What did you do to / for your E53 today??

[OctaveCircle]

Ordered a New Business CD to replace the faulty one. Ordered parts to get the passenger window to work.

[MINIz guy]

Winter tires off, all season tires on. However, those all season tires do need replacement soon.

[JWMich]

Interior noise project completed - sound dampening material for all four doors and rear floor, extra weatherstipping for upper doors, adjusted door strikes in tighter. Big difference, not much expenditure, well worth the time.

[petener999]

Fill her up with gas.

[Ldiggs910]

Originally Posted by x5sportman

My 9 months with my '04 4.4i sport was love/hate all the way. Love the ride, the handling, the power, the looks. Hate the ZF transmission. Even before it started slipping and doing the 2-1 slam, its goofy shift points were annoying. Whatever engineer thought plastic lower grilles, plastic mounts for the taillight circuit boards, plastic tabs on the lumbar support switch (and on and on) should have his butt kicked. Traded it yesterday on a Grand Cherokee and I'll never ever think about owning a BMW product again.

Well BYE!! What u doin still standing there wit ur head down, hands in ur pockets looking at the ground drawing circles in the dirt wit ur left foot for??? We LOVE our X's. They are our "babies", "wives", "mistresses", and "2nd girlfriends" so thru the good and the bad so we stay.

Good luck tho buddy. U MIGHT gain in reliability, but u lose in panache

[nezarnuaimat]

Originally Posted by JWMich

Interior noise project completed - sound dampening material for all four doors and rear floor, extra weatherstipping for upper doors, adjusted door strikes in tighter. Big difference, not much expenditure, well worth the time.

Can you elaborate on this please? I'm having horrible interior noise!

[dolbyX5]

My drivers door handle carrier finally broke. Replaced it yesterday. Back to normal and loving it.

[SlickGT1]

Fixed my soft close issue. Turned out to be shitty factory relay closest to the tail light. Go figure. Going to replace all of them with Hella relays shortly.

[JWMich]

Originally Posted by nezarnuaimat

Can you elaborate on this please? I'm having horrible interior noise!

Well, I can share what I did:

• Popped off all the door panels and lined them with Dynamat Extreme.
• Lifted out the rear floor, removed the OEM pad, lined the underside of the floor panel with Dynamat Extreme, replaced the OEM pad, stapled everything down with trusty staple gun to supplement the adhesive.
• OEM has two weatherstrips around each door opening and there is a space between them. Cleaned the metal with alcohol and laid in 3M EPDM self-adhesive weatherstrip between the two, pretty much all the way around.
• Popped off the plastic covers at the base of the door strikes (the U-shaped things the door catches on when you close it), loosened up the torx bolts and moved each one closer to the vehicle interior, retightened.

Result is solid reduction in road noise and wind noise - as I said, well worth the time and cost.

Cost : $140 for the Dynamat (9 sheet bulk pack, Amazon), $75 for the 3M weatherstrip (3 packages at $25, Advance Auto Parts)

Disclaimers: 1) I am not any kind of expert in vehicle noise reduction. There appears to be a cult out there dedicated to the pursuit of total sound isolation, often connected to extreme sound system installations. From what I've seen, they're expert but nuts. I'm sure plenty of fault can be found with what I've chosen to do (didn't do enough, did the wrong things, used the wrong materials, etc.) by people who actually know something about this. Sorry 'bout that. 2) This is NOT what the BMW engineers decided you should have in an Ultimate Driving Machine, so I have sinned in doing this project. I will chant ten million times "I did not NEED to do this. No one NEEDS what OEM does not provide." as penance.

[Phr3d]

as long as the full seal doesn't burst an eardrum when you close the door, it's all good, heheh.