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Thread: Front Drive Shaft Play

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Aug 2018
    Location
    Vancouver Island
    Posts
    4
    My Cars
    2005 X3

    Front Drive Shaft Play

    Did an oil change on my daughters 2005, which is here for an annual visit today. She lives over 1000 km away, in an area where there are no BMW dealerships or shops with a lot of knowledge of the car, so I'm trying to get as much mtce work done as possible before the vehicle goes north again and have worked my way thorough most of the punch list. However, one thing has left me unsure if it is an issue or not.

    As I was under the car, I checked the drive shafts and found that the front shaft U-Joint, at the transfer case, had lateral play (perhaps a total of 6mm / 1/4") in one direction only, but no rotational play. There was no lateral or rotational play on the U-Joint at the front end of the shaft.

    I would normally think this points to a bad joint, but there are no drivability issues, which given the amount of play left, me wondering if this is normal and a design feature of the shaft (visually the joint looks OK).

    Did a forum search and didn't see anything similar, except one post with the same question but no responses and another with the comment that a dealer said lateral play in one direction was normal (but that then went on to say the shaft was replaced, with no explanation leaving me uncertain why), so am hoping someone can enlighten me.
    Last edited by KHRX3; 09-03-2018 at 11:40 AM.

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Aug 2018
    Location
    Vancouver Island
    Posts
    4
    My Cars
    2005 X3

    E83 - Bad Ft Driveshaft and Transfer Case Actuator Gear

    Answering my own post. Did some more looking at the drive shaft and decided the U-joint was bad. I ordered a new one that may arrive today and decided yesterday to get the old one off in preparation.

    As the attached picture shows, the joint was toast, Both bearings on the axis with play were history and the needle bearings long gone. The bearings on the other axis as well as the joint at the front of the shaft were OK. The amount of damage wasn't visible until the shaft was off the car.

    Why this made no noise or didn't cause vibration is beyond me, but no doubt the shaft was a candidate for failure at some future point.

    Removal was a piece of cake. 8 torx head bolts and 10 minutes to get it out. Installation should be as easy when the new shaft arrives. fingers crossed it is an exact match as clearances are tight.

    I have a Foxwell NT510 and bought the BMW module as I worked on the car. Great tool, v happy with it for this project. It showed that the transfer gear oil needed to be changed (code 54C6 was set), so I bought a litre of fluid and then decided that while I was at it, I would pull the actuator motor and check the gear wheel on spec (no codes were present) as the car is at 195,000 km and I expected it might need replacing. As the attached shows, it did - with tooth wear shown that matches what I saw on many posts. Removal of the actuator *should* be simple, but I found that the bolt that passes thru the frame bushing of the transmission support was seized inside the bushing and took a lot of work to free (the transmission support needs to come off to give access to remove the actuator motor). That 30 minute job ended up taking 1.5 hours...... I'm inclined to simply rotate the gear 180˚ and reinstall as it appears that the gear only rotates ~25% of the circumference, so this should be OK for the rest of the car's life and I'm a little worried I will time out before the car needs to go north again if I wait for a new gear wheel to arrive. Given the amount of wear I found, I'm surprised there weren't more codes set. As it was the worm gear on the motor can only just have been making contact to rotate the gear. I expect it wouldn't have been long before the gear wheel failed and more codes were set& the car went into the default state.

    Another finding was that the transfer case oil had been changed at some point in the past. As I know the car had been maintained from new by the dealer my daughter bought it from, I expect they did the change. What was sad was that I found both crush washers were missing - not a huge deal as the case sealed OK, but without the washers the bolts were very difficult to break loose. More worrying, and I suspect part of the reason the gear wheel had so much wear is that I got a full litre of oil from the case. The spec for the ATC 400 box calls for a refill of 0/69 litre (or 0.8 litre for a fill of a new box). I think what happened is that the tech doing the change filled until fluid dripped from the fill plug orifice - but that is only correct if the box is at operating temperature, not when it it's cold. I think by overfilling as they did there was likely a lot of pressure inside the case that could have impaired operation of the clutches that contributed to resistance during the actuator calibration sequence and lead to the gear damage I found.
    Attached Images Attached Images

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