Its your damn big brakes lol.

168's with my 3.0 brakes are easy peezy to clean and I use wheel woolies and a boars hair brush to clean

The calipers are huge on the 4.8is models. Larger than my M5 that is for certain. Once painted with Epoxy they are simple to keep clean.

^We should work on retrofitting those to our M5 :D

I want iS brakes

I have some that I'm not using. :D

I think it would look sharp if you painted the retaining clips black. I'm thinking about doing that on mine

A bit late to this,but have to say that everything you have posted shows that it has been professionally done,so congrats to you,mate ,for being a pro.:thumbup:
Not many can do it themselves and have to pay and rely on pros to do it.Truth be said ,some do spoil the cars with silly mods.

With regards to your wheels,everyone has different tastes ,of course,but they look much better than plain black that you see on a lot of X5s.Colour coded centre is a nice touch and reminds me when I used to do it ,ages ago!Yours look exclusive and have been professionally done ,not plastidipped!

Calipers !Red or blue :)

To throw my 2 cents - regardless of workmanship quality, I would have to say I don't like it. The contrast dark-ish color of the car and bright silver rims is lost, now it is dark-ish car and black rims. Also - we just bought another E53 which is metallic black, my wife looked at it and said that it looks significantly smaller than another on that is stratus gray. For the same reason - visual appearance of black rim + black tire on dark-ish shade color of the car, makes whole wheel look smaller. Sorry - I don't usually leave negative remarks, much prefer not to say anything if there is nothing good to say but hopefully you will not be offended by my opinion.

Don't you tempt me

They are available in the aftermarket colored that way. Next question is life expectancy of the paint. Most are just rattle can paint and rust up in 6 months. I wanted the "OE" look as currently 90% of the viewers don't even notice that they are even painted.