M62TU VANOS seals- proactive replacement necessary?

[sienayr]

I have 153K, '03 540i.

My passive understanding had been that replacing the VANOs seals when doing TCGs was generally recommended. However I've talked with my indy and some other locals, and seen older posts on this forum, that say the failure rate on the M62TU VANOs seals is actually pretty low. Many of the threads were from the 2010-2012 time frame when Besian came out with the 6 cyl VANOs seals and did not yet have the 8 cyl seals.

Mine does not seem to exhibit any driveibility symptoms of seal failure at this time. If I do it, I will be buying the units from dr.vanos, which adds another $500 to the TCG job.

Is the failure rate on the M62TU high enough to warrant pro-actively replacing the seals? Or in 2018 can we still say the failure rate for the v8 is still pretty low? Thanks for the input.

[edjack]

Are your symptoms like these? http://www.beisansystems.com/procedu..._procedure.htm

If not, you may not need a rebuild.

[sienayr]

Thanks, currently there are NO symptoms, so I'm trying to decide if the risk of future failure is high enough to warrant pro-active replacement of the seals or not.

[edjack]

Your call.

[JimLev]

You'll almost never get a CEL for bad vanos o-rings.
At 100K they are worn past the point of not providing a good seal, replace them.
I've done a bunch of them, at way less mileage than you have. They were all shot.
Ask Danny Z, he'll tell you the same thing.

[dannyzabolotny]

Yep, they all wear out pretty badly. Not enough to cause real problems, but enough to cause a lot of rattling and a slight loss in low end torque. Every car that I've rebuilt the Vanos units on has a pretty noticeable difference in low end torque, and they idle much quieter. Just don't pay Dr. Vanos $500, that's a ripoff. Buy the Vanos seals from Beisan Systems for $60 and replace them yourself, it's not hard. Or just send them to me and I'll replace the seals for you along with pressing the Vanos units. That's basically all that Dr. Vanos does anyways, there are no special methods he uses that make it worth that price.

[Mannyf540]

Yep, they all wear out pretty badly. Not enough to cause real problems, but enough to cause a lot of rattling and a slight loss in low end torque. Every car that I've rebuilt the Vanos units on has a pretty noticeable difference in low end torque, and they idle much quieter. Just don't pay Dr. Vanos $500, that's a ripoff. Buy the Vanos seals from Beisan Systems for $60 and replace them yourself, it's not hard. Or just send them to me and I'll replace the seals for you along with pressing the Vanos units. That's basically all that Dr. Vanos does anyways, there are no special methods he uses that make it worth that price.

Danny is Dr. Vanos!! Thanks for doing my Vanos, you are the best Danny!!

You should definitely replace your Vanos seals.

[geargrinder]

Yeah. Exactly. There are no 'bad symptoms' except being notably down on power.

Required? No. Worthwhile? Well. If you like getting all the factory power out of your motor... then definitely yes.. If you only want the engine to work well enough to move the car around town, it'll work perfectly fine w/ the worn out seals for nearly forever I suspect.

I'll second the Dr. VANOS being a bit of a ripoff. Look on eBay there's a handful of guys w/ the press that will do it for you CHEAP, or, for a little more, send you a pre-done set with a core charge and then you send yours back to them. There's even other 'branded' commercial operations that don't charge the amount he does. (not saying go-eBay... I'd pay Danny if I were you cuz he's our people..)

[sienayr]

Thaks guys. You confirmed what I thought but I always like to check my assumptions. I will probably explore some other options for replacement based on the feedback here.

[killian665]

It’s $100 just do it