Friday Video: BMW Design Head talks about design

Today's treat is a nice little (7 min) video of the current head of BMW Design, Karim Habib as he talks about his work and design in general. Interestingly, the car he drives is an Inka Orange 2002 Tii (shown driving in the film around Munich). That car still has a hold on the core of BMW. Nice to know.

Visiblity mod

As part of the '02 restoration, I replaced the US spec frog eyes front turn signals with Euro turn signals. Not only do they look way cooler, the car is an Euro model so it's only returning back to stock.

Flat European turn signals

Bulbous US spec lights

One advantage - probably the only - is the US spec turn signals have an extra bulb that lights up - aka parking lights. The Euro ones only have a single bulb, so at night there's only light when the turn signal is activated.

Somebody on the BMW2002FAQ forum came up with a nice mod to add the missing functionality. Start off with a GM right angle license plate socket (Dorman #85868) that I picked up at the local AutoZone.

I told the car the GM stands for Generalisimo Motors ...

With a step drill, I drilled an 11/16 hole and mounted the socket to the light bracket.

Since the lights are grounded to the body, I drilled a small hole and mounted the ground lead from the socket with a sheet metal screw.

** Cool Tool Alert ***

While I was in the middle of this mod, I got my Klein Journeyman Crimping Pliers. For years I been using those cheap yellow stamped steel electrical connector crimpers that everybody has. I've never been real happy with their use. It's a crappy tool. While doing the front fog light install, I added a couple of relays and did a fair amount of electrical wiring. In the middle of it I said enough! I'm done with crappy crimps and off to Amazon.com. Well it's finally here, and it's great tool. Expensive ($30) but worth it. Easy, and ergonomic to use and does solid crimps, one after another. Recommended.

Cheap shitty crimping tool

Klien Crimping Pliers - awesome!

And now back to our regularly scheduled blathering ....

Here's the final result:

44 Nose Job

Picked up the 44 from the folks up at Bodymotion yesterday. A mostly positive result. First they put the car up on the frame bench to check it and the car is straight, with all the suspension points aligned and within spec. So that's great news to start off the season.

Next they spent some time yanking all the sheet metal in the front in various directions trying to get the gaps all to line up. The front sheet metal around the radiator support and other metal were seriously "adjusted" over the last several years of racing and repairs. Now the new turbo fenders, header panel and hood are lining up with only small even gaps and the car looks good. Relatively speaking of course. I still have a lot of sanding and painting ahead of me, but that's monkey's work, I can do it.

The next thing they were going to do for me was a corner balance and alignment. As they started working on it they found a couple of issues that I will need to address. First the trick Mantisport strut hats I put on for last season, it seems that the springs are binding in the tower. I had heard the helper springs binding and releasing in slow parking lot turns earlier. But now, at least on the left side, the top of the coils were solidly bound up and frozen. That's why I needed to use a 2x4 under the left front wheel to get my lift arm under the car. So a future order of business is to remove the strut hats and replace with my old camber plates. They also discovered play in one of the rear banana arm spherical bearings. I'll have to pull it and see.

The above issues makes corner balance and alignment a waste of money until I address them. So they moved on to the next task. Fabbing the support for the fiberglass turbo nose.

New nose installed

The guys did a great job with it. They did in a day what would have taken me several weeks of futzing around and did a better job than I probably would have.

They build a nice tubular steel frame and welded dzus tabs for easy on/off of the nose.

I still have a fair amount of work to go: Cut the radiator holes in the spoiler; fab up a tow hook; relocate the oil cooler, painting and more. But I got a great foundation.

Cool tool of the day: lubricheck

I just got a cool gadget into the garage. It's a Lubricheck, engine oil tester. While you can buy an oil tester like the NASCAR guys use, but they're up around $600-800, not alpine garage money territory. The Lubricheck guys have been developing this for the last couple of years as a Kickstarter project trying to develop one below $50. Well they finally delivered and I got mine in the mail the other day.

It works by measuring the dielectric and impedance of the oil sample on the sensor in the middle of the device and then shows a rating of the oil from 1 to 10, where 1-7 is good, 8-9 fair, and 10 means the oil time is done. I can use this to measure my oil state before and after every race weekend and know how my oil and also my motor is doing.

It's easy to use, just turn it on, wait for it to calibrate, and then add a droplet to cover the sensor area.

Press the test button and wait for the result.

In this case it's measuring the oil in my BMW 2002, and reported back 8 or fair. Which is probably a good assessment of the quality as it's the break-in oil still in the motor and should be changed shortly.

All in all, it looks like an interesting tool to add to the garage. For more info, check out their website at

www.lubricheck.com