WBM346Z Build Journal

Almost a requirement of any good build is an exhaust upgrade. Everyone from school boy tuners to fully blown racers do it. So now it was my turn to have a look. There is a very exhaustive and well written thread (Thanks to aznbo187 over at M3Forum) that covers all of the potential options you could ever imagine for the E46 M3. Now my drivers for the exhaust were I wanted; an all-in-one ready to go package (as usual), a performance increase, a little bit of extra noise without being obnoxious and a taming of the tinny rasp all E46 M3's have. There are multiple options to address the noise, tinny rasp and all-in-one requirement, but after a bit of research there was only one that offered a confirmed and consistent performance increase and this was the Supersprint option. So with that in mind I was very quickly set on the Supersprint offering without really jumping into anymore research. I didn't see any point spending any money on anything that wouldn't provide a performa...

As the car had done ~94k miles I thought it would be time to refresh the cooling system as part of the build project. It also gave me an opportunity to remove the viscous clutch fan, as I have never liked these. This is similar to my dislike for sleeving engines that aren't low-revving V8's, I have no science to support why I don't like them, I just don't. My main driver here was to upgrade to something better than stock with increased reliability. As with my other parts decisions I also wanted to stick to something that for the most part came as a ready to install kit specifically for the E46 M3. Fortunately (or unfortunately) there was a lot of options to chose from when it came to cooling upgrade for the E46 M3. I compiled a list of some of the options I reviewed / considered: Zionsville Radiator Fluidyne Radiator and Oil Cooler C&R Radiator and Oil Cooler Mishimoto Radiator and Oil Cooler CSF Radiator and Oil Cooler I am sure there is more opti...

Now with a rough build plan in place an my modification application sitting with the Department of Transport it was time to start stripping the car. This would allow me to at least start on the underside refurbishment, as irrelevant of the modification application outcome the underside needed a tidy-up. Stripping the car would also allow me to find other parts that needed refurbishment or replacement. As the car was a UK import the corrosion underneath was going to be horrid so I already knew there would be a fair bit of stuff that would need to be replaced or refurbished. I snapped a couple of photos of the car and parts as I went: