Not as much progress as yesterday, but the car is still better than it was this morning and so today is worthy of a note.

Very dull to start – the headlamps had residue of beam blockers for European travel stuck on them which looked quite minging. Quite why this was done, given that it’s easy to deflect the beams mechanically by twiddling controls on top of the lamp units, is beyond me.

Note the goo at about 5 o’clock on the left lens.

Some white spirit soon cleaned that up.

Here’s the quite obvious positive terminal cover I replaced yesterday:

And a general shot of the engine bay:

The air filters turned out to be a bit minging, and the chambers were full of crap, so I’ve hoovered those as best I can. I doubt it’ll make any difference, but it made me feel better.

I’ve removed the silly Traffic Master buttons and panel and put some front cup holders in:

I had a spare E30 bonnet left over from the E30 M3 project which was knocking around in the garage. Given that the M5 is roughly the size of an ocean liner I need every inch of space, and so I’ve given this bonnet to Ian Haynes – it goes at least 0.1% of the way to repaying his assistance over the last few years. Getting it in the 330d wasn’t easy, but I managed it once I’d worked out that I needed to shove a bit of it out of the window!

In return Ian has lent me his Carsoft apparatus which I plugged into the M5 for some readings:

I read out the DME codes first (engine’s the most important thing!), and I got this output, which currently may as well be in Greek:

Single diagnosis DME / DDE - Status: Error!

Module Info: DME / DDE

BMS 46

BMW Part Nr: 7833965
Hardware Nr: 01
Software Nr: 13
Diagnose index: 60
Code index: 00
Bus index: 12
Production date: 13/00

BMS_FEH.DXT

92

- Single diagnosis completed!

Now as far as I can tell the line at the end that starts ’92’ is normally a three digit code followed by a textual explanation, for example ‘117 IDLE SPEED ACTUATOR ACTIVATION’, but in this case there’s just the number 92 and no explanation.

No doubt I’ll find out soon enough that code 92 means that armageddon is nigh!