I am very much looking forward to seeing it! I have a 10 ton press if you need to press those son of a b1tch bushes out just up here in Loughborough, I know they are a SOD without a press as I need to do both M535i rear sub frame bushes some times in the next 100 years when I get round to it.
As for the over heating issues... Take a steak and some eggs everywhere with you, next time you get stuck in traffic you can pop the bonnet and sell abit of road side café food! haha.
On a ore serious note, I have a small kenlowe fan that is spare to you if you want it, which you may be able to mount somewhere to give you extra cooling to the rad/IC. Also have alook at the cowlings about the front of the car. A HELL of alot of the effectiveness of the radiator is based on the air being 'channelled' into the rad essentially, as its a high resistance to air flow and so the flow will move around it if there are gaps. This will even be the case if your in traffic and just the fan is running too!! (I have a whole semesters worth of lecture notes on this shite if you wanna have a look see if you can improve your air flow across the rad).
The rubber seal idea is pretty aerodynamically good, as the bottom on the windscreen is a low pressure area due to the acceleration of the air flow vertically to follow the windscreen. The opening of a gap to the low pressre areas should happily drag the higher pressure air coming into the radiator and engine bay back across the engine (cooling everything) and out the back of the bonnet to rejoin the overbody flow.
Look forward to hearing from you soon (should be getting both M535i's ready for re-MOT soon too... but not sure which one to take to the ring as the dogleg it SO much fun with the lower ratios!!!)
P.S. How much are the 850 T5's you wrote about worth... I just got one for free with 180k on the clock and ALOT of new bits








