My 2005 Imola Red M3 6MT Build Journal

[DropTopKingM3]

It’s cool at the end of the day. You’re building it for your own enjoyment. Plus it gave you a lot to do during covid.

[Inizes]

Awesome build and restoration journal. I’ve been doing the same maintenance stuff throughout this past year and you just motivated me to put together a journal as well. Keep up the fine modding!

Thank you! I added up how much I spent on parts this year... oops hahah. It’s all worth it though, the car is so much better than when I found it and it really deserved it in my opinion. While I may not see $1 for every $1 I put in, I think that with values appreciating for well documented cars, it has to be pretty close.

[DropTopKingM3]

Awesome build and restoration journal. I’ve been doing the same maintenance stuff throughout this past year and you just motivated me to put together a journal as well. Keep up the fine modding!

[Inizes]

Man that looks great. Big improvement just with the dye rub. Your ass is going to be much happier with the improved breathability next summer 👍

My fiancé’s legs won’t stick to the hot leather anymore either!

[ZHPizza]

Man that looks great. Big improvement just with the dye rub. Your ass is going to be much happier with the improved breathability next summer 👍

[Inizes]

Interior looks great! super jealous

Looks wonderful man. congrats!!!! It is such a good interior.

Appreciate it from both of you. Easily my favorite part of the car right now.

[Loopyspec]

Interior looks great! super jealous

[BMWahba]

Looks wonderful man. congrats!!!! It is such a good interior.

[Inizes]

Wow -I didn’t realize it had been so long since my last formal post. I gave a short teaser but time to do some catching up.

First bigger item for me wasn’t actually a purchase for myself. After the Tail of the Dragon trip, my best friend with a built STI (seen in some of the photos above) decided he wanted to move into the BMW platform. He wanted a black or white e92 6MT ZCP with under 60k miles. Luckily, I was able to find one with 66k miles only 2 hours away from us that he decided to jump on. So far he loves it, and it is fun for me to have my best friend in an M3. He didn’t take too long to jump into modding it, but I will leave that story for him to tell if he chooses.



Back to my M3. Shortly after the Tail of the Dragon trip I decided to upgrade to an M-Performance emergency brake handle and alcantara boot. I heard a rumor that this part may soon be NLA. I’m not sure how true it is, but I jumped on it. I like the way it brings a little more attention to and brightens up the very dark center console area. The alcantara shift boot also ties into my alcantara shift boot which was a plus as well. I don’t have the best photos from this install, but hopefully you can get the idea.





The biggest news for the M3 I have is now below. When I saw BMWahba mention he had an M-Texture interior, I took a closer look at what it actually looks like. Needless to say I fell in love with the look and thought it would compliment my Imola Red exterior. Then I found out LSBALEX has the interior and his photos made me lust after it even more. Sure enough, AdamLZ on YouTube bought an LSB M3 with the interior and I really felt like I was missing out. I told myself if I ever saw a set come up for sale, I would buy it. I knew they were rare, just didn’t really know how many were ordered from the BMW factory.

MPartsWorldwide bought a crashed car that had an original M-Texture interior and listed the entire interior for sale late in the night on September 17th. I felt the asking price was really fair and shipping to Ohio was very reasonable via freight to a business. Lucky for me, my friend I spoke about above owns a Lumber business. Where I lost a bit of faith was when I was asked to pay via Paypal Friends and Family. Never before have I had someone refuse I pay goods and services, especially when I offered to cover fees. I spoke with Liam and a few others who have bought similarly priced items and they helped me establish some confidence in the purchase. I knew if I waited overnight that the seats would be sold, so I decided to go with it and made my purchase. My initial thoughts were that the interior was dirty, but in decent shape for 110k miles on them. The donor car was t-boned on the passenger side door, so an airbag did deploy through the door card. Below is a photo of the pallet prior to shipment, happy to say it looked pretty well wrapped.



It arrived literally the next day in pretty similar condition.



Thanks to the help of Titaniu//M and my best friend, swapping into the interior only took a couple of hours.









