Page 1: Overview
Page 2: Exterior, Engine, Interior
Page 3: Audio, Car PC
Page 4: System Buildup, Part 1
Page 5: System Buildup, Part 2
Page 6: Bimmerfest '06

Getting the head unit into the dash was a royal pain-in-the-ass. Basically, the OEM E60 center dash has a central plastic piece that holds the MASK unit (OEM CD player/radio/amp) and a cubbyhole. Basically I ditched the front trim and the cubbyhole, and modified the central piece to put the MASK unit where the cubbyhole was and the DVA-9860 where the MASK unit was. Nothing was standard so much Dremeling, Bondo-ing, and bolting was required.

Power for the HU was taken from the front fuse box in the glove compartment:

Before I decided to install the computer, I used an iPod connected to an Alpine iPod adapter. Little did I know that the transport was analog, not digital, and that the interface to the iPod on the HU was so slow as to be unusable. Stay away from this setup:

At some point I noticed that I had installed the sub crooked, so I had to remove the dust cap and replace it. For the sake of curiosity I took a picture of the naked cone:

The Alphasonik soon died on me, and I purchased the SoundStream. I also ditched the capacitor because it didn't really have an audible effect:

Now for the PC. The Xenarc PC and touchscreen, and the Carnetix power supply, arrived in perfect condition. I set them up in my house connected to an AC/DC converter and configured the system to my liking. I also tested and configured all the various USB buses and devices I would need (sound card, Bluetooth, GPS, etc.)

The big question was how to fit this in the car? After much pondering, I determined that it could all actually fit in the glove box. So I set everything up in the garage and started soldering wires together. (Note at this point I had a SoundBlaster USB sound card. I soon replaced it with the far superior Edirol):

I decided to draw power off that same fuse box and protect everything with this cool fuzzy tape that BMW uses in its own wiring (and that I found on McMasters.com, which is basically a God-like Home Depot on the web):

The moment of truth... it boots! (Note the weak-ass computer mic I used before I woke up and purchased the Behringer and the Edirol):

Here's it with the Edirol:

Random pics of my garage halfway through the install:

It sounded great but I was missing some bass. The consensus of the Internet car audio Gods is that if one is going to fire a subwoofer forward into the cabin from the trunk, one should block off the back of the trunk to reduce cancellation. So I cooked up two MDF wings and screwed them in:

Now for the hard part. I wasn't looking forward to this. Essentially from scratch, I had to manufacture a new trim piece to fit over the mess I'd made of the center dash. After some research I decided to use a Bondo-like product called 'Liquid Plastic' that is formulated specifically for this purpose by a car audio shop called HzEMALL, run by Tim Baillie.

I started by chopping into several large pieces a spare piece of plastic dash trim I ordered from BMW to serve as a base. I taped the pieces to the dash, glopped on the Liquid Plastic, and proceeded from there:

Over many, many LONG weeks I continued to refine the piece. I sanded, added more Liquid Plastic, and sanded again:

As I approached something that didn't look like a blob of mutant cotton candy, I began using some of HzEMALL's Icing Mix, which is easier to work with than Liquid Plastic, but not as strong. It's very useful for filling in small gaps in a workpiece:

I sanded my way down to 400 grit. Now what was I going to paint this bad boy with? At first, I decided to go with a bazillion coats of primer, then a bazillion coats of standard Flat Black spray, then a bazillion coasts of SEM Texture spray:

Well, THAT didn't work out, did it? The primer never really hardened. I now sanded everything off and used another brand of spray paint designed specifically to be applied to plastic, with no need for a primer. It's also textured right off the bat. It's from Rustoleum and is called 'Textured Paint for Plastic'. Good stuff. I even used it to coat the trim piece above the center dash to match, and also my ugly white FasTrak transponder:

One thing I'd been planning to do was to improve the look of the ProClip where it comes off the central wood trim. I wanted to sand it down and repaint it so that a little of the wood on either side of where it connected got painted also. No problem:

Now all I had to do was attach the new trim piece to the dash, and keep it attached. I agonized about how to do this for a while before concluding that I could twist in some eye hooks and run string from them down to the driver's side footwell, where I would tie them off behind an easy-to-remove trim panel:

Finally: