knocked this up this evening.




It was pretty enjoyable to make. The original having presumably begun life by being drawn in CAD by a BMW engineer it was nicely spec'd in whole millimetres, so was easy to reproduce. The most difficult aspect was just that the bridge and the legs are not quite in the same X-Y plane.

I've shipped this off to Dad for him to run a test print in PLA. From that I'll check and make any necessary adjustments, but I'm pretty confident it's spot on.

The only thing I haven't drawn at this point is the holes in the legs. I'm undecided at this point whether I rivet or plastic bond to the kevlar support. If I go the plastic bonding route then the holes may prove to be unnecessary.

Till next time.

[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!

[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.

[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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[Will]

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

[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!

[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]

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 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]

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]

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!

[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]

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 :-)