A Yard-Sale Find

Today, I stopped by a yard sale near the church. I'm not usually one for such, but this one had a white Karmann Ghia in the yard, and I stopped to take a look. The car wasn't for sale, but while there my eyes fell on this BMW-logo'd bag in apparently unused condition, and for 12 bucks I just had to have it!

Boxing the Seats

In my last post, I detailed how I changed the seats in Ebony, the new-to-us 2007 BMW Z4 Coupe. That means I had a set of valuable and easy-to-damage sport seats sitting on the workbench at the Grant St. Garage! Clearly, the next project had to be protecting them from harm.

In that last post, I mentioned that I planned to reinstall the sport seats in Ebony some years from now when I was ready to sell it, or at least give the buyer the option of choosing between the installed standard seats (which I'm calling "touring seats") or the more aggressive sport seats. My plan was to build very sturdy boxes to store the sport seats, and when I was done with them, use those same boxes as shipping crates for an eBay sale. And that's exactly what I did!

Ahhhh.....

First things first: It's "Ebony." The car's name is Ebony. First suggested by Sydne Fredrickson, and later by Matt Sware (although he suggested the German version, Ebenholz), this name appears to have stuck. Here's a recent beauty shot, taken in front of John and Dee Zimmerman's house. Look how the early morning light plays over the complex surfaces of the body:

Welcome to the Fleet!

In my last couple of posts, I've been hinting at a new car in the fleet. I've been waiting for all the paperwork to be done before making it official on the blog, but today the title and registration paperwork was completed, and it's really ours: a 2007 BMW Z4 3.0si Coupe!

Z4 Roadster For Sale

I'll have something new in the garage to talk about soon, but I'll wait until it's actually here before I post about it. It's in Atlanta now, and I'll be flying down and driving it back next week. An adventure!

But for now... please check out my post offering the 2005 BMW Z4 2.5i Roadster for sale! I put it on a different blog since this one is my project log. UPDATE: The ad is gone now, and so is the Roadster!

Hold the Phone

My phone, a Samsung Galaxy Note 2, is one of those "phablets" - the great big phone that is almost a small tablet. Works great, but it poses special problems if you want to mount it somewhere in a car. It's big! My first attempt was a mount that held the phone perfectly because it was designed specifically for the Note 2, but it clipped into the air conditioner vent, and was so loose and floppy that it rattled and moved around and was impossible to type on.

Then, I found the same phone mount on a suction cup base, and it was cheap - only about 4 bucks shipped from China. Of course, it took a few weeks to get here, but it did arrive:

It looked very promising, but there were two immediate problems: 

Z4 Window Reset (plus a windsheld wiper problem)

I had a weird problem the other day: the wipers stopped working in my Z4. Well, not completely. If I pulled the wiper lever toward me to activate the windshield washer, that worked, and the wipers wiped correctly. But, it wouldn't work in any other position. Obviously, the wiper motor and all associated linkages were fine, since they would work with the washer.

Cupholders

You wouldn't think that cupholders would be a great source of controversy, but in the BMW world they have been for years. Long after American auto makers were putting useful cupholders in cars, BMW either omitted them, or made them so inconvenient to use that you might as well not have them. Legend has it that when asked, BMW engineers would disdainfully say things like, "You Americans and your beverages. Don't drink - drive!"

Even as late as 2005, BMW was still making cupholders that held only small cups, and somehow managed to work poorly while still being masterpieces of German over-engineering. The left photo below shows the driver's side cupholder in the Z4 in the closed position, and the right photo when open:

Pairing the Z4

My recently purchased 2005 BMW Z4 has turned out to be a fine daily driver, as long as there's not snow on the road. But one thing that puzzled me was how to get my phone paired to the Bluetooth that was clearly built in. I'm a real believer in having Bluetooth in the car for phone use. I always cringe when I see an SUV bearing down on me, with a distracted driver holding a phone to his or her head.

In 2005, Bluetooth was quite new, and BMW chose to treat that pairing code like a bank PIN, with unique numbers to each car. The car was delivered with a slip of paper containing the code, but that was long gone. I did some Internet research, and could scarcely believe what I saw - I'd have to disassemble a good bit of stuff to uncover where they hid the code in the car. But I confirmed that fact with Rob Howry at Faulkner BMW, so this afternoon I dug in.

A Little Side Trip

This is the convergence of two separate threads in Mary Ellen's and my automotive lives. Perhaps the more pressing  thread belongs to Mary Ellen - she has a leased 2011 BMW 328i xDrive sedan that we have to give back in about a month. That has occasioned much discussion concerning her next car, perhaps more than she wished she had to endure. It was out of that search that I wound up trading my BMW 128i convertible for a brand new VW GTI Driver's Edition - I was looking for her a car, and somehow...