Newbie- Help me make a horrible automotoive decision

[douglawrence42]

Reasonably successful day! Ran the liqui moly for 15 min. I used 750 ml or so (1.5 bottles). Oil came out fairly dark for only 4000 miles



But I didn’t see metal or particulate



And the filter seems fine



Ready for VCGs on Wednesday


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[computiNATEor]

The darker oil is probably because of the deposits the Liqui-moly dissolved. I think that would be normal.

[douglawrence42]

The darker oil is probably because of the deposits the Liqui-moly dissolved. I think that would be normal.

Yep. I was keen to do the flush because if the P.O treated the interior of the engine the way he treated the interior of the car, then I half expected pure sludge to run out.

I had a look inside the oil pan with the boroscope while the oil was out. No chunks.

Also I finally got around to replacing a caliper bolt whose head was stripped



And I went ahead and replaced the other pre cat o2 sensor since the first one looked so bad. This one wasn’t as bad



Then I was out of babysitting, so car projects became little girl projects. Always nice to do craft type stuff on a table that you clean with a grinder




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[douglawrence42]

Well I’ve had 2 extended drives through the twisties since doing the engine flush and the verdict is..... a little smoother. Not “oh my god I’ve found 50 missing horsepower”, but a little smoother sounding and a little more oomph on the butt dyno. Probably somewhere around 0.25 “oh”’s on the butt dyno scale.

In other news I may finally have a clue on my left turn clunk. There is a bracket under the strut pinch bolt that holds the wheel speed sensor cable and the brake wear sensor cable. Mine is mangled. I don’t think it was mangled when I installed it. I didn’t take a pic, and I didn’t have a volunteer to move the steering wheel for me so I could see what is happening. I de-mangled the bracket some, and the thunk is reduced. I need to look further into this, but that seems a likely culprit.


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[Firstbmw528]

I had a weird noise in my passenger front after brakes and suspension were done and it culminated in losing a caliper saddle bolt on the road and my caliper grinding on the inside of my wheel. Just an idea for noises.

[douglawrence42]

Life is interfering with wrenching. Valve cover gaskets and coils have been moved to Saturday.


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[douglawrence42]

And so we begin. Let’s tear apart an adequately running engine and see what’s going on!

I work fixing nuclear power plants. Dropping a bolt into the wrong hole can cost millions. In fact, a bunch of my buddies are in Spain right now using edm to cut their way into a pipe so that a robot can crawl in and retrieve some dropped parts. So I’ve had “don’t drop nothing!” Practice for 15 years. Let’s see how I do now that it’s my wallet on the line as I open up the valve covers on my m62tu

First look at the leak rate. These spark plug wells were cleaned out ~6 months and 3500 miles ago

Bank 1


Bank 2


Onward!


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[douglawrence42]

Whenever anyone talks about this job, they complain bitterly about the injector clips.



I agree wholeheartedly. Let’s get an engineers name and get his schnitzel privileges revoked!

Meanwhile, progress





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[douglawrence42]

Bank 1 cover is off!


Very nice to see the beautiful cams. One concern is the amount of sludge, especially on the front timing cover



And inside the valve cover itself




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[douglawrence42]

And now bank 2



All my plastic bits look to be in remarkably good shape. I’ll make sure with the boroscope in a moment.





These are nasty. Powder coat doesn’t really fit the overall half ass motif of the car, but of course if I had awesome powder coat valve covers, then that’s kind of an excuse to make the rest of the car awesome right? “Honey I had to supercharge it, the valve covers look gorgeous” seems like a plausible argument. I’ll think on this.


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[douglawrence42]

Everything I could see from the boroscope looked good.





So now the questions:

Is there anything else I should be looking at while I’m in here?

Is there anything I can do to evaluate the state of my lifters?



Everything looks good, no obvious collapses, but I think I have the lifter tick, is there anything I can do now?

And finally, I’ve got vanos rattle. If my guides didn’t look so good, or a lifter looked bad, it would be a no brainer to do the beisan fix. But as is, I’m tempted to just clean and button everything up. Opinions?


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[dannyzabolotny]

In the M62tu you pretty much have to do a guide job to get the Vanos units off. If everything else looks good and the timing covers aren’t leaking I’d clean things up, put on some new valve cover gaskets, and then wait for the guides to actually fail.

[douglawrence42]

New job, every other Friday off, projects were going to be getting done like crazy. Sure, I’ll tear into the valve covers, I’ve got plenty of time, right?
So now 2 Friday’s off in a row have been spent with sick kids, and tonight I was informed that the next Friday off will be spent prepping the camper for a Xmas trip. The Wednesday after Xmas is my next shot. Roughly 6 weeks to change valve cover gaskets. So much for my new abundance of free time.
This bmw downtime has meant baby stig has to ride the truck for bedtime. For the first week she cried and pointed at the shop every time I buckled her in. But now she has gotten used to it, which brings me to the point of this post; documentation. 15-20 years from now, Baby stig is going to bring home some loser boyfriend, and I’m going to show my wife this post. “Remember the winter of ‘17 Honey, that’s when YOU taught baby stig to settle for less”.


