The brakes arrived from Lee of massive brakes last week. Lee shipped them out from canada and they arrived here in 5 days, talk about service.

Lee produces a big brake kit for the E21 utilising wilwood rotors and superlite forged 4 piston calipers, coupled with his own manufactured hats, brackets and other associated components. The rotors utilised are a massive 300x32mm heavy duty rotor which will take all the abuse you can throw at it. If you really must have the best brakes you can buy for your E21, get in contact with lee, you will find his link in the plugs section.

Read more about the kit here

Unfortunately, one of the problems living in australia is the bmw performance part scene is pretty limited. The majority of parts are imported by companies then resold into the market, often bringing with them large markups which price the product out of the market for a good percentage of bmw owners.

After having my camshaft damaged in transport I started looking around for options to purchase a replacement in the country, only to find limited australian suppliers, most of which offer regrinds and not new billet cams. I straight out refused to pay a workshop in australia double the cost to supply me a schrick camshaft, when honestly, Id rather keep importing my own camshaft until one arrived undamaged than pay stupid amounts.

The whole scene left me a little dismayed to tell you the truth, as the old adage goes, put up or shut up; So I decided to do something about it.

Above are examples of the first run of blackbmw 293' camshafts to be produced, supplied and supported in australia. All our camshafts are manufactured from fresh blank billets, (the same quality billets used by companies such as catcam's and dbilas), machined to match the correct profile for your application, then parkerised via an acid treatment to help protect the lobes and retain oil on the surface during break in.

While I firmly believe regrinds have their place, their one limitation is you cant produce large amounts of lift due to being largely restricted to the physical valve lift produced by the original core. Yes, you can build up the lobes of a camshaft to increase valve lift above the original profile, however when talking the realm of 4mm, it just isnt possible so a new billet is the only solution.

New profiles will be added soon, so check out the forsale section for information on our camshafts.

The camshaft arrived this week from flying brick performance, unfortunately it arrived in 2 pieces. 

Its always a bit of a risky business shipping an item like this across such a large distance. Camshafts arent actually very strong, the treated lobes are very hard to resist damage and wear from impact but the metal is actually quite brittle and can be easily damaged. Any weight across the cam or a sharp knock to one end could see it snap clean through (as in my case). Now, generally good packaging will take care of this, but nothing is assured and accidents do happen. This however leaves me with a problem, pistons are paid for, headwork is done as far as can be, now the camshaft is holding up the whole process.

The approximate cost of importing another camshaft from the states or the UK runs to approximately $700 and can take 3-4 weeks wait before stock arrives, then another week or more to ship the item out to me. This has left me exploring other options, I have spoken to a few camshaft regrinders here in aus and a real possibility is having a brand new fresh billet copied from the broken cam. This eliminates the shipping issue and will take approximately 1 week to produce.

The cost to create an initial profile is quite high, however once it has been created, the cost to produce a camshaft drops. If a price can be arranged, I might look into the possibility of producing a few camshafts in various profiles, a limited run of a few items to begin with, then if they sell, expand the range.

Thanks do go out to Daniel from flying brick performance, when the camshaft arrived broken he arranged a full refund quickly so the build could continue.