Blackknight530i has another new non-E39 project (E53 X5 4.8is)

[blackknight530i]

Hey guys,

I've acquired the 5th addition to the growing fleet of early 2000s era BMWs. This one is a 2004 X5 4.8is. It's got 137k miles on it and is in pretty darn good condition, but will be needing some refreshing of quite a bit as well. I picked this one up from a fellow BMW enthusiast in Richmond, VA who bought it to haul parts from our good buddy Adam's (Clemster) place, and then didn't need it anymore (He has 2x X5 3.0s with 6-speed manuals and a X5 4.4i as well as a few other BMWs). The interesting thing about this car is not so much itself, but what it is being used to pay for . Harold, the PO, is planning on having me do a S54 swap in his 2001 530i 5-speed and this is a bit of a down payment on the project. That project is going the be the really cool one. I plan on doing a build thread and maybe even a DIY thread (much like my current S62 swap DIY) on it, so keep your eyes peeled for that in the next couple months. I will confirm/amend a lot of speculation we had in the big S54 swap in any E39 thread on here and at a minimum, condense it down into something much more useful.

As for the X5, here's a bit of the details on it:



After getting it back home, I took it to have it looked at by my buddy Tom, who runs Euro Envy in Charlotte, NC. We got it up on the lift and did a pretty thorough PPI on it and found some typical N62 issues, none of which are scary or even unexpected for the age and condition of the car.

The motor mounts are shot and it's actually causing the upper radiator hose to pull off the quick disconnect at the thermostat due to the stress from the engine rocking. I'm basically not driving it anymore until I get new motor mounts and an upper radiator hose that are on order with FCP.

The alternator bracket o-rings, the brake vacuum pump gasket, timing cover gaskets, and valve cover gaskets are leaking and there's a bit of a power steering leak (I know, what a shocker ).

And the one thing that I knew going into it was that the valve stem seals will need to be done as they are shot.

One thing that wasn't expected was the transfer case is done. Turns out, X5s don't like the front and back tires to differ more than 1% in diameter and without knowing it, the PO installed some e70 replica wheels with tires that were one profile taller than stock on the front, which we think killed the transfer case. I'm not blaming anyone here, just pointing out what happened. According to Tom, it doesn't take driving more than a few miles with mismatched tire heights to destroy it. It is currently unplugged and works fine in 2WD mode, but once I get the correct tires put on the front and swap the transfer case, it will be fine. I also needed to install some hub centric rings on the wheels as the e70 uses 74.1mm center bore instead of the 72.56mm bore that e53s use. To be honest, I'd much rather find some Style 87 or 168 wheels instead as they look better in my opinion and would fit without rings. These wheels are gloss black on a black sapphire X5 and look a bit "murdered out".

So, plans for this car are to hopefully restore it back to original condition and repair any leaks and do some preventative maintenance and suspension refreshing. To do that, I am hoping to get my buddy Tom to help me out on a weekend and pull the engine/front subframe out (lifting the body off) and take care of all the known issues of the N62 at one time so we don't have to deal with going back in there again. I'm told most of the parts are pretty cheap, but it's all labor. I hope to do most of this stuff myself or with buddies, so I think it could come out ok. I don't have plans to sell the car afterwards, but if I did sell it, I would know I'd be selling a properly sorted X5.

I'll try to take some more pictures of it after it gets a nice bath. It's supposed to rain most of this weekend, so I don't know when that will be.

Stay tuned guys!

[purplecty]

Nice grab! Congrats!

[blackknight530i]

Thanks Ayal! Gonna be a fun one.

[TerraPhantm]

Awesome car - always wanted one of these

[blackknight530i]

Awesome car - always wanted one of these

Thanks! Me too. Even before I bought my first BMW, I wanted a 4.8is. I ended up getting the 530i and my parents got a X5 3.0i like a month or two later. Never lost the "want" and when this one came up for a deal I couldn't pass on, well, you know the rest.

[JimLev]

Paul, is the transfer case similar to what's used on the older X3's?
A friend had his crap out. We took it out to open it up to find a plastic gear chewed up.
He found a company that made replacements, we put it and he was all set.

