pynacl

I jumped on a set of ZCP wheels over the weekend since they're NLA and don't pop up too often for sale

99,105 miles After replacing most of the front suspension I took the X5 into EuroTech in Minneapolis for an alignment. They charged $223 which felt pretty high considering these don't have camber adjustment. Anyways, while there they diagnosed an oil leak from the oil filter housing. I knew this thing seeped, but honestly just didn't care much until I read how these N55s like to suck serp belts through the crank seal if they get oily. Out of curiosity I asked them the rough estimate to have that gasket replaced - $1800! I was feeling lazy, but not for that price. I was able to knock it out in roughly an afternoon and it wasn't too bad at all. The only tricky part is BMW designed it so that you cannot reach the 3rd bolt holding the housing to the block without removing the intake manifold. Other than that the trickiest part was just managing the fluids and trying not to spill - once again those giant 500ml Amazon syringes came in clutch to suck most the coolant out of the reservoir before starting. Also de-greased the hell out of the front of the engine while I was in there, but didn't take any great photos. While in there I replaced: - Oil filter housing gasket - Oil cooler gasket - Oil pressure sensor - Accessory drive belt - Belt idler pulley - Belt tensioner - All mounting hardware

Picked up a ceramic iDrive controller, which was an uncommon factory option on the 50i variant. You can also get a matching shift lever and HVAC control knobs if you’re willing to shell out. Kinda silly the knobs are integrated, so you need to replace the entire iDrive control unit.

Copy cat!

I also lightly polished and ceramic coated the headlights because they were starting to get a tiny bit sun damaged at 10+ years old. Before/After:

Also @Rekpoint stopped by with his piece of shit

For months I've been chasing a clunking noise in the suspension. So far I've replaced shocks, spring bushings/rubber, sway bar links, lower control arms, adjusted steering rack pre-tension, and just yesterday replaced the thrust arms. After all this work and well over $1000 in parts I realized it was just one of the upper shock bolts wasn't tight lol. Fresh front end though, eh?

The muffler is Top Speed, a discontinued eBay special. Sounds fantastic, but annoying as all hell.

Ive put a 1000 trouble free miles on it. Seems like the new battery and new FRM fixed this cars woes. These E90s are really great - cheap, easy to work on, fun to drive 6MT, okay to get a little banged up by two goldens.

I got really tired of the exhaust setup I had, the drone was just getting unbearable with this joke of a muffler. At first I thought it sounded good enough that it'd be fine since this is a weekend car, but it just turned me off from driving the car. I swapped back to the stock muffler for now to get the drone under control. For now I have Fabspeed catless headers, stock section 1, STG x pipe section 2, and stock muffler. I'll be on the lookout for a Rogue Engineering El Diablo muffler soon. Finally can hear the induction noise of the S54 again!

That is a huge bummer! I think I paid $65 with free shipping since it was on Amazon, but you can also buy it directly from ColourLock and pay the international shipping of $15 (and wait a bit): https://www.colourlock.com/Leather-Repair-Kit-for-Steering-Wheel-Black/850729-us/. Totally worth it IMO, I think it's enough material to do 2-3 wheels.

My understanding is the legal actions only impacted them hosting their "Standard Tools" package - aka Inpa, NCSExpert, WinKPF for those folks that like to do it raw. I don't think it impacted their ProTool because that is using closed-sourced, proprietary software. Although I would put money on them using parts of the BMW IP code in their product. Looks like they still sell it and support it though

After a few weeks of research, forum perusing, and tinkering I finally fixed the electrical problems with the E90. I believe this all stemmed from the battery. 2 years ago I replaced the battery with a factory equivalent 90ah AGM unit. I forgot to use a coding tool to tell the car it was an AGM battery, and according to some stuff I've read the power output of the two types is slightly different. Without the coding, it can cause subtle voltage spikes to flow through the car's various ECUs. Long story short, through forgetting to code it and harsh winter storage, that battery caused quite the issues, namely frying my front footwell module. Some symptoms of a failed FRM are: no power windows, no central locking system, headlights permanently on, no interior lights, no 6MT hill assist, no blinkers, amongst a very illuminated dash, and a host of other issues. To fix it I had to buy a replacement FRM and go scouring the internet for the coding tools. If you didn't know, Bimmergeeks, who used to host the resources was hit with a cease and desist from BMW NA and removed access to things like Inpa, WinKPF, NCSExpert, along with all the sp-daten files for all the different chassis. After days of digging / testing I got my laptop setup and coded a new FRM - surprisingly it all worked like a charm! Aside from the fact the FRM came from an E9X M3 and the previous owner (who I can only imagine has dog shit for brains) had coded it to turn on the high beams when the headlight switch was set to off (position 2) - this literally took me weeks of wire tracing and headaches only to figure out it was coded that way... Edit: I did also send the original FRM off to an ECU repair shop, but they deemed it "un-salvageable" and could not find the issue. The steps were: Install new FRM module in the footwell Flash the car to accept a newer FRM3 from the previous FMR2 module via WinKPF Read the VIN/car data from the CAS via NCSExpert Write the VIN/car data from the CAS to the new FRM3 module Revert some weird settings the previous FRM3 owner had via BimmerCode app Clear all faults and verify VIN matches between CAS and FRM via Inpa Here is the car with a sweet sweet error free dash and fully working!

After some testing I did find that the original source of the electrical issue was stemming from a faulty battery - I think from improper winter storage which was my fault. It was a 2022 date stamp so I was pretty surprised! Sadly since I was too lazy to test/fix this sooner, it fried the footwell module I didn't think to check the ground strap, but after an absurd amount of testing I did figure it out finally. In the end it was more difficult to fix the damage caused by the faulty battery than it was to fix the original issue. That's what I get for being lazy!

Suspension looks identical to the F gen - I did the same thing with the top hats too lol. From my recollection they're actually slightly angled. Also, which spring compressor do you have? Looking for a new one after my cheapo amazon one blew up in my face.