In "The Shawshank Redemption" the factors were Pressure and time. I find myself under the same constraints.
Last night I went to a buddy's place that owns a metal shop. He told me that the castings made it virtually impossible to "polish" so that the nickel would look good.http://i326.photobucket.com/albums/k...psnyjbdccv.jpg

http://i326.photobucket.com/albums/k...pssxoslya9.jpg
He said it would look horrible and suggested as a few others have, powder coating. So, that's where I'm at. I was going to wait and see what the v/c's look like from my 4.4 after bead blasting but I won't have enough time before I leave for my trip and I want to turn the key before I board my flight on the 12th of this month.
I'm again disappointed that either I planned poorly or lacked the time/money to do what I wanted.

If the v/c's from the 4.4 look good, I'll still send them off for the nickel plating and sell the powder coated ones I'll use till then.

I found a nice little shop in Issaquah, WA called Powder Vision Inc. JR and Ben were at the counter and we got along great. They understood my time crunch and helped me pick out a good alternative to nickel. I think it'll look good.

Tomorrow I sell my 4.4 and begin to assemble the 4.6 getting it ready to drop in. With some luck and TerraPhantm's help I can delete my cats and secondary air pump. This leaves me with a tad more room in the engine bay and a need for an exhaust extention to fill the gap the cats leave. Perhaps I could just hollow them out...

Will post more tomorrow evening.

" With some luck and TerraPhantm's help I can delete my cats and secondary air pump."

Can you please explain more?

I'll try but I'm not an expert.

I'm getting help from someone writing a DME software flash to manage the engine built to run in an e53, to run in an e39. The two programs are different so while deep in 3k lines of code, if he can locate and disable the section that sends a message to the obd II that my pre-cat O2 sensors as well as the Cats themselves are "missing", "failing" or "all good" then I don't need to have a restrictive catalytic converter behind the exhaust manifolds. I'll still be able to pass emissions just fine but with less back pressure in my exhaust pipe tubes.

The Secondary air pump is a nice design for helping achieve a "cleaner burn" with cold-starts but not at all necessary and takes up much needed space in the engine compartment and adds plumbing to the engine I don't like working around that could be better used by a supercharger someday or some other forced air/fuel mechanism.

Why not just go with free flow cats and leave the O2 sensors alone?

I figure if free-flow cats are low restrictions, no cats is even better.

I probably won't at this time though. Messing with the exhaust will be a time and money consumer and I'm running short on both. http://i326.photobucket.com/albums/k...pskvzpciee.jpgprogress today.

Tomorrow we'll turn this short block into a long block. Today was spent cleaning all the matching surfaces. http://i326.photobucket.com/albums/k...ps4knlsljg.jpg

I went with a silver-vein black gloss. They finished them up early for me knowing my schedule.
POWDER VISION INC. in Issaquah, WA is Awesome!
http://i326.photobucket.com/albums/k...pse9r6y0nv.jpg
I'm liking these.
http://i326.photobucket.com/albums/k...pscsau0qzz.jpg

^That... is... awesome! Nice choice. Seen it before on something but can't remember what.

Thanks. I'm not totally bummed about not having nickel now. A little bit but not much. I really lucked out with these guys. The cost was about $130 with them rushed 3 days early. How can you beat that kind of service. In the future, I'd go out of my way and drive to their shop rather than go to the places I talked to in Seattle.

We'll take a break for a few hours to feed our respective kids/horse. Kids are his and his wife's, horse is my wife's other off-road vehicle. More reliable than an e53 X5 but equally a pain in the ass at times.
Here's where we're @;

Valley pan installed (URO parts version)

Heads torqued on. (as per instructions)

http://i326.photobucket.com/albums/k...psmhpges4d.jpg
http://i326.photobucket.com/albums/k...ps6zcj9hcf.jpg
And here's my idea of how to achieve the 2 angle pulls at 80° (James couldn't find one of his super fancy torque wrenches with an angle dial) so... http://i326.photobucket.com/albums/k...psyqmyvzce.jpg My phone has a magnetic back so I launched my protractor app, calibrated it with a real plumb bob and stuck it to the wrench. Once on, we secured it with tape and ta-da, instant fancy torque wrench. http://i326.photobucket.com/albums/k...pscho6untp.jpg
We'll come back to the shop in about 3 hours and get good and busy. More to come!

So cool...been following this for awhile. Former 2 time E39 M5 AND e53 4.8is so I can appreciate what you are going for!

Excited for the Seattle BMW experiment!