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Thanks for the comments guys. I had never driven a 5 series before and the comfort and smoothness even on ICE power was very impressive. The thing just glides over bumps and potholes that would rattle the teeth in a dfferent car.
Regards the clutchless coupler I had a couple of reasons. First my experience with clutchless shifting in the e36 has been very good. Nice and quick with no snatching or grinding of gears. Unfortunatly in Ireland there are very few engineering shops that would do the work of making up an adapter plate and coupler and those that might would be prohibitively expensive. So i'm kinda training myself and building up the necessary equipment to do this work myself. The 5 series uses the exact same gearbox so i'm not anticipating any problems. I have also removed the motor fan as it will be externally forced air cooled so this should help allow the armature to change speeds easier when the synchros mesh. This gearbox is also very light. I can carry it one handed so the weight penalty versus having 5 speeds to choose from is very slight.
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Now, Cole, when you shift the gear and that little needle on the ammeter goes into the red and reads 2000 Amps, that's bad.
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