E46: Clean door panels

Before and after pictures of the door panels. Some serious elbow grease, new speaker covers and it is much better looking.

E46: speakers and obdii socket

Installed the tweeters today. Luckily the aftermarket tweeters fit into the oem tweeter housings. Transferred the oem connector and it was a bolt in place affair. Even with the factory amp the highs are better. Bass is weak. Expect the ohms differences on the speakers is not helping. Will fit an aftermarket amp to drive the aftermarket speakers.

Today we also added some additional pins to the obdii connector. This car has a 20 pin connector still which means txd (diagnostic bus) is not present at the obdii connector.  Only TXDII (for ISO OBDII protocol), power and 2 grounds were present at the connector.   So we rewired it and added not only txd but can bus and I bus. The connector is more useful now. And we no longer need the 20 pin connector.

Also reinstalled the door panels.  Will post before after pictures later.

OEM left.  Aftermarket in OEM housing right

OBDII Port.  Added 4 pins and wired up the Diagnostic bus, Can Bus and Ibus.  Now I have easy access to them.

Not Sure why but the OBDII pin part number eluded me for awhile.  It is listed on REALOEM  Not sure why I hadn't found it sooner.  So I bought a bunch from ECS tunning when I was ordering some other parts.

E46: Door speakers

Since the BMW mounting holes are nonstandard, I fabricated 6 little brackets out of some scrap to hold the speaker in. Here is a picture of one.

Home made Speaker retaining clip



Speaker held in with fabricated clips



Spliced the OEM connector into the aftermarket wiring then tie wrapped the connector to the speaker to keep it from rattling.  With the insulation back one might not notice the changes.

E46: Snow

The E46 at the moment. Not much going on. Actually I do have interior parts in the house I'm fixing up. Though waiting on parts to be delivered so i can finish. I'll post pictures of that later.

E46: New wheels

Had a warm Saturday and took the time time to clean up the car and change the wheels. It's now sitting on the wheels and tires that I had put on my e36-ls1 last fall. The rear tires went from 205mm wide to now 245mm. Car looks meaner with just that change.