I arrived late yesterday afternoon to find Robin and Ben had decided to source and fit a clutch – they’d assembled it all and attached the gearbox to the new motor.

Next job was to reattach the exhaust headers with new gaskets. This wasn’t the smoothest operation – some of the nuts had seized onto the bolts when removed so we had to free these up and reinsert the bolts – more tapping required here to fix broken threads etc. I left Robin and Ben doing this:

It certainly wasn’t a three man job, so I indulged in some relaxing cleaning instead. The car has been stored, uncovered, outside for a while, and so isn’t looking quite as beautiful as a nail-varnish Estoril blue car should.

The wheels were also in shocking condition. Sadly the lacquer has peeled off in large chunks – nothing I could do about that – but I could generally improve things. Should the car get back on the road satisfactorily I’m sure Ben will get them professionally sorted.

I think they’re the easiest-to-clean BMW wheels of all time! By the time I’d finished nancying around cleaning, the motor was ready for location.

Upon Simon Stevinson’s advice we’d dropped the subframe and steering rack out of the way to make this whole process a lot easier. We fitted new engine mounts and supported the subframe on a jack.

Robin worked on getting the gearbox all organised under the car while Ben and I tackled the daunting prospect of the massive wiring mess. What goes where? What does this do? How did this ever work? Etc! This took hours – roughly 10pm-1am. The next six photos show this process – hopefully you can see small progress between each!

In the meantime the under body heat shields were attached and the exhaust refitted. A question for the wise: the gearbox has an easy to spot reverse switch, but there’s also another couple of terminal connectors higher up on the same side. We’ve duly refitted them, but wondered what they were for! Also, there’s an electrical connector on the fluid supply to the clutch slave – what’s that for?!

Next came the refitting of the inlet manifold. This is a horrible task, as there’s an electrical connector, an oil drain pipe and two air pipes, one on top and one underneath, that need to be jubilee clipped to it – almost impossible unless you’re Mr Tickle!

Eventually this was done, so we set about slapping the induction on and completing the oil, coolant and a/c loops so we could test the engine.

In this comedy condition, we figured everything was ready. We gave the car some oil, and refitted the now fully charged battery. Here’s a video link to our first start attempt. What went wrong there? We left it in sixth gear with the handbrake on – pretty unfair on the starter motor really! So, second start attempt.

That turned out to be oil leaking from the pipes that leave the oil filter housing to go to the oil cooler. We left it there for the night (finished at gone 4am!), but Ben has reported today that he’s dismantled that and re-seated everything, rebuilt it, and it now runs just fine without any oil leak. There’s more good news – the engine seems to run without any knocks or rattles from the bottom end, the top end sounds sweet, and the Vanos is quiet. It’s early days with cold oil, and no coolant, but the signs are good.

Soon we’ll get the coolant in and bled, get the front back on the car and get it on the ground, but for now we’re going to celebrate this success and the advent of a New Year – cheers to all!

A busy day today. We’ve not got much to show for the 20 man hours we’ve put in today, but we’ve overcome a lot of hurdles that we’re pleased to have behind us. We had a rounded bolt on the clutch assembly that caused a delay first thing.

The clutch doesn’t look new but is certainly serviceable so despite the potential for saving labour later by changing the clutch now, Ben has decided not to; we don’t even know that this engine swap is going to work yet!

So, left is the clutch and flywheel assembly, photographed with a torque converter couple of pot noodles.

Ben set about stripping the remaining assets from the outgoing block: fuel feed, throttle bodies, ancillaries; until we reached the stage where both motors looked about the same.

In the photo below the outgoing motor is on the left and the replacement is being prepared on the right.

The next job was to swap the sumps over. This was necessary because the ‘new’ motor had a damaged sump – it’s taken one hell of a whack. Here are the two sumps side by side – crack clearly visible on the right end of the lower item:

This was also an interesting step because it gave us the first chance to look inside the outgoing motor. The whole reason for this process is that the old motor has developed an alarming knock which sounds decidedly bottom-endish. I’d heard that it was common for the bottom of piston 5 to slip on the crank, and lo and behold this seems to be exactly what’s happened. I’m annoyed that my SLR won’t take video because it’s so hard to describe the issue with stills, but in the picture below the bottom of piston 5 is pretty much in the middle. The gold casing – a U section clamp around the crank, could easily be wiggled vertically by hand in a manner that the other 11 (both engines!) couldn’t.