[blackknight530i]

Paul, is the transfer case similar to what's used on the older X3's?
A friend had his crap out. We took it out to open it up to find a plastic gear chewed up.
He found a company that made replacements, we put it and he was all set.

No, it's the later X-drive case. The early ones had that issue.

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[blackknight530i]

So, one thing I've done so far on the car is make some fixes to the aftermarket head unit install that was installed by a PO. The way it was hooked up was to have the speaker level outputs from the Pioneer AVIC head unit go directly to the front door tweeters and mid-basses (but not the dash midranges), and the rears go directly to the rear mid-basses (no tweeter/mid-range), completely bypassing the DSP amp. I guess this isn't the worst thing they could have done, but it completely removes the crossovers for the individual speakers and sounded pretty bad. They should have at least installed some passive crossovers in the cargo area or something, but whatever. I re-spliced all the wires they cut to the individual speakers back to the DSP amp and reconnected it, then used the wires that went from the radio module to the DSP amp and spliced the head unit wires in there, taking the radio module out.

The typical issue with doing this is that the DSP amp shuts off after a short bit of time, but after having NBT in my previous e38 and my e39 wagon with DSP, we've discovered that setting the amp to mid-basis instead of bordmonitor will keep it alive. I had tested this out with my old Pioneer AVIC-F90BT a long time ago and it worked great. Now, another issue arose in that the volume was very low and if you tried to turn it up on the head unit, it would clip/distort really bad. This is where having a bunch of old MIDs lying around helps. I have the DSP MID out of my e39 wagon and I made a connector to hook up 2 power wires, 1 ground and an IBUS connection to it. Then, connected this to the old CD-Changer 3-pin plug.

This allowed me to do a few things: 1) set the clock and OBC information (after changing the cluster to Front MID as well) for the cluster 2)raise the volume on the DSP amp and 3) configure the DSP settings how I like them, which I can then further tweak in the head unit. The result is now the DSP amp is doing the actual amplification and the head unit is really just outputting a fixed output. The only issue with the control of it is that the steering wheel controls are currently going to a Pioneer steering wheel control adapter and not the Ibus, meaning that they aren't controlling the volume of the amp, but the head unit instead. I think they might actually both be hooked up because once I hooked the amp up, the button response has been atrocious. My thought is that the signals are colliding. I will probably sacrifice track changing to remove the steering wheel controls from the head unit so I can regain control over the DSP volume.

Another thing that I discovered while doing all this is I think the length of time they had the tweeters in the doors hooked up to the head unit directly has caused them to blow. I connected a tone generator to them and could barely hear anything and even with music they barely sound like they're doing anything. Overall sound quality feels like it's lacking most if not all high end. I'm hoping finding some replacement DSP tweeters will help. I'm also missing the mid-ranges in the rear doors. Not sure why, but they are physically gone. I'm sure adding those back will help as well.

Anyways, that's all I've done so far. I've got plans to replace the motor mounts and upper radiator hose this weekend so I can drive it more reliably and comfortably, even if it does leak/burn oil .

[StephenVA]

Welcome to the X5 4.8is world!

[blackknight530i]

Welcome to the X5 4.8is world!

Thanks buddy!

So, now for the update on the motor mount install.

That job is the devil incarnate. I swear, I really don't know what BMW was thinking in designing the frame rail to be right where the bolts/nuts are for the mounts, then decided that they would make it impossible to remove them from the car without unbolting the steering rack and lowering the subframe, because you can't lift the engine high enough with the front axles in. If they had just made a little notch in the frame rail about 1/2" or so, it wouldn't be that big of a deal to remove them. Ugh...

Anyways, it took us a full 8 hours or so to do 1 and a half mounts on Saturday/Sunday. Then, tonight I finished up the rest of the driver side mount and replaced the upper radiator hose and that took me about 3.5 hours. I can't say it's ever taken me that long to replace motor mounts on any other BMW I've worked on. There were many curse words spoken/yelled, LOL.

