Liam821's Phoenix Yellow

[liam821]

After my last m3 met its maker, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do so I sat on it for a few years. I ended up missing my e46m3 and started looking for another one. I wanted one with an interesting color, so no black or silver. I really wanted LSB, but ended up finding this Phoenix Yellow with 110k miles on it and jumped on it. It was in fairly good condition cosmetically but needed a bunch of maintenance, and because of that, I got it for a fairly good price.

The day I bought the car






Right on the first drive home, I knew I had my work cut out of me. The rear wheel was rubbing the fender on acceleration, it would stall when you let go of the throttle coming to a stoplight, and the suspension felt really really soft and bouncy.

The first thing I did was replace the gruppe m replica intake with the stock airbox and replaced the MAF, hoping that might help the stalling and fueling issues. Helped, but didn't fix the problem. I do like the stock airbox look though.


Next up was replacing the exhaust. I like a quiet car and wasn't a huge fan of the tips that was on the car when I got it. So I swapped back on a stock exhaust.

Before:


After:


Next up was addressing the rear subframe. After having a closer look it looks like the subframe is cracked.


Dropped the rear subframe for a closer look...ouch!




Got plates and an X-brace from PureTech Sweden.


Fixed all the cracks and welded in the plates




All fixed!


Here is the old rear subframe...I won't be using this


I still had the rear subframe from my old IB ZCP car which just had its rear end gone through a few thousand miles back. It also only has 19k miles so I'll just use this one instead. It's also much cleaner.


More to come!

[liam821]

Next up was the interior. The car had an Imola interior, which is my favorite. But Imola on PY? hrmm yeahhh I'm not so sure. The car originally had dove, but one of the previous owners had swapped it.

As it came. Yeah, that is the car's original dash, but all the dove parts have been wrapped with Imola leather. Actually really well done.




I still have the original interior from my Interlagos Blue car...so I was thinking about swapping it in. Since its suuupppeerrr minty. P.S. RIP my old M3.


So either way, the interior needed to come out






That escalated quickly!




After much thinking, I thought I was going to just replace the Imola dash with a stock all-black dash and then swap my Imola from my Interlagos car over. But then I came to my senses and started looking for either a dove or black interior.

Pulled the dash from my blue car. Minty condition


I wanted to swap over the carpet out of my blue car since it had such low miles and was basically new. Also the carpet in the PY car was swapped over, it originally had a dove/gray carpet. You could see see a part of the carpet under the hvac system. I figured I'd go all in and swap over the hvac system from my blue car since all the fenders, motors, etc were basically new and I didn't want to cut the carpet to use it. So out the old hvac system came...


I ended up pulling the intake manifold to get to the hvac system heater hose lines. I wanted to clean the throttle bodies and IAC valve anyways. Found out the evac line wasn't connected under the airbox, a ha! That's probably the stalling problem...


I started putting the interior back together. Carpet back in, hvac swapped over. Starting to look like a car again!

[liam821]

After lots and lots of looking, I finally found a minty black interior set. HUGE thanks to MPartsWorldWide who hooked it up. The guys there did an insanely good job carefully wrapping up each interior piece and shipping. It got to me in one piece without a scratch on anything!

All packaged up at MPartsWorldWide


Picked up at the SAIA shipping yard in Portland on a rainy Friday night


The interior is insanely clean! I can't wait to get it all installed


Massive pile of bubble packing material...there's actually a front seat somewhere in that pile.


My car originally was an SMG but converted to a manual, so the steering wheel was an SMG wheel. It had the shift paddles removed, but you could feel the nubs to where they mounted on the rear. I bought a poor condition manual steering wheel from MPartsWorldWide (thanks again!) and had it directly shipped to Coby Wheel to be recovered. After about a week or so, this showed up.


Looking back, I should have probably bought this without the red/blue m-sticking as I don't want it to clash with the yellow, but its such a small detail and hard to see it probably won't matter. Looks awesome though!


Next up was all the trim. The car originally had aluminum trim which I sold, I'm going to be using the ZCP trim out of my blue car.

Bye!


From the blue car


The steering wheel trim wasn't in the best condition, and I really like the ZCP trim, so I bought another ZCP set on eBay and had them shipped off to get refinished. Another forum member refinished it up and did a fantastic job!

Before:






After! Soo minty!






Mmmm 🤤🤤🤤🤤🤤


I had just replaced the center console on my blue car right before it was wrecked, so I'll be swapping that over. I also bought all new lower Radio/Navigation mounting trim/storage cubby from ecs.


