Have been watching a few threads with great interest. I tucked my 6 speed 3.8 away in storage a year past in June for three weeks when I was going on holiday and sadly, other than a couple of runs to keep the oils and everything circulating, there it has stayed. I got involved in another couple of quicker car projects here and, as everyone knows, they quickly soaked up all the spare time and more importantly money and the M5 was temporarily forgotton about.
With the current economic situation I thought it would be a good idea to rationalise the hobby cars, and since I haven't driven the car for 18 months, I thought it would be first to go. However the thread and youtube piece on the induction kit quickly changed my mind as it does make the car sound superb. The follow on to that was I was doing a hillclimb with the car a couple of years ago, and thought before I did it that the clutch slipped one night out testing, so I ordered a new one from the local BMW agent but didn't get time to fit it before the event. As it turned out, it didn't slip and the new clutch is still in my garage, so the recent thread on changing to a lighter flywheel and clutch sent more ideas of changes through my head!
The final idea was to change the diff to a 5 speed one, and hence lower the gearing and improve the ingear acceleration. These three changes wouldn't cost a fortune but, as a combination, would make a marked difference to the performance and, more importantly, the noise it would make. The whole Evolve induction kit and custom re-map sounds good, but £7 or 800 for a rolling road remap is a bit rich for my tastes. I appreciate we are talking BMW here so don't expect cheap prices, but I took my K-series engined MG midget to Dave Walker at Emerald, who make the ECUs, in the summer and for a map check and adjust and an 'economy' map installed, he charged less than a quarter of this.
The other small issue is why spend extra money on a car when that money would probably almost allow you to upgrade to an E39 M5, have you seen how cheap some of them are at the moment?
Anyway thoughts from those have done these changes would be most appreciated.
With the current economic situation I thought it would be a good idea to rationalise the hobby cars, and since I haven't driven the car for 18 months, I thought it would be first to go. However the thread and youtube piece on the induction kit quickly changed my mind as it does make the car sound superb. The follow on to that was I was doing a hillclimb with the car a couple of years ago, and thought before I did it that the clutch slipped one night out testing, so I ordered a new one from the local BMW agent but didn't get time to fit it before the event. As it turned out, it didn't slip and the new clutch is still in my garage, so the recent thread on changing to a lighter flywheel and clutch sent more ideas of changes through my head!
The final idea was to change the diff to a 5 speed one, and hence lower the gearing and improve the ingear acceleration. These three changes wouldn't cost a fortune but, as a combination, would make a marked difference to the performance and, more importantly, the noise it would make. The whole Evolve induction kit and custom re-map sounds good, but £7 or 800 for a rolling road remap is a bit rich for my tastes. I appreciate we are talking BMW here so don't expect cheap prices, but I took my K-series engined MG midget to Dave Walker at Emerald, who make the ECUs, in the summer and for a map check and adjust and an 'economy' map installed, he charged less than a quarter of this.
The other small issue is why spend extra money on a car when that money would probably almost allow you to upgrade to an E39 M5, have you seen how cheap some of them are at the moment?
Anyway thoughts from those have done these changes would be most appreciated.