I’d set today aside to give the 330d some much wanted love, and I was required to help Robin perform a quick gearbox swap in his 325i, so the M5 has only a short tale to tell.

This morning I pushed it out of the garage so I could retrieve some 330d tyres.

Utterly filthy from last weekend! Also, a really heavy car: pushing it back in the garage was a real effort! Still, I ignored that and filled the tractor with tyres, got that sorted, changed its back brakes, wipers and got it washed. A suitable stable-mate.

Having nipped up the road to help sling a new gearbox in Robin’s 325i, most of Saturday’s daylight had escaped. A root around in the garage produced a few choice bits and pieces which I quickly fitted to the M5.

The water-pump pliers and the wiring harness were retrieved from James’ knackered 528i during the week. I did have some pliers from Ben’s 328i but they didn’t quite fit in the tool box correctly, so I’ve replaced those with James’ ones that do. I’ve got whipping the headlamps out down to a fine art now, so it wasn’t long before I had the harness and correct indicator fitted to the lamps – facelift (finally) complete!

As a result of the Cornish camping trip last weekend the inside of the car was a bit minging:

So I vacuumed and polished back to a satisfactory condition. Sadly it was pretty much dark by the time I’d finished, but trust me, it’s clean inside. Still filthy outside though…

This weekend saw a little bit of a road trip, and in a successful attempt to empty my wallet I chose to take the M5. On Thursday evening I drove to Monmouth to collect a pal. On Friday morning we drove to Bath for an eye test, then to Newquay for a stag weekend. On Sunday I returned with three passengers – delicately – via Monmouth.

Fact and figures – average speed of 47mph over 800 miles at 26mpg. On the strength of those there’s absolutely no justification for choosing this vehicle over the extremely competent 330d.

However, it did do two things the 330d couldn’t. Firstly it provided a superior level of comfort. It manages this in a variety of ways. Its boot is enormous – which means that large amounts of luggage don’t restrict rear visibility and damp camping clothing and materials don’t stink out the cabin. It’s also more comfortable due to it being more roomy, and the general £35K vs £55K things you’d expect such as reduced road noise, increased luxury of seating and space etc.

The other thing it did, once we were in Cornwall, was to travel preposterously quickly, making a beautiful noise, with an attitude so easily adjusted with the throttle that its motion could be sublime beyond belief considering its mass. It also looked most comical in the camp site:

In conclusion I’d say I don’t regret taking it, but given I now estimate it costs over 10p per mile more than the 330d to fuel, if I were making a return trip in the near future it’d be staying in the garage!

The trip provided an excellent shakedown. Over the last 1,000 miles the car has used about 200ml of oil. Given some of the reports I’ve read of over 1 litre per 1,000 miles on cars with considerably less miles, this is relatively good news! My spider senses suggest that the propshaft donut wants renewing, and indeed that the clutch is pretty old – it will slip if really abused, but is still strong under all gentlemanly conduct.

Otherwise, no gremlins, so I’m pleased. I’ve been blessed with a cold and I note the evenings are now dark so early they’re almost useless, so I currently plan on giving both me and the M5 a rest until the weekend.

One of my colleagues spotted a brand new BMW E39 M5 rear right brake disc on eBay for £80 delivered last week, so I bought it – partially because I’ll need it (when I get a left one to match), but also for the comedy value of having a single giant brake disc delivered to the office. It arrived today!

This is a serious bit of kit. It’s enormous, heavy, and floating bell design – this is just a rear brake! The engineering involved in creating this disc is notable – it represents the rest of the car in a healthy manner.

Okay, I’m officially sat here all very pleased today. This all started when I plugged the Carsoft diagnostics in since last nights outing and noted that the DME fault code 92 had not returned – all was clean.

There were three other warnings: airbag, instrument cluster and EWS. The EWS and airbag warnings both referred to low battery voltage at some point in the past – I’m happy enough with this because I know the battery was removed at the car dealers. The instrument panel may relate to this, or being removed to have the pixels fixed, or something else (the codes aren’t especially clear). I’ve reset all these faults and read it again before I return the kit to Ian on Tuesday.

Anyway, I next decided to follow some advice I’d found on the very informative m5board.com about MAFs, their effects on power output, and how to test them.

It all seemed quite straight forward: it’s possible to get the OBC to display instantaneous fuel consumption in litres per hour (special test 4). This threw up an interesting comparison of 1.6l/h at hot idle – the same as my M3 Evo – the 328i was 1.1l/h. Anyway, rumour has it that full beans under load the engine should be shoving fuel around at something approaching 140l/h. So off I went to find out.

Accelerating hard from idle in second saw the rate rapidly rise to 50l/h but at around 3,500rpm – just when the car starts feeling less strong than Olly’s – the rate of increase slows, peaking at 99l/h just before the redline. I’d imagine that on a private circuit the same results may apply at the top of higher gears.

Now Olly had kindly donated two second hand but cleaned MAFs, so I headed home to fit them. This is indeed an easy job. New MAFs resting on the old ones:

Half way through side 1:

When I started the car it sounded a little different, but then settled to a familiar idle. Out on the road though THINGS WERE DIFFERENT. Holding back? Oh no, just a V8 roar and we’re in a different county, pumping at 125l/h – still not perfect but a whole lot better. It feels like 25% more fuel. It’s a different car now – it’s brilliant!

I’m so utterly delighted by this that I’ve even polished my exhausts in jubilation.

Today began brightly, and I prepared to change the oil filter and install the liquid gold TWS 10W60.

This was a simple operation, the only hiccup being my selection of an oil catch tub that had a hole in it.

