Used to be on a poster in my dorm: 2005 M3

[Beej]

Gutting it and caging it?

I go through the circular logic of "no track time until more safety equipment" and "not gonna be able to get out to the track enough to justify safety equipment" on a weekly basis. :?

I mean while you're in there you may as well pick up a turbo kit. This only took you an hour!

Not a bad idea, but I decided to take that time to fish out a coolant sensor I dropped under under the intake manifold instead. Hours.

So, good news and bad news. I caved and decided to do the radiator too:


Also did the two coolant sensors and hoses. Cooling system seems solid now. Comes up to temp and stays there, no leaks, huzzah.

The bad news is that on the shakedown run, the SES light popped on. Car felt normal and I didn't notice anything as I got home. I turned it back on and the idle was rough. Checked the codes with a generic OBD2 thing and I'm getting P0014 over-advanced exhaust cam timing and P0492 - secondary air injection, which I don't care as much about at this point.

I knew while I was doing it that I probably should do one repair at a time, but I went ahead and changed the VANOS sealing plate anyway. You can see some oil residue on the first shot, then nice and clean on the second.



A quick Googling shows potential for cam sensor (I did replace the o-ring on it recently, but it still feels like it's mounted solidly), VANOS solenoid, exhaust cam gear tabs...and other potentially un-fun stuff. So that's fucking discouraging.

I guess the first thing I'll do is pull the VANOS sealing plate and check that it looks good and everything is still clean, then yank the valve cover and check the exhaust cam gear.

Also, I really have no excuse to not have my own BMW specific code reader at this point.