New build! E90 M3

[patsbimmer1]

GunMetalGrey said:

She's looking great! 
I'm glad to see people trying something other than the PSS!

Thanks Ben!  I'd consider myself an above average tire consumer based on my experience in the industry and more so with tires specifically.  After reading reviews and doing my own research I felt very comfortable stepping away from Michelin.  It's not like I was stepping into a tier 3 Primewell or something similar.  Pirelli is still a top tier tire manufacture and I wanted to see what they had to offer.  So far so good!  Now my buddy keeps bugging me to get them on track and give him feedback compared to the Michelin's.  I'm pushing for Pirelli to pay for my track day, we'll see how far that gets me lol.

[GunMetalGrey]

patsbimmer1 said:

I'm pushing for Pirelli to pay for my track day

That would be quite lovely! 
I do look forward to your thoughts on them in more aggressive driving.

[patsbimmer1]

After staring at my rod bearings in my garage for the past 6 months or so I dropped the car off on Monday at EFab Motorsports in Lake Zurich to have my RB's done.  Eric was great!  Very knowledgeable with some cool projects going on.  I had the BE bearings installed with the ARP bolts which are both an upgrade from stock.  Eric was very complimentary of the car after working on it and couldn't say enough nice things about how well maintained it appears to be.  The stock bearings had over 77k on them and a little bit of wear but according to him they didn't look to be failing anytime soon.  Regardless, I'm very happy to have had them replaced for peace of mind.

Up next I want to get the GTS DCT tune.  Other than that adding some bolt ons is tempting but I'm so happy and comfortable with the current power level I don't feel like I need more and I'm the kind of person who's more happy driving it than tinkering with it.

[patsbimmer1]

So I splurged a bit this week and bought new center caps!  I thought they were a bit expensive so I ran the part number and found that they were FLOATING CENTER CAPS!  All I could think about was Jermain Dupri on Cribs pointing out the center caps on his Rolls Royce or Bentley and I had to buy them. They were about $20 more than a set of normal OEM center caps so it made the best financial sense to do this.  That and I'm a child and this makes me giggle.  I'll always be a ricer at heart...

[KaiserRolls]

The Germans sure do have a way with letters

[SteelBlue]

KaiserRolls said:

The Germans sure do have a way with letters 

Hasgedfodorlf ehausragsed

[Jdesign]

[patsbimmer1]

I had a chance to throw my GoPro on my car and get a video of the center caps in motion or lack of motion I guess.  I may be a bit ignorant but I expected these to spin while in motion so I was a little surprised that the weight actually keeps them centered while in motion!  I still love these stupid things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS4py3eR5jM&feature=youtu.be

[patsbimmer1]

Late Model Throttle had their annual dyno shootout so I stopped by this morning and figured I'd make all of the LS guys feel better about their dyno numbers.  My engine is bone stock other than Borla mufflers which adds approximately zero horsepower.  My best run was 337whp/247wtq which seems to be in line with the rest of the stock s65's so that's good.  Torque is basically flat from 2k-ish rpm's to redline.  My butt dyno has always told me this car is fast enough for me so this was really just out of curiosity and to hear it run to redline from outside of the car.

[YoungCR]

Glorious!

[m42b32]

Sounds awesome! It's so weird watching the center cap stay perfectly still the whole time

[B C]

I bet the centercaps were a great conversation piece. This is one of the only applications of a Borla muffler that sounds really good to me. I have usually preferred Magnaflow in the past, but that was also back in the 4 cylinder days

[patsbimmer1]

m42b32 said:

Sounds awesome! It's so weird watching the center cap stay perfectly still the whole time

B C said:

I bet the centercaps were a great conversation piece. This is one of the only applications of a Borla muffler that sounds really good to me. I have usually preferred Magnaflow in the past, but that was also back in the 4 cylinder days

I had two guys come up and ask me how I got them to do that lol.  It's still the dumbest thing I've put on this car and I love other peoples reactions!

[suspenceful]

Car sounds great!

What was the highest BMW/Euro power at LMT that day?

[patsbimmer1]

suspenceful said:

Car sounds great!

What was the highest BMW/Euro power at LMT that day?

Friday there was an 08 335i that put down 701whp/712wtq and that ended up being the highest euro 2wd or 4wd.  There were a couple F80's on Saturday that were 570 and 590 whp respectively.  The one that dyno'd 590 actually ended up on the Burger Tuning instagram page.

[GunMetalGrey]

patsbimmer1 said:

This won't be much of a build thread and more of a "look at the silly cosmetic things I bought"

This thread is delivering as expected.

I wasn't creeping too hard, just came here to remind myself what color your car is.

[patsbimmer1]

GunMetalGrey said:

This thread is delivering as expected.

I wasn't creeping too hard, just came here to remind myself what color your car is. 

If I do one thing well it's setting low expectations then delivering on those expectations!

[patsbimmer1]

I have a few plans for the car over the next few months and it's starting on the interior right now.  For Christmas I received the Colby Wheel parking brake boot and DCT boot.  Over the weekend I was able to install the parking brake boot and I'm happy with the look.  If like to get the interior a little brightened up without exploding with color and I think this helps.  The DCT boot is a little more labor intensive so I'll be doing it this week.

[straight6pwr]

that looks great!

[patsbimmer1]

I took a moment today to knock out the DCT boot today from Coby Wheel.  It's not exactly as simple as the parking brake boot was and I reached out to Coby Wheel for some direction which he provided quickly.  Part of the instructions included cutting my old leather boot off... which I wasn't really thrilled about.  I was fully prepared to do this when I started the project but later figured out I didn't need to.

First step was removing the shift decal and face plate from the knob.  I used a small blade screwdriver to pry the decal off then used a torx to take the screw out holding the face plate.

After this I removed the leather boot from the frame using a flat blade screwdriver.  Now, this is where you would normally cut the leather boot off of the base of the shift knob then ziptie the new one on.  I decided to try and slide the leather boot through the alcantara one and have the new alcantara rest on top of the leather boot.  I did this in order to easily revert back to stock without having to buy a new knob/boot assembly.  Once I had that done there is a piece of boot that you can slide under the face plate and sandwich in order to have a more seamless look.

Here it is with the face plate resting on top and the alcantara boot resting over the leather boot.

To be honest, once I got to this point I was actually disappointed about the fitment.  It looked really frumpy.  I decided to put it in the car and see if being on the shift lever helped.

I used some double sided tape to install the decal and popped her in.

I'm much happier with it installed!  It's still more bunched up than the leather boot was but I don't mind it at all.  I'm really happy with the boot and it was a quick 30~ min DIY that's completely reversible.