Upon restarting the car, as expected, the Vanos was quiet, then very loud for about a second, then quiet. Good. I took the car for a drive, and lo and behold when warm, the Vanos rattle came back. Oh well, it was only a £100 experiment.

On the bright side, the Vanos is now extremely quiet on start-up. On the down side, I found this in the front right tyre:

Fortunately it was repairable, so £16 saw that sorted.

During all this, the car’s habit of ‘bonging’ at me to say ‘key in ignition’ when the driver’s door is open officially got on my tits. Therefore while I was queuing to check the tyre pressures I got under the foot-well panels and disconnected the ‘bong’ sounder. The main disadvantage of this is that it can no longer ‘bong’ to inform me that the lights are on, but then due to the ‘crying wolf’ aspect of the ‘key in ignition’ warning, I tended to ignore that too.

Finally, I stuck £70 of fuel in, cleared the DME codes, and went for a good blat – averaging a massive 21.4 mpg.

Following the hilarious tail-lift and adaptor collection, the facelift was almost a smooth operation. It all looked so simple to begin…

I knew which tools to use, which bolts to remove etc, and it wasn’t long before the lights were swapped over on the passenger side. Then I had to connect them up. The motor, the high beam and the primary dipped beam all connected straight away, the sidelight connected through the adapter and then, then I discovered that I also needed an adaptor for the indicator. So, for the second night in a row, ‘bollocks’ was the general theme and mood.

Still, at this point my fortunes improved. I found that the whole indicator bulb holder could be removed from the old unit, and wedged pretty soundly into the new one. So I continued.

Then, my luck improved further: when I’d disconnected the driver’s side unit from the 528i I’d done so south of the indicator adaptor – so that was plug and play.

A quick bit of beam alignment against the marks I’ve etched on my garage door and the job was done. I’m really pleased with the result – the car now can’t be easily aged, and looks smart. Shame the Vanos rattles so – a day off from the blog tomorrow and then it’s TWS 10W60 time on Saturday!

It struck me when last night’s curry woke me up early this morning that, as a result, I may have time to nip to the 528i before work and retrieve those adaptors. I was right!

Hopefully this means I can get the front lights in tonight…

Olly & I have had a play with the new lights I collected today with varying results. We started with the tail lights, which rumour had it are significantly harder to fit than the head lamps. Here’s Olly modelling one of the new units:

We immediately tore out a lamp to check the connections – all was fine.

First things first, it’s important to point out that the Cellis lamp units aren’t direct replacements for the standard pre-facelift units. The mounting points aren’t all the same, so I had to measure and drill a couple of holes on each side.

I’d called Adam Tier who has performed this process a few times, and he explained that as well as drilling new mounting points, it’s necessary to enlarge one of the bulb holes to accommodate the larger rear of the units. Here’s the car mounting face before I abused it:

Adam sagely advised chiselling or filing the lower right hole there to accommodate the new unit. I chose to ignore his advice and took a lump hammer to the car, giving entirely satisfactory and swift results! Olly seemed amused by my willingness to drill and hammer the car into shape, but I took due care, and remembered to lacquer over the new holes to prevent rust. Sadly I only had a spray can of lacquer where a touch up stick was needed, and neither did I have a brush. I did however have a used fake moustache to hand, so I sprayed it thick with lacquer and used it to apply to the car.

This done, it was just a case of bolting it in and connecting it up.

Then it was just a case of repeating the process on the other side. By this time it was more or less dark, so here are some with and without flash photos.

I’m really pleased with the look of the back of the car now. Much as I dislike the plate, the fact that it doesn’t necessarily reflect the age of the car, combined with the newer style lights mean that the car has shrugged off years.

So, tails held high, off we trotted to do the fronts. A head lamp was whipped out, and a new unit offered up.

The main xenon unit worked no problem but – and I’m kicking myself for this – I failed to grab the sidelight connector adapters from the 528i. Bollocks!! So, for the sake of a couple of adaptors, which I must have handled to remove the units this morning but left behind, I can’t put the facelift front lights on the car.

Access to the 528i is very restricted, so it could be some time before this stage of the project is complete, but I am pleased with the rear of the car, and I’m also pleased to note that the xenons worked on the new units. In the meantime I’ve had some kind offers of standard units to replenish the 528i with illumination, so with luck this will soon reach a happy conclusion.

I was up at stupid o clock today to run some car related errands, the most relevant of which was to raid an E39 528i belonging to my friend James.

His 528i requires a new engine, and is then likely to be donated to a friend in Spain, and as such James volunteered its facelift lights for the super saloon. I also managed to pilfer some more tools and a warning triangle.

So currently the boot of the M5 looks like this:

I also collected some new tyres for the 330d. Fortunately the M5 is a nice big car, so as the boot was full I made good use of the rear seats.

At some point I need to both get these new boots on the tractor and fit these lamps, and then I need to return the 528i to a condition where it has some lights and is weatherproof. As I’d like the keep the M5′s original lights I therefore need to source some bog standard E39 lights to complete my promise – I’ve had a couple of good offers come in on the forum already (lovely bunch that they are!), so hopefully this chapter will be complete soon.

After much debate on the forum, I decided to bite the bullet and fork out a small fortune on TWS 10W60, the very expensive oil that E39 M5s seem to need to thrive.

Big thanks to Olly Bloxham for oiling the wheels of the transaction, and ultimately sourcing 10 litres of this stuff plus a BMW filter kit for £120.

I’ve other engagements this evening, and the weather is far too minging to entertain getting under the car, but at least this haul is now in stock – photographed here on the delightful yellow seats of my 330d.