At least now the engine idles super smooth and shifting is much improved. I'm still not sure I got the top nut fully tightened though. There is just no way to get enough extensions and universal joints on the nut from the top by yourself, so I got it mostly tight with a 16mm ratcheting wrench from below. I might try to take it to my buddy's shop to see if I can get him to tighten it the rest of the way with some tools he has. I'm just glad I can drive it now without worrying about the radiator hose ripping off the thermostat end and dumping all my coolant out. I can now see why my buddy said we should just do the motor mounts when we drop the whole engine out to do the engine reseal and valve stem seals.

BTW, I've never owned an engine that leaks oil as much as this thing. It is absolute sludge everywhere under the engine. With 137k miles, I just can't believe it. I'm hoping that when we have the engine out we can clean it really good.

[blackknight530i]

Well, I should have figured it wouldn't last that long without another issue, LOL. Turns out the front right air strut is bad and not holding air. The rubber is quite stretched and even though the left side is just as stretched out, it seems that it at least holds air. That being said, I think I'm going to replace both air struts. I know I could just replace the air springs and keep the original struts, but then what do I do if the struts are also bad later. As far as I can tell, I can't buy the strut by itself, so that would mean buying all new struts with air springs as well. $312 each side at FCP with lifetime warranty, but $100 core on each side as well. Going to be a pricey order unfortunately. At least they look pretty simple to install.

[Kaiv]

Awesome car - always wanted one of these

Same here. I think they look awesome!

The main thing that has kept me away from them personally (besides the N62 : ) is the transmission. I've driven a few cars with that era's 6hp26 and they just never seem to feel right and do what you want. That transmission is the reason I sold my 05 4.4i and that was such a nice car.

Do you guys know if a 420g would bolt up?

A friend of mine recently did a 6MT RWD conversion on an early 4.4i E53 and it was essentially just a matter of installing E39 540i parts with an extended driveshaft and selector rod + making a trans mount. The front diff and axles were just deleted. Very straight forward but I understand the facelift version is whole different animal.

[blackknight530i]

Same here. I think they look awesome!

The main thing that has kept me away from them personally (besides the N62 : ) is the transmission. I've driven a few cars with that era's 6hp26 and they just never seem to feel right and do what you want. That transmission is the reason I sold my 05 4.4i and that was such a nice car.

Do you guys know if a 420g would bolt up?

A friend of mine recently did a 6MT RWD conversion on an early 4.4i E53 and it was essentially just a matter of installing E39 540i parts with an extended driveshaft and selector rod + making a trans mount. The front diff and axles were just deleted. Very straight forward but I understand the facelift version is whole different animal.

So, the transmission has actually been pretty good, though I do know what you mean about it shifting at weird times. It seems when you're accelerating quickly, it wants to get to 5th gear really quickly. I'm hoping that it learns my style of driving fairly well and gets better, but it's not that bad really. I didn't really like the 5HP19 in my 530i either and love it being a 6-speed now, but it worked ok.

I do know that the 420g will not bolt up to the N62, but it will definitely bolt up to the M62TU in the early cars. The problem is if you want to keep the 4WD. Basically, to do that, you need to redesign a new tail shaft housing for the 420g that has mounting bosses for the transfer case. There's a guy that made one for the NV125 transfer case used in the early models and did a 420g swap on his 4.6is with 4WD, but it wasn't cheap and that was even having some guys in eastern Europe design it to keep costs down. The same would probably need to be done for the later X-drive models, but nobody I know of has attempted that. To be honest, I have 3 manual cars and 2 autos and I don't really mind the X5 being an auto. It's nice to just get in and go for a quick drive through town without worrying about shifting in traffic.

Also, I would think if you're doing a RWD conversion, you would need the axle flanges installed in the wheel bearings to keep them fully tightened. I watched Tavarish RWD convert his new Lambo Murcielago and the kit included some flanges that replaced the axles so you could reattach the axle nut.

