Hey, y'all!
After selling my Oxford Green 330i/5 last year, I had a variety of different cars, ranging from an E39 540i/6 to an E32 740i to several E34 525i's. Nonetheless, in that time I still missed having an E46... there's something irresistible about its blend of modern features along with classic BMW handling prowess and a relatively light curb weight.
The timing for another E46 never seemed quite right until this one fell into my lap (not literally, that would hurt!). As a little bit of backstory, I run a small BMW specialty shop here in Tempe, AZ, where I specialize in older BMW's like the E28, E34, E39, E36, E46, etc. That's where this particular E46 came in— it got towed to the shop one day on a flatbed, having overheated. After running a compression test and verifying that the engine was still in good shape, I diagnosed the overheating issue as being caused by an ancient (if not original) cooling system and a completely dead clutch fan. I also noted a variety of common E46 issues when I talked to the customer about their car. They told me they were trying to sell the car and didn't really want to invest much money into it for that reason. That got the gears turning in my head, as I needed another car to daily drive with my E34 525i falling apart (long story). I made them a fair offer on the car, taking into account its mechanical issues, and they accepted, so I became the owner of this 2003 330ci.
A little about the car: it's a titanium silver coupe with a gray leather interior. Super exciting color combo, I know! It's well-loaded, with the sport package, auto headlights, self-dimming mirror, lumbar support, seat memory, Harmon Kardon audio, bixenon headlights, and style 68 wheels, albeit in a less-than-desirable chrome finish. No heated seats, but being a coupe it does have folding rear seats, which is super exciting to me. Believe it or not, I've almost never owned a BMW that had folding seats before. For whatever reason that seems to be an extremely rare option. The car has an automatic transmission, for better or worse. It works okay for now aside from the usual torque converter lockup issue on the highway. The plan in the near future is to manual swap it, which should be relatively easy to do with a shop at my disposal.
The car has clean title, clean Carfax, no error lights, and originally came from Arizona, hence the faded front and rear bumper paint. The rest of the paint is in decent shape though, and should respond nicely to a paint correction once it cools down a bit here. At a mere 135k miles, it's one of the lowest-mileage cars I've owned in recent years, with the vast majority of my past fleet having 200k or more. It's got working keyless entry, all the original owner's manuals and paperwork, and a decently complete trunk toolkit.
After suffering through all this rambling, I will reward y'all with two extremely mediocre pictures of the car in question. I'll take some proper pictures once I have the chance to detail the car properly.
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The absolute first order of business was making the car not overheat, at least for the time being until I can scrounge up enough money to redo the entire cooling system. Topping off the cooling system regularly along with swapping on a good used clutch fan seems to have solved the overheating issue, at least temporarily. I definitely won't be taking any long trips in this car until everything in that system is brand new.
The next thing I needed to fix immediately was the HVAC fan working intermittently. An intermittent fan is not fun at all in an Arizona summer, especially when it's been 110º+ every day for the past month. After verifying that the blower fan motor was in good shape, I quickly obtained a new FSU. The one I removed looks to be original, nice.
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With the AC working correctly, I turned my attention to the absolutely awful tires, two of which were worn down to the cords. I ordered 4 new tires, which will hopefully be here in the next few days. That alone should make a massive difference to the handling and ride comfort of this car, considering it has 4 completely mismatched tires in varying states of decay.
Here's the to-do list so far, in no particular order:
- Valve cover gasket
- Oil filter housing gasket
- Cooling system (radiator, hoses, expansion tank, thermostat, water pump)
- Control arm bushings
- Spark plugs
- Differential bushings
- Transmission mounts
- Engine mounts
- Passenger side window regulator
- Sunroof delete (sunroof is currently super broken)
- Inner & outer tie rods
- Trailing arm bushings
- Alignment
- Factory aux input install (perks of it being a later car)
- Polish (or replace) headlight lenses
- Vanos rebuild (would probably make sense to do along with VCG)
As for the more major changes I want to make:
- Black interior swap
- Manual swap
- Maybe different wheels, if not just style 68's in the stock finish
- Some kind of intake
- Catless headers
- Tune
- Coilovers of some kind
- ZHP bumpers maybe?
Anyways, that's where I'm at with the car at the moment. I want it to be a good daily but also want to tear up some mountain roads with it and fling it around at a track day semi-regularly.
