Not Another Dash!

How is it that I keep getting into this situation??? This time the subject is the 1999 Z3 Coupe - the car that was the genesis for this blog:

Actually, I know how I keep getting into this situation: it's "old plastic." My cars are too new, but not quite new enough. They are at that golden age where all the plastic components are brittle, and break at the slightest provocation. In this case, it was plastic in the console that holds the power window switch. It was broken when I bought the car, so if you tried to use the button, it disappeared into the console. My fix for the past five years has been this ugly kludge using a pair of wire ties to hold the switch above the console.

When I went looking for that panel when I first got the car, it was NLA - No Longer Available. But recently, I discovered that the parts catalog had a new item. Essentially, it's a repair panel. It's only available in black plastic, so it won't match any of the finishes originally sold in the car, but at least you can fix this incredibly common problem. For you Z3 owners that stumble across this post, the part number is 51168398850, and I spent about $52 including shipping at bmwpartssource.com. Here's the new piece on the left, with my battered original brushed aluminum trim on the right.

I had actually had that piece out once before when changing the radio, and had tried to fix it with JB Weld. Trust me - won't work. You can see below the broken one on the left, complete with JB Weld  residue, and the new one on the right.

I had thought that maybe the aluminum trim could be moved to the new piece, but it is factory crimped through slots that don't exist in the new one. Plastic finish is what you get, but it fit perfectly once assembled:

In place, the mismatch in finishes doesn't look that bad - certainly better than a switch floating on a bed of zip ties! You could easily imagine that the brushed trim originally came on the upper piece only:

This is a fussy job that took about 5 hours to complete. The driver's seat has to come out, there are about 10 different cables to find and unhook, and it takes a lot of fiddling to orient the console correctly to get it off and on around the handbrake. But I'm glad I did it - it cleans up an eyesore, and will make the car easier to sell. (Foreshadowing.... "a dramatic device in which an important plot-point is mentioned early in the story and will return in a more significant way.")