Maintenance time

This Thanksgiving I'll be doing some minor work on the m3. Fuel filter, cabin filter and intake filter. It's all OEM parts. I vacillated about getting the K&N stock replacement filter or the CAI kit. After much research I found that all the expensive options were either hype, not worth the money or potentially dangerous.
1. Really good write up on performance upgrades and which ones make sense. Apparently any cold air intake which leaves the filter visible is crap. And the only ones that will possibly give performance cost more then a grand.
http://forums.m3cutters.co.uk/showthread.php?t=6436
2. Apparently the oil used in the K&N stock airbox filter can cause the MassAirFlow meter to fail. So much for that.

Cost of parts was less then $80.

Shipped From NoCal Warehouse	13-32-7-831-089-M67	Fuel Filter, M3 (2001-06), Each NEW FEATURE: Write a Review for this item!	1	$29.25	$29.25
Shipped From NoCal Warehouse	13-72-1-730-946-M63	Air Filter, E46 323i/Ci, 325i/Ci M56, 328i/Ci, M3, Each Brand: Mann NEW FEATURE: Write a Review for this item!	2	$12.25	$24.50
Shipped From NoCal Warehouse	64-31-9-071-935-M87	Activated Carbon Microfilter, BMW E46 3 Series, All (1999-04), Each NEW FEATURE: Write a Review for this item!	1	$22.25	$22.25

Door trim falling

Seafair weekend I parked my car in the sun. I came back several hours later to find the door trim falling down from the roof interior hanging by the driver window. I pulled it down so I could drive. Last weekend I bought epoxy/resin and spent 2-3 hours iterating through a painstaking process. Mixing the epoxy applying to a coupe inches of trim, clamping the section of trim and then waiting 10mins for it to attach. I looked at the passenger side of the car and noticed the trim was starting to give there too.
A little embarassing to be a BMW fan-boy while having to explain these kinds of durability issues. My opinion is that BMW isn't really as reliable as people think, and reliablility is not what BMW markets. It's not a Toyota or a Honda. But then again that's why I like it. It's the drive that makes it compelling not the durrability.

Scary

This last Friday I took the High Performance Driving School that I've been preparing for. Wow. It was pretty cool. Scary too.

The photo here is taken passing the last turn before the straight away in front of the grand stands. I get the feeling that nobody in the know is supposed be bragging about speed, especially after my instructor gave me the safety lecture after I asked how fast I could go. I'm going to brag anyway because it was cool to me. Over 120mph in that straight away. Looking back on the experience I can see why I was scolded about that question. While passing other cars, concrete barriers, cresting blind hills and balancing the car at high speed I noticed that one mistake would probably kill me, my instructor and probably any other car close enough.
I left happy. I won't be doing any competitive racing like this, but I'll do this class again from time to time.

Cracked belts and technical inspection

In preparation for a high performance driving school I had the car tech-inspected by BMW of Seattle. http://bmwpugetsound.com/track_tech_sheet.pdf. It's nice that BMWCCA has an agreement with BMW of Seattle to only charge about $35. However, they failed me for cracked belts, which they told me a month earlier was no big deal. Strange. They wanted $210 to replace the belts, I already had the parts from pelicanparts.com so the labor was $120. I think the belts were about $30 from pelican w/shipping. Took about an hour to do. I also have my tech inspection so there is nothing stopping me from getting schooled on SIR!

Ohh yeah the battery worked

I purchased a werker battery from betteriesplus. It cost $170 after taxes. Total bill was $215 including battery maintainer and multimeter.

Emissions recall

I got a letter last week that my 2003 M3 was in need of a DME reprogramming to address an emissions error which causes the check engine light to go on. It was fully paid for by BMW Seattle. I used their free shuttle service (shit-service). I should have walked to work, it would have been faster.

When they finished the work I called up the free shuttle service and road back to the dealer. They did a free 27point inspection and noted a cracking A/C belt. So I know what I'm doing next.

