Just saying Hi & showing off the 6 weeks progress on the X5 **PIC HEAVY**

[dpbayly]

Hi all joined the forum last night after stumbling across it and I have to say there's a lot of great info.

I picked up my 2001 4.4 LPG gas converted titan silver X5 6 weeks ago and apart from the LPG conversion it was bone stock,

So like with all my cars I set about changing a few things.

Here's how it looked the day I picked it up:



first job carried out was a refurb of the front and rear inner lights:

from this:





to this:





also fitted the LED sidelight bulbs:



Next was a complete machine polish (20 mins masking up saves hours of cleaning later):



Then came the dash pixel repair job

before:



during:



after:



then it was an exhaust mod to free up some of that great V8 sound:





Next was to tint the rear lights as I wanted to go for an all black and silver theme

This was done by using the spray shop at work and mixing black with normal car lacquer at a ratio of 10 parts lacquer to 1 part black then just giving them light coats till the desired effect is reached.

In the booth being sprayed:



back on the car:



then sprayed the front grills and rear badges satin black:



then fitted a 4.6IS front lower valance:



I couldn't source the matching rear valance so sprayed the stock rear:



then picked myself up a set of 22's which I painted the lips body coloured:





Due to not being a fan of the orange indicators and the Depo ones I wanted I was struggling to find in stock anywhere so I decided to make the most of the stock lights by tinting the lenses, It's something I've done before but I found it was a bit to dark and effected the vision at night so it didn't last long but this time I went with a much lighter film and just put the darker stuff over the indicator then the lighter stuff over the whole light:





Here's a pic showing the vision at night (taken on a phone camera so not the best but gives you an idea)





After tinting the lights I loved the way it looked and at night I could not tell one bit they had been tinted so decided to keep them and so fitted a set of CCFL rings:





And thats about it as far as looks go so 6 weeks It's gone from this:



To this:





One other little mod not so much cosmetic just IMO cool.

This little mod was to get the new CCFL rings come on when unlocking and also to have them come on when the engine is running like DRL's (just the CCFL rings no other lights)

This was a very simple mod just needing 1 x 5 pin relay 2 x diodes and some wire and terminals and wired the right way you get no issues with feed back problems or error messages on the dash and the whole mod is done in the passenger foot well so no major work needed:

some picks of the wiring up:





and here's a couple of videos showing it all working:

With the central locking (the vid shows them flicker on and off but I think thats down to the frame rate on the camera they actually fade on and off):



Video showing the rings coming on with the start up of the engine (only the rings no rear lights):