pynacl

I decided I wanted a bigger daily driver to haul odds and ends + the dogs. The E90 is great but just doesn’t cut it size-wise.
Originally set out to find an E70 X5 35d with the beautiful M57. I’d been searching for a while when suddenly saw an F15 35d pup up at a similar price point. It’s a bit high mileage at 145k, but overall pretty good shape. Came with plenty of maintenance records and some nice extras: Yakima roof rack with Thule wind deflector, thule ski box, remote start, OEM hidden hitch.
Sadly not an M Sport, but I really think the Imperial Blue on Terra interior makes up for it. I’m equally pumped and nervous to dabble into the diesel engines!

 

https://www.xdelete.app/

Finally picked up the new daily! After ruling out many of the other European SUVs, I kept coming back to the X5. After a lot of browsing I realized I wanted one with nicer wheels and either sport or comfort seats. The other features weren’t as important. 
 
There were some in Chicagoland, but driving down there with my wife and then driving two cars back through there with her by herself isn’t something I wanted to do. Fortunately, I found a strong contender to the north of me in Neenah. We went up there Saturday morning, checked it out, and bought it. 
 
2015 Xdrive35i with M-Sport package. The PO also has an e70 diesel with m sport, an M650, e46 M3, and a new X7. He was selling the X5’s to make room for his new M3 Comp. So it was coming from someone who knew the cars and I really liked that. 
 
Anyways, I’ve only been driving it for two days, but it is so awesome. All three kids fit comfortably with three across forward facing car seats. The storage in the boot is great. The car in Sport mode is quicker than I thought it would be and the paddle shifters are reallly good. 

I’ve been daily driving the e30 for a couple months now. Other than one scare when it wouldn’t start at work it’s been great! Thought the starter failed after I got to work one day but it was actually the engine to frame ground. I assume the starter is grounded to the engine block? Anywho. 
 
Anywho, here’s some neat pictures from cruising around the area last night. 
 

Haven’t really done much with this other than drive it, which is good. Would like to change up the wheels at some point, but these fit the car so well and there’s not a lot of options for 4x100, or they’re $5,000.
 

Got some new wheels. Style 193's from a coworker who was moving and no longer needed them, got them for a good price. They came on Michelin Pilot Aplin winter tires. I am planning on keeping these off until winter, running them with the winter tires, and then next spring, swap the Michelin Pilot Sport 4 S's I just got onto them to be my spring summer tires.
 

Noticed a little spot of oil on my garage floor after not driving the car for a bit. At first I thought it was coming from the oil drain plug, but a closer look made me suspect the center oil pan gasket. Sucks I didn’t choose to replace it while the rod bearings were done recently - feels bad dropping fresh oil. Also deep cleaned my reinforcement plate while it was off and it looks pretty darn good!

 

Not exactly car related but I knocked out the first step of the garage build - insulating the walls. Such a pain in the ass removing the shelving system the previous owner had. Half was built with nails, at least 1000 of them. After getting all shelving removed, I went with R15 in the walls and eyeing up R38 for the ceiling. My plan is to just finish insulation and vapor barrier this summer and drywall / paint next.

Side story - I sold the Imola parts car that the cinnamon interior came from. Ended up getting the full interior, an Eisenmann exhaust, tons of interior parts I was missing and made a pretty nice profit. Sure I’ll regret not keeping a spare S54 some day

No big update, but now that I’m in my own house and no longer a tiny apartment I was able to bust out the pressure washer again! M3 and E90 both got a much needed deep cleaning. M3 also developed an interesting issue with one of the brake pressure sensors, so that looks fun.
 
136,852 miles

I finally decided to put on the side mirror caps. Looks much better, but also out of place. I think forged carbon would be a better fit with white. 

Noticed a little spot of oil on my garage floor after not driving the car for a bit. At first I thought it was coming from the oil drain plug, but a closer look made me suspect the center oil pan gasket. Sucks I didn’t choose to replace it while the rod bearings were done recently - feels bad dropping fresh oil. Also deep cleaned my reinforcement plate while it was off and it looks pretty darn good!

 

Slow progress is still progress!
 
After some extensive measuring I decided on some Polk DB+ 6.5" component speakers for the front and 5x7" coaxial speakers for the rear. While I had the front all pulled apart for the amp I decided to start there with the speaker upgrades. My car originally came with the basic 4 speaker sound system so I did not have the tweeter housings in the doors. The Polk tweeters have a nice basic black grill but are an odd rounded shape on the outside so they wouldn't necessarily be an easy fit in stock e30 tweeter pods. I didn't want to just surface mount the tweeters on the stock blanks so I decided to design and print some mounts of my own. I started with a basic model of a tweeter blank I found online and modified it to be mounted with a screw and perfectly fit the Polk tweeter at an angle that matched the stock ones. After a bit of trial and error I printed the final parts in ASA. To finish them up I sanded them down, sprayed with filler primer and sanded again to completely smooth them out, then a coat of texture paint followed by a final pass with SEM trim black. I mounted the tweeters from the back with hot glue so that they wouldn't be impossible to remove if needed, we'll see how that holds up in a hot car. 



