Yeah when I first took mine off, one bolt was completely loose, and two were finger tight.
I cleaned them up with the chaser tap and die and reused them at the 56 newton meters and 90 degrees but have low expectations. I've wasted enough money for one time use bolts, I'm about sick of it.
Good call on the aftermarket hardware. I'm definitely going to do that next time that plate is off. Really I would like to weld the nut captive up on top of the subframe / sway bar brackets, so it's easy to remove replace, just gun the bolts in and out. That's the way the f30 is. This thing with the bolt and nut set, well first I didn't know that, and I had a real moment of panic when the first two just kept spinning on me. Oh no .. someone was really working on this car... Everything is stripped I'll never get this thing off. Then when the third one spun I realized what was going on.
I put the wheels on the day before, and then it took me forever to figure out how to get the wrench in there and hold the nut, I ended up having to take the wheels back off. Real pain ... Welding the nuts would make sense.
Myself.. I took it out as a convertible last night for about 30 minutes. The wind buffeting noise at 50 mph is pretty intense. But it runs and drives great. It's going to be pretty solid .. one day. The first gear is pretty awesome.
The black interior pieces are all here I'm still waiting on the second replacement sunroof kit and hopefully will do a perfect job on that second attempt.
I picked up a very clean rear subframe without any rust to send off the powder coat and start "the build". I hope by the end of summer I have a nice clean rear subframe fully built with new or reconditioned parts and just swap it up and on. I visited the local salvage yard and looked at three different e53s. I might take the rear calipers off the one. Not sure if I want anything else off of them. The one did have the panoramic roof and it looked intact. So if I fail again I'm just going to go get that.