Latest on Project ATKTIM3…

I bought the E90M3 about two years ago and since then I’ve slowly been accumulating parts here and there. Instead of going hotboi and making the M3 look good, I wanted the engine to be as bulletproof as possible. That means fixing the critical “flaws” that the M3 has from factory. In the previous post on the M3, I had the rod bearings and motor mounts replaced by Malek at MRF Engineering out on Lake Forest, CA. The car is now at another shop waiting to get the next phase of mods and maintenance done…

The car has had a CEL for a couple months from a bad idle control valve and faulty O2 sensors and with smog coming up later this year, I needed to get all this engine work done. I decided to save up and replace the other critical items that needed to be replaced “while I was in there” type of mods. The main items that are being redone is replacing the magnesium valve covers with a set of NRW aluminum valve cover and they will also be replacing the plastic VANOS covers with a CarBahn VANOS spring plate kit. On the exhaust end, they will be replacing all the O2 sensors and swapping back to a mint OEM x-pipe paired up with a Dinan muffler to reduce the drone! I’ve also bought misc. items from the NRW parts catalog with the aluminum jack pad set, silicone throttle body coupler, and S65 billet spark plug tubes.

As for little updates on the M3, I removed the horrendous side mounted license plate and got a custom plate for the M3! For the interior I finally swapped the sticky cup holders over to a new set and I can’t believe I waited this long to do so!