Great looking car. All of those source of inspiration pictures are sweet too. I may have to borrow some ideas.... Thanks for the thread, great Mini!

 

I really wanna swap my jcw grilles for the aeros. Wish I had the ability to mod the bottom grille to fit. Was it a terrible pain?

 

Aero grilles aren't difficult. Hood 1 is direct swap. Cover your engine bay w/ a blanket to prevent losing nuts. For lower part, I used a drill to make new slot openings on the bumper since the aero lower doesn't use the same 1s as the stock R53. Make a series of small holes & drag the drill across them. If you have a dremel, better. The lower part will protrude, i used a hacksaw to slice the thickness thinner but kept the retaining 'tongues'. Fun job.
Check the mod section here for pic'd guides.

 

Thanks for the info, I know there's a lot if diys but I wanted an opinion of the difficulty. I'm definitely gonna give it a try now.

 

I found it to be a total PITA and I went the same route.. I have a dremel as well. Not terribly difficult, just quite time consuming to get all the measurements and cuts right.

 

I didn't do too much measurements. I just masked the grill slot of the bumper, pressed the aero grill into the area & marked those to be drilled out w/ pencil. It was a lucky 1 take activity.
The DIYs over-prepared me for worse. It turned out to be more fun than challenge.