USA Road Trip (Patreon)

US special with E46 M3 coming up!

My better half and I are setting sails for the US tomorrow. We'll be there for about 3 weeks traveling and exploring. The first stop is Boston, then Cape Cod and NY. I've never been to the East coast so I'm really excited to see NYC!

After that, we are going to Pittsburgh, where my girlfriend's sister lives. This is primarily a vacation, but I had to make it spicy and interesting. A long time ago a nice subscriber from Utah offered me a cheap 2001 E46 M3 6-speed vert. $7k! A bit neglected, but perfect for this road trip. 

We'll fly in from Pittsburgh to Salt Lake City to pick up the car. Obviously, the M3 needs some work before it can start eating miles. Therefore, I'm working with BimmerWorld on this project and they kindly agreed to send me all of the parts that I need to fix up the car and make it comfortable for the journey. I reached out to them and the experience has been awesome, a bunch of BMW enthusiasts that watch the channel as well and once I explained what I'm doing, they were excited to participate.
I wrote them basically one week ago and they managed to ship the big pile of parts that I asked for in time. Can't tell you how big of a help this is as the whole trip is going to be expensive. 

To make my life additionally easier, we have an incredibly nice Patreon J.R. that lives in SLC and offered to assist me with everything and anything. From picking me up from the airport, giving me his car to use, storing massive boxes with parts at his place... just speechless with the hospitality. Thank you!
He put me in touch with his friend John that has a garage full with tools, quickjack and lots of wrenching experience. Among other projects, they fully rebuilt an E46 M3 in there so they are generously going to host me and help with my adventure.

We are landing around 11 am in SLC and have the rest of the day to work on the car and prepare it for the first leg of the journey as we need to start driving to LA the next day in order to stay on schedule. I got a PPI on the car and the seller disclosed the issues so I know what it needs more or less. Taillights are shot, rear brakes, interior needs TLC (I'm bringing a new steering wheel with me), the cooling system needs a refresh and lots of other small things so we'll see how much we can get done in a day. 

My best friend lives in LA in Santa Monica so we'll spend a couple of days there and then head to my all-time favorite place and my old stomping ground, Santa Barbara. I left CA in 2017 and can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to being there again. This is where my journey with BMWs started! 

After that, we are going to take the beautiful Pacific Coast Highway to San Francisco where we'll spend a few days and meet up with Jason Cammisa if the timing works out. Then back to LA from where we'll fly out back home.

As for the M3, I'm 99% sure I'm going to sell it once done with the trip. To ship it back to Germany will be expensive and the timing is just not right given how many other projects I already have. 

Of course, I am going to film this entire adventure and I'm hoping to have enough material for 2-3 episodes. I bought a new GoPro 11 which is already overheating and driving me mad, but it's much more practical than the camcorder that I usually use.

In other news, Alpina is in Poland getting stripped and ready for paint. After discussing it, we decided it would be best to repaint the entire car as every body panel has some imperfection and since the rest of the car is perfect, it makes sense to have perfect paint as well. The roof they'll leave alone as it's in good shape, but the rest will be repainted back to the original Schwarz 2.

I've been working like crazy to get 2 more videos done to release while I'm absent so the next episode of project X5 is coming next week and it's a nice long wrenching episode. After that, an episode where we do some work on project Raleigh E60 M5, install carbon fiber intake plenums and make it sound even more insane and also show you how we installed the 2-post life in the Dojo.

That's the update for now. Once I'm back, we are going to go strong to finish the X5, Alpina should be back and then we'll start preparing E31 and possibly E21 to be shipped to Poland to be repainted. 

As always, thank you so much for your kind support! I'll do my best to post some pictures here as well while on the road. Cheers!