New M5 Grills And Celis Tails!!

[Eric S.]

Here are a couple before and after photos of my new M5 grills and Celis tails on my '99 540/6, courtesy of jim WindowPro, an alumnus of this board. Both car & camera lens were dirty, but you get the idea...

I think it helps appearance a lot, and I am at 115.5K miles now.

I have already changed my Avatar and personal photo accordingly. Now it looks like the next thing will have to be clear side markers...

The Tails:
Before:
[attachmentid=22911]

After:
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The grills
Stock:
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M5 Grills:
[attachmentid=22914] [attachmentid=22915]

[billB]

It looks great.....what a difference nice tails and especially the M5 grill.....

[Eric S.]

Originally posted by billB@Jul 17 2005, 07:55 PM
It looks great.....what a difference nice tails and especially the M5 grill.....

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Thanks a lot Bill!! Too bad I can only look at my new "accessories" when I am not driving!!

[uconn99]

How hard was the tail light installs. I just bought mine and am a bit worried I am going to have trouble with them.

[Eric S.]

Originally posted by uconn99@Jul 17 2005, 08:05 PM
How hard was the tail light installs. I just bought mine and am a bit worried I am going to have trouble with them.

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UConn -

I am hardly the person to ask, because everything I try to do ends up being exponentially more difficult than it should be.

That said, it wasn't too difficult. The trick is that there's a little bit of drilling and dremel-ing to be done and the directions are in mm. Some guys have precision metric tools. I don't. I converted all of the mm to the nearest 1/16th of an inch and went with that. For the big (16mm, which is about 5/8") hole, I drew the circle and then drilled small holes around the circumference of the circle, then used the dremel to punch it out and smooth it. Same with the 8mm deep, 24mm radiused cutout. Take a look at BMWtips.com for some good ideas, like taping a plastic bag over the back of the body cutouts before drilling so the metal filings don't get everywhere. re-paint after drilling and smoothing is a must as well, for corrosion prevention.

One last thing - When I finished hooking it all up, it didn't work right. I checked and re-checked, and yet no dice. Then I decided to try switching left & right on the ballast connections, and for some unknown reason, that solved the problem. Didn't see that in anyone else's tips, so if you run into trouble with it functioning correctly (if anyone would, I would), that's a fix you can try.

Good luck - now that it's done I am much happier. I took me well over 3 hours, but I am slow. For most normal people, It's probably a 2-hour job if you don't dawdle...

[///Matt]

It looks great Eric!

uconn, I did the same as Eric last year. It took me about 3 hours to do the tail lights. Be sure to get the correct drill bit, that was the one thing that I wish i'd done. I ended up taking time dremeling them to fit just right. But overall, its a pretty easy and very rewarding face lift to your e39. I will also reccomend bmwtips.com who got me through the whole thing. Good luck, you won't be disappointed!

[CosmosBlack]

Nice grilles Eric! Now it's time to upgrade to the black shadow grilles! Hehe...