 
Good news for me is that cars with the base sound system still have the tweeter wiring going into the door, so these just plugged directly into that and fit perfectly! I'm super happy with how they turned out. 

 
I also got the 6.5" woofers mounted in the kick panels. The speakers have the normal 4 mounting holes as well as an inner circle of holes that turn out to line up perfectly with the 5.25" speaker pattern (which I would assume is intentional). Because they'll be tight under the kick panels I printed a ~3mm spacer to keep the mounting screw heads off the speaker surround as well as keep the kick panel from interfering with speaker cone movement. 

 
These Polk 6.5's are pretty shallow and also don't protrude too much beyond the mounting surface so zero modification to the chassis was required to fit them. I did however, have to modify the kick panel trim. I removed the sound insulation/speaker mesh and trimmed away the plastic ring around the speaker grill and the back side of the one screw hole. I also used a heat gun to flatten them out a bit as they had warped into a concave shape over time. The speaker sticks out maybe 5mm further than the original so these have to flex around them a little bit, but once installed they look completely stock and don't have any gaps. I may go back and replace the sound insulation at some point, but going to try without for now. 

I don't have a pic of the kick panels installed but it looks completely stock. No need to space out the hood release on the driver's side and zero clearance issues with anything there. I am still working on the passenger side but so far it looks like the glovebox will clear without issues as well. 
 
Next job is wiring in both crossovers and finding places to mount those!
 

Hitch installed


Nice an easy access to get that one installed.......


Got a bike rack after much deliberation. Settled on a 1up Recon 5 vertical rack. 5 places for bikes, pivots out of the way of the hatch, and weighs a cool 95lbs! I've been enjoying it vs the truck


Did some light off-road driving in Whistler to car camp after a day of biking (full size mattress fits perfectly with the seats folded down) and found I need to get rid of the 20's as soon as possible. 


Went up to Mazama to visit a friend, rock climb, mountain bike, and go for a hike and brought the X5.
On the way back got an error for oil level over max, which I thought was odd as I had checked it after purchase and the oil level was near the top, but not over. Checked on the dipstick and it was indeed over the max mark, meaning the oil level sensor was intact. The oil smelled like diesel so the hunt was on. After pulling up the coolant temp and driving around a bit I found that the thermostat is stuck open, and am trying to find when the last DPF regen was as it likely got up to temp to be able to do a regen while climbing the mountains, but then cooled down and just dumped all that extra fuel into the oil. I can't get the coolant temp to go over 150 on the highway, with 140 being the average. Running temp is to be in the 190-195 range, so I'm getting plenty of fuel past the pistons.

New thermostat and EGR delete on the way! Of course with an oil change in the next couple of days. 

What's better than having 5 vehicles? Having 6! 
A poor picture for intro, but its the only one I have right meow

This was a spur of the moment decision, and is planned to replace my truck and 1 series. 
2011 x5 35d Sports package, HUD, 360 cam, premium package, pano sunroof, and a set of snow tires + to go with it

More details / photos later

After couple of weeks of engine bay paint prep. I am ready to paint it. I build a beautiful spray booth in my garage with two box fans and shoot some epoxy primer followed by some seam sealer and more epoxy. Today i will finish it with single stage urethane in original safari beige.
 
 
I got the intercooler figured out. Wiring is next on the list.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Last week I had a customer come into my work and they asked me if we worked on foreign vehicles. I said "Yeah, I dont think theres really anything were afraid to work on." After talking to him a little while longer I found out that he wanted to schedule getting a radiator replaced in his 96 318ti so he could list the car for sale. I told him that I might be interested and asked how much he'd be looking to get out of it as it sits with a bad radiator, and he told me he was looking to get $2750 for it as is. I then asked him to bring it by so I could take a peak.

The car shows up and it is pretty beautiful, one of the best condition 318ti's that I have seen. At only 120k miles, the boston green glistened, the dove leather interior was damn near spotless, and the A/C was ice cold. It was a southern car almost its an entire life, and was a one owner vehicle until the PO bought it a little over a year ago. It has a small rust spot on the rear quarter and one of the jack pad areas, but the rest of the car was extremely clean. I took it out for a spin and aside from the coolant leak the car drove phenomenal. We shook on $2700 (including a new radiator and hoses), and I drained my bank account and brought her home.

