Hey what's up everyone. I never really did an introduction thread when I bought my car so I guess this is it!

I'm from South Orange County in Southern CA. I've owned and tuned several Japanese cars since I could drive and this is my first Euro. I'm really enjoying the M3 so far.

The car I ended up buying about a year ago (in Dec '07 from Sterling BMW in Newport Beach) is an '04 M3 TIAG/Imola red SMG. It only had 24k miles on it and had the CPO warranty. It has PDC and navigation as well. I also purchased the service plan which has already payed for itself since I recently had the inspection 2 done. At first when I was looking at pictures I thought the red interior looked awesome, but I wasn't sure if i could live with it every day. After seeing it in person I was sold and never I've never looked back. Everyone here has seen a stock M3 but here's 1 pic of mine:
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/IMG_0592.jpg
I went right out and bought a DICE silver line from EAS after finding some very useful information here on the forums. After perusing their site I saw some of the minor but meaningful exterior mods that seem to be pretty popular and that I liked. I was please to see that some of the parts were not an arm and a leg lol. EAS is local to me and they gave great service. After a couple of months I made my choices. I picked most of the stuff from EAS. Here's the "stuff":

Black out grills/gills, black & white Roundels for the hood/trunk/steering wheel, DEPO smoked corners, Invisilite bulbs for the corners and side markers, black out M3 badge, painted reflectors and TIAG bumper plugs from bumperplugs.com
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/IMG_0603.jpg
As I mentioned I'm not totally new to fixing up cars and I was already thinking about wheels and suspension lol. In my opinion wheels make the car. I decided to stash my stuff because I new it would be more fun to put it all on when my wheels came for a really dramatic change. It was tough to resist putting it on for a couple months! I decided to special order some RAYS/Volk RE30's in flat black and get the HKS Hipermax adjustable coilover suspension. I've had awesome results with it on three other cars previously. Here are some teasers of those:
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/IMG_0600.jpg
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/IMG_0605.jpg
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/IMG_0604.jpg

The parts are on but I'm going to leave you with that for now :rofl3:. I did my first amateur photo shoot on Sunday so when I get the pics up on Photobucket I'll do another installment.

Thanks for looking! :thumbsup2:

great start Gabe!

post those pics from Sunday already haha :thumbsup2:

great start Gabe!

post those pics from Sunday already haha :thumbsup2:

Thanks Will. I will definitely try to by the weekend but not promising :raspberry:

You know what Gabe, I've never seen your car stock :P

I think it's safe to say it looks much better now!

Nice car and Nice parts! Lets see some pics..........

Nice Journal..

Where are the Sunday pics.. :shifty:

nice intro :)

Thats one hell of an enterance!

what the hell. lets see some pics

great mods.....TiAg ftw!

Great start to your journal! Now lets see the current pics! :)

nice journal.. lets see the finished product! :)

Thank you everyone, I appreciate all the nice feedback so far. I'm starting to feel the heat on the pics already lol. I'll definitely try to have them up in the next day or two.

Dont make me steal your thunder and post some pics haha.. I do know the guys that shot the pics haha :laughhard:

JK

Dont make me steal your thunder and post some pics haha.. I do know the guys that shot the pics haha :laughhard:

JK

Ya one of the guys is cool, the other I'm not too sure about. I'll let you figure out who's who :laughhard:

Thanks for your help Sunday!

Ya one of the guys is cool, the other I'm not too sure about. I'll let you figure out who's who :laughhard:

Thanks for your help Sunday!

hopefully mike doesnt see this post hahah:laughhard:

Here is a few shots of the suspension install:

HKS Hipermax:
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/IMG_0601.jpg
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/IMG_0608.jpg
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/IMG_0610.jpg
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/IMG_0612.jpg
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/IMG_0613.jpg

My friend Katsu helped me with the install. "Katz, make a funny face" LOL:

http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/IMG_0607.jpg

:thumbsup2: 1 of my favorite coilover setups! :thumbsup2:

OK here is the finish product so far. We didn't have the best light and it's really a pain in the butt to get a good picture of flat black wheels. That being said I think they came out pretty good.