[blackknight530i]

Also, some good and not as good news regarding the X5. It turns out that most of the issue with the leaking air spring is from trying to lower it too much using INPA. It seems that if I go too low, it can't hold air well. I'm guessing it's causing some kind of crease that is letting air out that it doesn't do when it's raised up a bit. I raised the whole front end up a bit and it seems to be holding ok, but I do know the compressor is not sounding optimal, so I might get the rebuild kit for it and try that. I think that is the other issue. Either way, I'm going to put off doing the air springs for now as it's a huge expense that I'd rather not deal with at the moment if I can avoid it.

I will say that the motor mount repair turned out to be great. It drives so much smoother now and I no longer have to worry about gassing it abruptly. I'm still running around in 2WD mode with the transfer case disconnected, but I'm hoping I can order some new front tires soon so I can swap the transfer case and not destroy the new one with mismatched tires.

I'm also hoping to go this Saturday to a local salvage yard and pick up some black 4.8is seats and door cards as well as some wheels. I hope they don't charge a fortune for it all as they all look good in pics and I don't really "need" them, but 4.8is don't come up often at salvage yards, so I can't let this opportunity get away.

[purplecty]

Which manual trans is used in the N62TU?
http://www.realoem.com/bmw/enUS/show...diagId=23_1036

[blackknight530i]

Which manual trans is used in the N62TU?
http://www.realoem.com/bmw/enUS/show...diagId=23_1036

No idea.

[TerraPhantm]

Same here. I think they look awesome!

The main thing that has kept me away from them personally (besides the N62 : ) is the transmission. I've driven a few cars with that era's 6hp26 and they just never seem to feel right and do what you want. That transmission is the reason I sold my 05 4.4i and that was such a nice car.

Do you guys know if a 420g would bolt up?

A friend of mine recently did a 6MT RWD conversion on an early 4.4i E53 and it was essentially just a matter of installing E39 540i parts with an extended driveshaft and selector rod + making a trans mount. The front diff and axles were just deleted. Very straight forward but I understand the facelift version is whole different animal.

420g wouldn't easily bolt up, but the GS6-53BZ out of the E60 545i/550i should.

To keep AWD would be a bit more complex. Unfortunately as far as I know, BMW never made AWD manual car that uses the V8 bell housing. Probably wouldn't be impossible to use a bell housing adapter with one of the I6 transmissions (335xi / 535xi probably being the 'ideal' donors since those transmissions would be rated for the most torque). Or maybe even the bell housing from the RWD transmission might bolt onto the AWD transmission (but you may run into input shaft length issues like on the 420g I6 vs V8).

[blackknight530i]

So, this past week involved a few new updates to the X5. Went to that salvage yard and bought the front and rear seats, the carpeting behind the rear seats (except for the slide out floor), and the rear door cards (front left was gone with the door and the front right was damaged) from a 2005 X5 4.8is. It's pretty hard to find salvaged 4.8is models as it is, so I had to grab what I could quickly. The leather was still soft and had no tears or cuts (just a few dimples that will hopefully come out with some heat and time), though it was filthy. They used Walknappa leather like M5 seats, so they are much harder to find. Once I picked up the rear door cards, I fortunately (and unfortunately) realized that the door cards also use the same walknappa leather on the arm rests and the inserts. I'm glad I got the rear ones, but the front ones are going to be a bit problematic.



This is kind of a before and after on cleaning the seats before installing them. They could still use some deeper cleaning and the front seats could probably use some magic from my buddy Brian at Fibrenew North Raleigh Wake Forest.

Here are both the front seats cleaned up:



The rear seats came out very nice and look nearly new. I'll take some pics of them all in the car soon and add them to the next update.

Another thing I did was that following Monday I had a bit of a short work day, so I went back to the yard and had them pull the transfer case from the same X5. My parents' X5 3.0i was starting to give them fault codes and have some really strange DSC activation at low speed stuff, along with a trifecta, so after doing a bit of research, it seemed to be the X-Drive activation gear that had failed, a common issue due to there being a metal worm gear and a plastic normal gear. I figured I would take apart this one and put the new gear in it before installing it in my parents' car, but it turned out to be flawless, so I just put it back together and installed it as-is. Fixed their issues and saved them the quoted $6000 BMW wanted for a new transfer case. I got a nice dinner for that .

