BMW DIY advice, and the occasional critique of the company
This past April marked 15 years since I purchased my 2002 E39 M5. I was very stoked about it at the time, and it continues to give me a lot of enjoyment. As subscribers here know, I’ve turned the maintenance and upkeep of my two M cars into a hobby. As performance German cars go…
I’m happy to report that the E46 M3 Dinan Champion wheels I purchased back in January are finally on my car. Full back story here. Obviously I wasn’t going to install in the middle of winter, but life and travel also had delayed the swap. Having this done was not a straightforward process. The first…
Last weekend was the first club DIY for me since last year. Both my M cars are up to date on maintenance items. That’s when I start to think about items that, as far as I know, are original to the car. Both cars are over 20 years old and preventative replacement can make sense….
There’s exciting news on the E46 M3 front this month. I purchased a beautiful set of Dinan Champion wheels from a fellow member of the NAM3 forum. I’ve been keeping my eyes open for a while but had never seen a set as perfect as this before. I’d come close in 2024 to buying a…
Two Sundays ago I was driving home from the final club DIY event of the year. I had done a simple oil and filter change on my 2002 E39 M5 (at 118,100 miles) and inspected the car while on a lift to research future projects. There were a couple of things that needed attending to,…
Last weekend I did an E46 M3 brake fluid change on my 2006 M3. Craftsman Auto Care, a long-time friend of the CCA National Chapter, invited us into their Ashburn location. It was the first DIY event in a while, mainly because the club organizers were traveling a lot in the summer. Changing the brake…
It’s been a while since I talked about the planning and research that goes into a BMW DIY project. Right now I’m in the midst of deciding how to tackle replacing the radiator on my 2002 BMW E39 M5. To the best of my knowledge the current radiator is original to the car. It now…
It’s been quiet this summer on the M car front. It’s good news there hasn’t been big maintenance needs, not so good news that there were no DIY events in the past few months. Here’s a post about something else that didn’t quite happen – I came close to purchasing a Dinan S-1 M5. Of…
Last month I attended a National Capital Chapter DIY event held at Scandanavian Import Service Center in Rockville, MD. It was time to replace the differential fluid in my E39 M5, as well as swap out the air filters and the fog light halogen bulbs. I hadn’t changed the differential fluid since 2013. That sounds…
This weekend I completed a front-end refresh on my E46 M3 that I started thinking about last year. Last March I sent my headlights to Lightwerkz and had more modern projectors retrofitted into the stock assemblies. That got me thinking about what else up front should be refreshed. So this weekend I replaced the plastic…
This past weekend I tackled some minor paint issues, one on each car. I also changed the oil in my E46 M3, doing it in my driveway since a club DIY got canceled. Neither paint issue was major. My E39 M5 came to me in 2011 with two long scratches on the driver side rear…
I thought I was done with M3 news after the last DIY event. But the car had other ideas. My alternator died last week while I was driving through Old Town Alexandria, taking the battery with it. After I got that settled I decided to buy a Bluebus Bluetooth device for the car, like I…