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[computiNATEor]

“Remember the winter of ‘17 Honey, that’s when YOU taught baby stig to settle for less”.

Pshahahaha!

Should I have my lawyer start the divorce papers now? 'Cause that's how that starts!

[douglawrence42]

Finally back to work. Sickness, Christmas and random welding projects for neighbors have kept me off the bmw for a month, today I get back to it.



I went with the “dab will do ya” method on the RTV. We’ll see how I did later

I added Belleville washers between the nut / bolt head and the washer. I’ve been using Belleville washers on machine fixtures for years and love them, so any excuse to use them on a car is one I’ll take.



And here is bank 1 bolted up. Now on to the hard one.




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[douglawrence42]

Bank 2 went in pretty easily. The beisan instructions made it sound tricky, but it didn’t cause much trouble


Replaced my broken jump point plastic



And hooked the top end up. I left the bastard clips out.



I labeled everything when I took it apart, which was a good idea. I used cheap, crap tape, which was a bad idea. A label fell off and was deep in a hole between the head and the intake, where it would surely catch fire. After many attempts, using 2 pieces of weld wire as chopsticks worked to get it out. It was a pita, but on the plus side I pretended I was the worlds most bad ass surgeon called in to perform a procedure only I could do. I may have watched Dr Strange last night.


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[douglawrence42]

And it runs again, no leaks, no codes.



I installed the super cheap amazon coils, no issues yet

Very nice to have the 540 back in service.



The boat is back on the lift and the bmw is finally off it.


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[computiNATEor]

Awesome coffee cup!

[douglawrence42]

Awesome coffee cup!

Sharp eye! Yes, the coffee cup placement was shamelessly on purpose to show off / see who noticed. Make the noise!


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[computiNATEor]

De-de-de-de-deet!

[douglawrence42]

Battery died Friday. I gave it 24 hours at 10 amps, and it wouldn’t hold a charge. Even with the battery showing a surface charge of 12.6 volts, my truck couldn’t jump it. Swapped in a new battery, all seems good. Hopefully just the battery.
Question for the peanut gallery. While the car was out of use during a long cold spell (I need to find some beater wheels for winter tires), I had a charger at 2 amps hooked directly to the battery in the trunk. I recall seeing something on the internets where jumping from the trunk is not advised. Could I have harmed anything by charging from the trunk? My primitive electrical brain says it shouldn’t matter, but I don’t honestly know what zee Germans might have put between the battery terminals and the posts under the hood.


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[computiNATEor]

Battery died Friday. I gave it 24 hours at 10 amps, and it wouldn’t hold a charge. Even with the battery showing a surface charge of 12.6 volts, my truck couldn’t jump it. Swapped in a new battery, all seems good. Hopefully just the battery.
Question for the peanut gallery. While the car was out of use during a long cold spell (I need to find some beater wheels for winter tires), I had a charger at 2 amps hooked directly to the battery in the trunk. I recall seeing something on the internets where jumping from the trunk is not advised. Could I have harmed anything by charging from the trunk? My primitive electrical brain says it shouldn’t matter, but I don’t honestly know what zee Germans might have put between the battery terminals and the posts under the hood.


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I think they recommend jumping from the jump posts because a spark is more likely to damage something or ignite something in the trunk. But electrically there is no difference. However, try telling that to the stubborn and ignorant tow truck driver...

[JimLev]

Congrats on finishing. The injector clips are easy to remove as long as you have a long 90deg pick and know the correct angle to go at for each clip.
2 propane heaters, get some insulation on those walls.
The battery cable goes from the + terminal to a big splice point where it's clipped to the pass rear side of the front subframe. From there one side goes to the starter. The other side goes to another splice point down by the alternator to go to the alternator and to the top of the valve cover.
Electrically, like Nate said, it doesn't matter too much. Less splice points if you connect it to the battery.

[sleuth255]

I can't find the coffee cup....

[douglawrence42]

2 propane heaters, get some insulation on those walls.

When I built the shop, I thought I was being brilliant by waiting to insulate and OSB until I’d used it awhile and run all the electric right where I wanted. DONT DO THIS! Conduit is cheap! The electric still ain’t done, and now there are mountains of crap between me and the walls. So now I need a block of time, but the plan is:
1). Pull everything off the walls
2) finish electric
3). Build awesome copy of myth busters mi-5 shelves to uses the 6’ to 12’ high wall space
4) Profit?

No idea when I’ll get there


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