Below are two items that I believe are referred to as ‘shells’; semi circular clasps that surround the point at which the con-rod meets the crank – a bearing like interface. They certainly looked worn, if not a bit damaged.

Note the wonderful fingerless mechanic’s gloves Ben’s wearing there! The photo below shows where the shells sit around the crank.

Sumps swapped, it was time to reassemble the ‘new’ motor. Lots of cleaning has taken place!

Above you can see the water pump, fuel rails and throttle bodies have found their way on. I also replaced all the VANOS bolts and VANOS filter in accordance with my article on the matter, and changed the oil filter and all associated seals and washers.

We were just popping the damaged sump onto the old motor for safe keeping, when Ben noted with alarm that there was a feature he’d not remembered seeing in the ‘new’ motor before we popped the good sump on that:

I guess that’s a second oil pickup protruding from the sump there. We removed the sump from the ‘new’ motor and found to our dismay that this part was indeed missing, and we could clearly see the oil pump assembly was broken where that arm had snapped off.

There was no other option – we had to remove the chain from the oil pump and swap the parts over. It all got a bit frantic at this stage so I omitted to photograph the oil pump assemblies out of the blocks, but to the left you can see the ‘new’ motor once we’d fitted the good parts from the outgoing engine.

This done it was time to refit the sump, and here we had another setback – despite using a torque wrench @ 12Nm I snapped a sump bolt. This prompted the sump to once again be removed while I surgically removed the bolt from the block, and we then chose to run a tap through any sticky holes as a precaution. Again, loads more time lost here!

Finally we’re in a position where most of the ancillaries are on the new block. Tomorrow’s jobs are to get the gearbox and clutch assembly on the new engine, and generally prepare matters for the unit to be reunited with the car.

Here’s how the block looks now – I can’t believe how much better it all looks for a good scrub!

A couple of hours today saw a good deal more progress. I grabbed a spanner from Robin to get rid of the fan – I can’t tell you how much I could have done with that yesterday!

Then it was time to get the injector wiring out of the way, which marked the point at which all electrics were clear. We removed the power steering pump and tied all that gubbins out of the way to the car. The fuel lines were separated, and then it was engine out time!

A few bolts and a bit of a wiggle and we had the gearbox separated.

That was our objective for the day, so we finished off with a bit of a tidy. Tomorrow we’ll work on moving all the ancillaries, and the flywheel and clutch to the replacement motor block. So for now, the car looks a little like this!

My friend Ben Smith clearly is. He had a rummage around in his yard and found this:

That’s an S50B32, or for those of you who don’t speak in code, the 3.2 litre 321bhp engine from a BMW M3 Evolution. Which is handy, because Ben also has one of these with a dead engine. We dragged it to a workshop to do the deed – the hope is that we’ll successfully swap the engines, the more likely outcome is that we’ll put the whole lot in a skip!

First job, car up in the air.

We decided that taking the front of the car off should make things easier.

We had pretty rapid progress up until this point. Then we took the exhaust headers off – took about 4 hours!

We’ve disconnected most of the electrics, drained all fluids (inc already empty aircon), clutch slave out etc – the whole thing is now on the dangle.

That’s how we’ve had to leave it overnight. Next steps are to get the gear shift clear of the car, sort the power steering, and remove the electrics from the fuel rail. Oh, and disconnect the fuel supply and return. All good fun! So cast your bets now, success or skip?!

A great day out today! Together with Andy Eccles, Adam Tier, Olly Bloxham and Paul Young I hired a small sprint circuit in the Midlands for a morning of ‘testing’ and photography. This is something I tend to do around this time of year, mainly because it’s nearly always damp or cold enough for a low-friction tyre-friendly oversteer surface – but not today! It was 10 degrees and bone dry – a couple of quick cornering tests presented far too much grip.

Fortunately Andy had a great idea during the planning phase, so we’d brought some irrigation for a nearby water supply.

The line up:

Neil – E39 M5
Olly – E39 M5
Adam – E39 540i (manual)
Paul – E87 120d
Andy – E91 325d

Andy and I are sideways veterans at this circuit, so we set about using the wetness to get all attendees sliding their cars around the bend.

