Great thread!

I've got a 2002 4.4 e53 that I recently re-inherited from my kids who drove it while they were in the house, and for the 14 years before that it was my wife's daily driver since new. It is now officially my project car, mostly because it's the one I've got in my driveway and I don't see a 911 or 67 Camaro build showing up any time soon with two kids in college.

It seems to be a real unicorn in many ways at this point, so your post, and all the replies, comments, and questions are of very real value to me. Thanks all.

I officially kicked off today what will be a slow motion build by pulling the instrument cluster and DME and sending them off to Fixels, to be replaced with a 4.8 cluster and properly coded DME. Gotta start somewhere...up next on the agenda:
- roof and hood paint. The rest of the car (blue) is in pretty good shape, but the roof and hood are completely shot. Looking at John Deere Blitz Black because its a cheap, easy to spray matte that hot rodders have been using for years and is easy to take care of, unlike other mattes and satins. The two tone blue/matte black should be nice for a while. I have a long term vision of a two tone matt black/british racing green look.
- Wheels/tires. Really like the Cragar Series 342 D window 17x8s, but would need adapters for the 5x4.5 pattern. I might need them anyway to fit the 285/60/17s I would like to run, although I think that might be a 30.5" total, so maybe not? I'm lost at how much "poke" that combo will have so I'd love to pick the collective brain.
- FMU lift if needed to get everything playing nicely together.
- Fix the stupid seat memory controller/steering wheel adjust failure interconnect-goat-rope. Hopefully a used control module off of ebay will do the trick.
- Lots of broken and rotted trim and assorted plastic and rubber to be replaced.
- Aftermarket sound of some sort or the other. Crutchfield seems to think its plug-and-play easy, but almost everything they carry that claim will work is on backorder.
- rack cross bars for the Thule that normally goes on my wife's Grand Cherokee for hurricane evacuations and bird hunting trips to Iowa.
- New subframe bushings all around (I redid all the big ticket suspension pieces on all four corners a few years ago when I had access to a lift, but didn't do the subframe bushings).
- Headliner and door panel work. The panels are shot up front due to my ham-fisting them off and on too many times to fix the stupid windows. My have to go to a custom upholstery shop since the beige panels seem to be harder and harder to come by in better shape than mine.

Finally, the big tix mechanicals...
The tranny is a two year old remanufactured unit I got from Euro Transmission Specialists (including the torque converter). I've been happy with the investment so knock-on-wood no money is needed there. I'm not certain about the transfer case chain and may just replace it for piece of mind after I finally find out how many mile are actually on the car.

The mighty M62 is leaking from every nook and cranny and I'm guessing within a couple years of a serious midlife crisis. A recent compression and leak-down test showed 7 very middle aged cylinders, and 1 cylinder with two feet in the departure lounge potentially. Number 8s performance was pretty far out of whack, so I'm crossing my fingers that it was a large speck of carbon maybe and the motor will last, reliably, until I'm done with college bills. At that point I'm dreaming of engaging Henry Lawrence to build me a bulletproof steel lined 5L M62 monster to drop in.

At the end of the day my goal is to build an overland style X5 that I won't think twice about driving 14 hours to the midwest in with my mutts to bird hunt in the winter.

I'll start posting pics once I figure out how.