On a side note I found out that BMW Seattle is moving south to Airport way, the new digs look pretty cool, huge!

Battery time

Last weekend I tried driving the M3 and got nothing but faint dash lights. First I thought I left something on, but most everything in the car is automatic and I'd been in and out of the garage lots the two weeks prior. I found a decent multimeter at Action Auto Parts. They didn't want to sell it to me at first (Strange concept, stop a customer from buying). I convinced them I would find many uses for a multimeter and they finally let me buy it ($14). My friend Kevin and I were amazed at an astounding low voltage from the battery. We jumped the car and got it started, after realizing that we didn't have to put jumper cables into the trunk (BMW puts batteries in trunk, not up front). I then realized that the brief time running the engine wasn't going to charge the battery enough to trust it. I picked up a 3 amp maintainer and hooked that up. Over the following 3 days of charging I tried starting the car and almost got it to turn over once. The whole while checking the voltage and seeing numbers all over the place, typically low. I finally conceded defeat and picked up a battery from www.batteriesplus.com "Werker BCI Group 94R Luxury and Import Car Battery - SLI94R-LI‏". That cost me about $160 after taxes. The alternative was $220 at Capitol Hill BMW and about the same at Bellevue BMW. After the 30 min drive to Everett and the 1hour drive back in rush hour traffic I'm not sure saving the 80 bucks was worth the painful commute.
I'm going to install the battery tomorrow after work. That should do it.

Easter Day driveline fluids.

Odometer ~ 30,600

I posted recently about changing the transmission fluid and LSD fluid. Today I was fortunate enough to use my father in laws car lift to do the work.

First we tried to do the LSD fluid but realized that it required extruded Allen bits not hex sockets. Jerry drove into town and picked up 12,14,17 mm bits.

I moved onto the transmission fluid while I waited for the tools and found the dirt shield to be the most challenging part of that job. Everything went well besides having an extra dirt shield screw left over.

The 14mm hex bit maid the LSD fluid change go pretty quickly.

The final job of the day was the e-brake adjustment. That turned out to be a real stumper. The instructions came from Pelicanparts.com and they were for a e30 not a e46. I knew this going into the job, but I figured they must be the same. Apparently not! We searched for a sproket inside the rear wheel hub for about 15 minutes. We finally gave up and put the tires back on.

The new fluid in the LSD seems to have dramatically improved the noises. I broke it in with some figure 8's at low speed and at first I heard the familiar grabing noise but after a couple turns it disappeared and I'm happy to report it seems to have fixed the problem. Cool!
The transmission fluid change has improved shifting, requiring less effort. I can still detect a slight grab when changing from 2nd to 3rd gear at about 3k-4k rpm. Benefits may show them self later when the car has completely cooled down. That has been the time of most shift stickiness.

Very happy with the fixed passenger side window tensioner.

A couple weeks back I finally fixed a common problem with this m3. There is a nut inside the passenger side door that gets jiggled loose and falls down inside the door and rattles when you come to stop or when you play loud music.

http://www.bimmerfest.com/forums/showthread.php?t=296820

Preparing for some maintenance projects

Hopefully in a few weeks I will head over to my father in-laws shop and do some long needed maintenance on the m3.

So far the projects are.
1. Replace the transmission fluid with Royal Purple to improve cold shifting and general gate stickiness.
http://m3.madrussian.net/diy_rp_tranny_fluid.shtml

2. Replace the LSD Differential fluid with the OEM improved fluid to reduce/remove grabby-clunky noise when tightly turning at slow speeds.
http://bmwcca.org/forum/showthread.php?p=23683#post23683

3. Adjust the e-brake so it works and stops making a scraping noise when I get out of the car.
http://www.pelicanparts.com/BMW/techarticles/E36-Ebrake_Adjustment/E36-Ebrake_Adjustment.htm

4. Check the driveline for the source of a clunk-ity-clunk sound when quickly stepping on the clutch at low parking speeds.