Great success! We spent the vast majority of the morning just hooning around. I learnt that I can do over 45mph in reverse, and that the M5 doesn’t need much help from me to oversteer: look mum – no hands!

In an attempt to get some vaguely scientific information out of the day, we recorded some laps times. Andy has neatly converted these into a Top Gear style “Power Lap” board!

The diesels did really well against the massive V8s, but again the nature of a small sprint circuit will level the playing field somewhat. Interestingly I did a lap in Andy’s 325d that felt every bit as fast as my M5, but that was a 1:28.

Overall a fantastic day out – throughly enjoyable! Best bit was that there were absolutely no complaints from the M5. I did over 300 miles, visited the rev limiter often, spun, got the oil well over 100 degrees etc, and it took it all in its stride on just one tank of fuel. What a car!

Today the weather has been mild and dry, so I’ve seized the opportunity to get things done. I cycled (yes, cycled!) to Vines of Guildford to collect all sorts of goodies: for the 330d a new leather lift strap for the boot floor and an oil filter kit, and a new thermostat and coolant for the M5. The 330d has 8,000 miles to go until its next service, so in about 1,000 miles time I’ll give it an interim oil change, but more on that as and when I do it.

The M5′s temperature gauge has struggled to get above the lower ‘norm’ dot recently, so I figured a new thermostat should help. As mentioned in a previous post, I followed the instructions on an M5 board, which were really useful. The biggest pig was removing and then refitting the under engine belly panels, necessary to drain the coolant. Once that was done, the MAFs and associated tubing had to be removed to permit access to the thermostat housing.

Then the coolant pipes were removed and the casing lid could be released. The instructions said “Remove thermostat housing (tug it! hard because VANOS sending unit in the way and doesn’t like to move due to SS hoses)” – tug it hard is an understatement, it required levering with a breaker bar! Still, eventually it was done.

Then the thermostat was changed, and as ever refitting was the reversal of removal.

This sad thing is that while the temperature needle now sits closer to upright than it did, it’s still not perfect and I suspect the improvement is as much down the milder weather than the new thermostat! Still, at least I’ve tried and I’ve got nice fresh coolant on board – I’ll have to do more reading before chasing this problem again.

I’ve been thinking for a while about the various car blogs I run, and how it’d be useful to blend them all into one. Following on from some inspirational use of  WordPress by my colleague Brenden, I was convinced that’s the way forward, so here’s the result! As and when I get the time I’ll be blogging about aspects of life slightly wider than just Bavaria’s finest machinery, and it also gives you the opportunity to comment on my ramblings, so we’ll see where that leads…

This weather is getting on my tits! There are a couple of small jobs I want to get done on the five, but it looks like they’ll keep waiting. As promised in my last blog post I did eventually have the car washed, but I chose to let the local hand wash place do it.

The trouble was, that didn’t go too smoothly. As I got to the end of the process, there was some kerfuffle and I was ushered around again. “Car very dirty, no?” Indeed. The next time around, I got out to check the results. All much better, but sadly the car’s right side repeater cover was missing.

Eventually this was found, but I can’t work out how it’s supposed to stay attached. All I need is a bit of dry weather at a weekend when I’m free, but it just doesn’t seem to want to happen!

Also, I want to replace the car’s thermostat. I plan on following the instructions on the M5 board unless I hear differently in the meantime! I’ve got a bit of leave coming up from work before Christmas so hopefully I’ll manage some success before the year is out!

On another note, I’m thinking of moving this blog to a more general WordPress installation to cover some of the other things I get up to – for instance I went to the WRC in Wales last weekend and I imagine that’d be of interest to some, but I want to make sure I can categorise things to that you subscribers only get updates on the topics you’re interested in.

Yesterday Diane & I took the tractor to South Wales to catch some views of the World Rally Championship. We got very close to the action to say the least – here are Loeb and Sordo’s cars photographed from inside the 330d!

And in fact, it would appear that Diane managed to photograph five times world rally champion Sebastian Loeb relieving himself before the stage.

It was very cold and had we planned our day better we’d have got to see a bit more action, but it was absolutely worthwhile for the experience. Seeing the leaders flying over jumps was just awesome.

The 330d made itself an excellent tool for the job – but more of that in another post.