Unfortunately it got too dark to take any good photos of the front seats prior to cleaning. The back seats looked like they never saw any use, which is great. The front seats have obviously seen some use but that's ok. I did have some issues with the passenger door card. I can’t really tell if it was from the accident or from shipping but there were scratched the top of the vinyl near where the window was which I attribute to the broken window in the accident. The weird one was a tear on the vinyl in the door jam. You can also see the fabric on the airbag cover is loose. When the airbag deployed, the soft plastic/styrofoam backing shattered and broke the bond with the glue.







I immediately went to vacuuming all of the interior to remove some of the bigger pieces of dirt and some final pieces of broken glass from the accident. Next, I used leatherique on all of the leather components and Sonax alcantara cleaners on all of the inserts. The leatherique did its job but the leather didn’t seem to be terribly dirty. The Sonax on the other hand was very helpful. I went through an entire bottle of Sonax alcantara cleaner, luckily it was enough to clean everything including the front and rear door panels. Below are photos of the towels displaying the dirt removed from the alcantara on the front seats alone (clean towel for reference).





My next steps were to help restore some of the bolstering which has had a bit of cracking. I had some leftover dye that I used to help darken the cracking. Below is an example for before and after photos, sorry they’re not the best. The dye job was subtle though.





With the interior clean, I wanted to shift my focus back to the passenger door panel. I felt like with this interior, restoration wasn’t just needed, but required. You can’t exactly just jump on eBay or Facebook and find an M-Texture interior being parted out. ASCFabrics does sell a good reproduction of the fabric but it is $225/yard which is pretty expensive. I wanted to preserve the original fabric to a) save on cost and b) match the age of the rest of the interior. I knew repairing the shell on the airbag cover wasn’t a possibility due to its shattered state. The scratched and torn vinyl could be repaired but it wouldn’t be perfect and would still be visibility repaired since the texture wouldn’t match 100%. Finding a donor door panel with non-damaged vinyl and an intact airbag cover shell was the best option. After reaching out to BMWRestoredSeats on Instagram I was told that there is a slight difference between the leather and cloth door cards. Leather door cards have a thicker foam than cloth, so the shell is shaped a little differently. After some searching on eBay, I found a laser cloth door card for sale that was the perfect candidate.



While I feel like I could have probably DIYed this repair by swapping over the inserts, I felt the cost if I had an error was too high so I took it to some professionals in town. I used Tritex Corporation in Columbus and they did a great job. We used the vinyl structure from the donor card, swapped over the large M-texture insert without reupholstering, and then removed the M-texture fabric from the shattered shell and placed it on the donor shell with some new foam. I also transferred over the factory “M-texture” sticker located on the back of the door panel. Tritex knocked it out of the park on this. I don’t have the best photos of the repair, but it looks great.





Finally, here is the finished product. Some of the photos are still missing the passenger door card since I took them while the repair was still being worked on. All I can say is that I am in love and these are easily my favorite part of the car right now (outside of the driving experience).











Also - for those curious, here are the factory production numbers of M-texture for North America courtesy of Duck360198 :

US 6MT: 129

US SMG: 76

CAN 6MT: 67

CAN SMG: 22

TOTAL: 294

[Inizes]

It’s on the car, just wrapped in new leather.

[8000RPM]

What did you do with your original steering wheel?

[Ajcanadian]

Looks fantastic! Somewhat upset, I missed the set. But hey, glad it's on my car's twin, haha.

[Loopyspec]

Interior looks beautiful. I'm so jealous!

[Inizes]

Still cleaning it so it’s a work in progress... here’s a teaser though.

[Inizes]

Subbed! Love these restoration journals

Thanks! I appreciate it. Currently gathering parts for a full rod bearing service. Going to throw in new pulleys and belts, engine mounts, and debating about some of the from control arm and suspension components.

Nice touch on the floor mats, never seen anyone go that length

Hey thanks! It was a lot of work for a bit of a reward but not much. I’m not sure if I mentioned it or not, but I did end up replacing with brand new oem from FCPEuro. Main reason was the felt wasn’t as grippy as I was hoping which made for some dangerous driving conditions since the drivers floor mat was moving up near the gas/brake pedal.