The wheels are RAYS/Volk RE30 special ordered in flat black. They are 19x9 38 front and 19x10 25 rear. I special ordered the optional flat caps in the same color as well. I went with Hankook S1 EVO tires in 255/35 and 285/30. I'm very happy with the set up so far. They just didn't jump on the car though. I'll explain the install later when I have more time.

Drum Roll..................
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/DSC_2049B.jpg
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/DSC_2045.jpg
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/DSC_2089.jpg
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/DSC_2058.jpg
This is not a good picture really, but it's damn hard to take a good pic of a flat black wheel and they look pretty defined there:
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/DSC_2065.jpg
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/DSC_2123.jpg

Looks so sexy Bro! You need to get some bigger exhaust tips or an exhaust to fill up the rear of the car.

:thumbsup2: Loving it!

next time Ill actually drive my M to the shoot haha

Looks so sexy Bro! You need to get some bigger exhaust tips or an exhaust to fill up the rear of the car.

Thanks 0-60. I hear you man. Not only does the exhaust look stock it sounds stock. Comes with all the fabulous rasp too of the stock system :eek2:. I've been looking around and doing some research and I think exhaust parts are probably next up as budget permits.

I had the AP muffler on my car with 83mm tips and it looked awesome and sounded wild but unfortunately it was too loud for my rarely driven car. So i sold it to a close friend as he DDs his car. But yeah go for tips if you like the sound of your OEM system or for a nice Exhaust system like EISENMANN or SUPERSPRINT. Good Luck.

I had the AP muffler on my car with 83mm tips and it looked awesome and sounded wild but unfortunately it was too loud for my rarely driven car. So i sold it to a close friend as he DDs his car. But yeah go for tips if you like the sound of your OEM system or for a nice Exhaust system like EISENMANN or SUPERSPRINT. Good Luck.

I was being sarcastic. I don't care for the stock system at all.

AP looks awesome but everyone on the forum says it's borderline unbearably loud, especially with headers. What I was tossing around as a wish list exhaust was a good/reasonably priced header with an EGR bung (maybe RD), A Custom Performance Rasp Terminator with cats, undecided section 2 but the SS and Borla look like a good design (and I've read the X pipe or balance tube design/location is important) and SS Race rear section.

We'll see what happens when I actually have the money though lol. The SS race would be so nice with Ti tips, or even black tips would really go with my motif. It's too bad they don't come that way.

Next up I'll post pic of my lighting. I have to fix the old clips on my Aurora 60 LED Angel Eyes then I'll get some pics going.

I may just have to shoot some pics of my super deluxe custom rear license plate bolts for you guys too lol. I'm also tossing around lowering the front a tad more.

I recently also applied Leatherique to the leather too. The interior is pretty stock but maybe I'll take a few shots of how the leather came out.

Thanks for all the great comments.

hopefully mike doesnt see this post hahah:laughhard:
LOL
OK here is the finish product so far. We didn't have the best light and it's really a pain in the butt to get a good picture of flat black wheels. That being said I think they came out pretty good.

The wheels are RAYS/Volk RE30 special ordered in flat black. They are 19x9 38 front and 19x10 25 rear. I special ordered the optional flat caps in the same color as well. I went with Hankook S1 EVO tires in 255/35 and 285/30. I'm very happy with the set up so far. They just didn't jump on the car though. I'll explain the install later when I have more time.

Drum Roll..................
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/DSC_2049B.jpg
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/DSC_2045.jpg
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/DSC_2089.jpg
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/DSC_2058.jpg
This is not a good picture really, but it's damn hard to take a good pic of a flat black wheel and they look pretty defined there:
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/DSC_2065.jpg
http://i238.photobucket.com/albums/ff163/MRaculous/M3/DSC_2123.jpg
Nice pics of an awesome looking car!!! Who took those pics anyways? haha

Here's some more pics from Sunday!

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3504/3196395594_b312c282ca_o.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3353/3195550743_a0c9b2a525_o.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3498/3195550689_0b9605bd51_o.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3489/3196395382_7f648c290a_o.jpg

looks AMAZING. Love the flat black volks. You really got a great start on the car. ONLY thing I would do is lower it a bit more to get rid of the wheel gap. Otherwise... beautiful m

Tough car and nice pics. Any updates?

nice work so far!! keep it going.