Anyways, I used the new Odometer Gears reinforced gear in the actuator I took out of my parents' car and reinstalled it on the new transfer case I got and those will eventually go in my 4.8is once I finally get the proper size tires on the front.

I've been dailying the car to and from work and it's been very nice in traffic vs all my manual cars. It's quite fun and believe it or not, people really do let you in when you need to change lanes in such a big car .

Next updates will probably be new tires for the fronts or possibly new wheels as well. I'm not in a huge hurry to fix all the oil leaks, but eventually, I will buy all the parts and my buddy and I will pull the motor and reseal it all. For now I'll just enjoy driving it.

[blackknight530i]

Got a nice little update tonight. Took the car to get new tires on the front in the right size this afternoon and that finally seemed to have fixed the horrible 60+ MPH vibration I've had since getting the car. Then, when I got home, I decided to be a bit adventurous and try reconnecting the transfer case connection and see if it truly was destroyed by the PO accidentally running the wrong size tires front to back. Well, I plugged the actuator back in and started it up. 4x4 light still on, but decided to take it for a quick drive up the street and back. Seemed fine, but I figured I would just need to check and clear codes.

Had some DSC, VTG, and LWS codes. Cleared them and then started it up again. This time, all lights were out, so i started up the road again. Drove fine a ways, then the DSC/4x4 light came back on. Checked codes again and saw a DSC code for steering angle sensor implausible and the VTG said DSC error. Then I tried to recalibrate the LWS, but that didn't seem to make a difference. I've never had a steering angle sensor fail on me before, but all indications were telling me that's what it was. Ran INPA to confirm that in fact, it was not receiving any value changes on the sensor. Ugh.

I could order a new sensor, but they're not cheap and I wouldn't be able to test it tonight. Fortunately I have an e39 wagon just sitting around waiting to get sold, so I pulled its and swapped it into the X5. Coded it, cleared codes and recalibrated it and just took it for a test drive. Looks like everything is good. Phew! Let's see if is still good after a few drive cycles, but so far so good. I've still got a spare transfer case in case this one turns out to be bad.

Really happy with this truck

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[blackknight530i]

And, just determined that my adaptive headlights also work now. Was wondering why they didn't. Makes perfect sense now.

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[purplecty]

Glad that worked out! A trick to the later e53 x5 steering angle calibration is that on these all it takes is lock to lock on the steering wheel and back to center for the calibration...

[blackknight530i]

Glad that worked out! A trick to the later e53 x5 steering angle calibration is that on these all it takes is lock to lock on the steering wheel and back to center for the calibration...

That's cool, but the old one didn't register anything and it's easy enough to do it in INPA.

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[JimLev]

Paul, what did you use to clean the seat on the right side in the first pic in post 18? Hard to even beleive it's the same seat.

[blackknight530i]

Paul, what did you use to clean the seat on the right side in the first pic in post 18? Hard to even beleive it's the same seat.

My friend Stephen gave me something called No Nonsense leather cleaner that I used with a stiff bristled brush for the larger areas and a stiff horsehair brush for the nooks and crannies.

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[Towerbridge123]

Hi Paul my name is Shaun I seen a old tread you had about instrument cluster change vin , was wondering if you could help me , I have a m3 e46 2003 and it blow the instrument cluster so I have a used one in the car but having trouble with changing the vin , I don’t care some much about the mileage. I can’t get the dsc /abs light off , it’s the same part no of cluster and it’s a

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Hi Paul my name is Shaun I seen a old tread you had about instrument cluster change vin , was wondering if you could help me , I have a m3 e46 2003 and it blow the instrument cluster so I have a used one in the car but having trouble with changing the vin , I don’t care some much about the mileage. I can’t get the dsc /abs light off , it’s the same part no of cluster and it’s a M35080 cluster , I have pa soft tool and I am in there just need a step by step to change vin

Any information much appreciated
Thanks Shaun