From my blue car

[liam821]

The car came with KW V3s, yyaayyy, which are great, but after inspection, they were leaking oil from three of the four dampers. Boo

Being that they were blown, I shipped them off to KW to be rebuild. Freshly back and rebuilt by KW


I decided I wanted to try something else, so I sold the KWs and after a bunch of reading and talking to all the suspension vendors at SEMA 2019 I ended up buying a set of Fortune Auto Muller MSCs. Swift springs 9k front 11k rear. They have some really great features, like ride height adjustability without impacting preload, front camber plates, and mono-tube Digressive Piston damper design. They also have great customer service, and unlike KW, you can rebuild them/change the damping/upgrade them. Totally customizable to whatever your needs are now or in the future. They'll even rebuild them for another car, i.e. I wanted to put them on an M2 or whatever down the line. I haven't actually driven the car with them yet, so no review, but expect to find something from me at some point.




Sure look pretty though!

[liam821]

A very much less fun, but really needed task, was rebuilding the shifter. The car came with a Dinan short-shifter but it was so insanely hard to shift...it just shouldn't be this difficult. While I had the driveshaft out I pull out the shifter, which btw is a massive pita even without the driveshaft in place. The bushings were all pretty worn. So I bought a shifter repair kit from FCP and replacing all the bushings. Turns out whoever installed the Dinan shifter didn't install a ring that is needed between the stock shifter housing and the aluminum pivot of the Dinan shifter. Instead of calling Dinan for a replacement, I pulled up Fusion360 and designed and 3D printed my own.

After putting it all back together, shifts like butter!

The 3d printed part is the black piece between the blue aluminum pivot and silver OEM shifter housing




Don't worry, I have a new OEM shift knob waiting. I just used the old one to make sure it shifted correctly.


Speaking of 3D printing... I've been eyeing those beautiful CSL intakes. I'm just not ready to drop $2-3k on an airbox, especially with covid-19 wrecking our economy. So I got to thinking, perhaps I can design and print one... I did a bit of research, the trumpets in the CSL airbox are the same as the stock UDSM airbox. So I bought a used airbox from MPartsWorldWide (thanks again!) and set off to getting it cut apart.




The trumpets are press-fit into the rest of the airbox. So with a bit of work, you can pull out each individual trumpet. Now I just need to design a new box...

Very early design. I haven't curved all the edges or added supports yet. I'll design it to accept the stock CSL air filter and will support the stock CSL flapper.


The end goal is to get the box printed on an industrial 3D printer since my 3d printer only has a 210x210x250 print bed. The CSL airbox is about 200x250x550mm in size. I'll press/glue the stock trumpets in. I'll then either wrinkle black paint it or perhaps wrap a single layer of carbon fiber over it for the bling bling look. Really I'm mostly interested in the CSL intake sound but I figure it should make similar power since it will be a close'ish copy to a real intake.

[TexaZ3]

Excellent work!

[liam821]

Excellent work!

Thank you for your excellent work on fixing/repainting my ZCP trim. It looks sooo great.

[Bostonbruck]

Great progress! Your wheel looks great. I am also going to ask him to refinish my trim!

[BMWahba]

Looking forward to seeing the airbox progress!

[TexaZ3]

Thank you for your excellent work on fixing/repainting my ZCP trim. It looks sooo great.

You bet!

[RoyalFlushness]

Nice thread looking forward to more progress

[Will]

Wow, great build thread. And thank you for building this site (as well grabbing over 175k threads from the old m3f archives)!

Are you doing your own airbox design (internal volumes and shapes) or are you thinking along the lines of laser scanning an OE csl box and 3d printing that? If it's comparable in performance and sound, but much cheaper than the aftermarket carbon fiber versions, perhaps there's a market for it.

Edit: 145k threads from old m3f.

[Dino]

Awesome build, looks great!

[liam821]

Wow, great build thread. And thank you for building this site (as well grabbing over 175k threads from the old m3f archives)!

Are you doing your own airbox design (internal volumes and shapes) or are you thinking along the lines of laser scanning an OE csl box and 3d printing that? If it's comparable in performance and sound, but much cheaper than the aftermarket carbon fiber versions, perhaps there's a market for it.

Thank you! That's the goal. I basically just want to make a 3d printable CSL airbox clone - same internal volume/shape etc. I'm hoping to be able to get them printed for under $500 on an industrial printer. We'll see how it goes - once I get a bit closer I'll make a proper thread about it and would love some input from everybody here.

[Will]

Thank you! That's the goal. I basically just want to make a 3d printable CSL airbox clone - same internal volume/shape etc. I'm hoping to be able to get them printed for under $500 on an industrial printer. We'll see how it goes - once I get a bit closer I'll make a proper thread about it and would love some input from everybody here.

That would be insane. I'd be up for one. Looking forward to updates.