 

Drove the car around for a couple days and so far I have been pretty happy with it. The car is currently under the knife in my garage at the moment waiting on some new intake hoses that ripped during disassembly, and it turned out the radiator hoses he supplied were some cheap bright red ebay silicone hoses that fit horribly so I am also waiting on a set of all new OEM rubber hoses from FCP.

Current plans arent anything crazy, just want to get the car squared away so I can have a comfortable and quirky summer daily!

Bumper repair.
Could I have left this alone? Yes. Does it look better than before? Yes. Does it still bother me? Yes.
Just a temporary fix until I get an M Tech bumper next year and don't have a roached out bumper.
What it started as:

Disassembly:
 
As this being a temporary fix, I did what I could to make it look presentable, but not have this take multiple days. Used 220, 400, and 600 grit sand paper.






I chose not to use body filler with how flimsy these bumpers are and didn't want it to crack. And once again, temporary fix.

Needs wet sand and polish, but looks decent.


Polished up the side markers using the headlight restore kit.

M3 style trunk lip added.


Replaced the angel eye bulbs with LUX V4 ones. Tried my best to polish up the headlights, but they are still kind of pitted. Passenger side is cracked in the top, top corner. So it needs to be replaced anyway. Lenses look much worse in this picture than in person.

 

Ok, so I spoke too soon.  I'm not 100% sure what I hit but when I was driving home from Appleton last night I heard a loud flapping noise so I pulled over at a Kwik Trip and was surprised to find out most of my front lip was missing.  I'm not 100% sure but I'm fairly confident it was not another squirrel. I was right though, the spot that I just fixed held up! 🤣
I don't think I can fix this one so the car is naked for the time being.

Not exactly car related but I knocked out the first step of the garage build - insulating the walls. Such a pain in the ass removing the shelving system the previous owner had. Half was built with nails, at least 1000 of them. After getting all shelving removed, I went with R15 in the walls and eyeing up R38 for the ceiling. My plan is to just finish insulation and vapor barrier this summer and drywall / paint next.

Not exactly car related but I knocked out the first step of the garage build - insulating the walls. Such a pain in the ass removing the shelving system the previous owner had. Half was built with nails, at least 1000 of them. After getting all shelving removed, I went with R15 in the walls and eyeing up R38 for the ceiling. My plan is to just finish insulation and vapor barrier this summer and drywall / paint next.

Not exactly car related but I knocked out the first step of the garage build - insulating the walls. Such a pain in the ass removing the shelving system the previous owner had. Half was built with nails, at least 1000 of them. After getting all shelving removed, I went with R15 in the walls and eyeing up R38 for the ceiling. My plan is to just finish insulation and vapor barrier this summer and drywall / paint next.

Not exactly car related but I knocked out the first step of the garage build - insulating the walls. Such a pain in the ass removing the shelving system the previous owner had. Half was built with nails, at least 1000 of them. After getting all shelving removed, I went with R15 in the walls and eyeing up R38 for the ceiling. My plan is to just finish insulation and vapor barrier this summer and drywall / paint next.

Been a while again. Been messing around with a few projects the last couple months and finally got around to getting the E46 back in action for the year.

After a hard winter of this thing sitting outside the whole time (my now ex-fiancée talked me into storing her car last winter instead of mine) upon everything melting and the super cold and rainy spring we had here, I discovered a major water leak on the driver side of the car. There was a roughly 1 inch deep puddle front and back, which pushed me to start vacuuming and drying. Vacuumed it out semi regularly over the last few weeks and left it in the garage with the windows open for over a month and worked on other stuff in the meantime. Once it was plenty dry I got it over to my work and had the guys start looking at it. One of the techs let me know that one of the sunroof drains got unplugged and was leaking water from the A-pillar pretty good. Got that fixed and now she's bone dry!

Another issue that I finally got around to dealing with was the suspension. When I had the car in the garage I pulled the front wheels off to get a better look at everything underneath and put together a parts list of what I might need. Started looking at my coilovers and realized that there was literally no pre-load at all and the shock collar was able to move freely with just my hand. Likely due to my negligence when throwing the car together in the garage last winter, I properly set the preload, raised the front suspension to a nicer height, and tightened up the collar adjustments. Since then the vehicle rides a lot nicer and is a lot more confident in the corners than it used to be.

Going forward I have a lot of work to do on the interior of the car due to some mold that showed up in the carpet from the flooding, and I plan on taking some time and ripping the seats out to really clean everything properly. The seats also very badly need a lot of love so I am going to try to condition and save them, but we will see.

In the meantime though, enjoy this picture of my 2 main projects right now.

Side story - I sold the Imola parts car that the cinnamon interior came from. Ended up getting the full interior, an Eisenmann exhaust, tons of interior parts I was missing and made a pretty nice profit. Sure I’ll regret not keeping a spare S54 some day