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-   -   My "new" E46 (1999 328i) (https://dorkiphus.net/porsche/showthread.php?t=35676)

HughA44s 03-01-2016 11:30 AM

Hmmm - Looks like I lost the metal impeller water pump argument. lol

Rob in VA 03-01-2016 03:47 PM

Jazz, I discovered the same problem w/ the hoses on my soon to be racecar. After removing the majority of unneeded stuff for a race car, I went on a shopping spree to replace all of it.

Some pix here of my SE46 build - https://www.instagram.com/robgagliardo/

PS - I'm always impressed at how you take on projects.

}{arlequin 03-02-2016 10:50 AM

wait... let me guess, you're building a racecar?

Jazzbass 03-02-2016 03:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rob in VA (Post 549129)
Jazz, I discovered the same problem w/ the hoses on my soon to be racecar. After removing the majority of unneeded stuff for a race car, I went on a shopping spree to replace all of it.

Some pix here of my SE46 build - https://www.instagram.com/robgagliardo/

PS - I'm always impressed at how you take on projects.

That's cool - first I've hear of Spec E46. How do you like that compared to GTS?

On your race car are you able to eliminate a lot of the emissions stuff like the SAP, CCV, etc? Getting rid of all that seems like it would clean up the engine bay significantly.

Dr K 03-02-2016 04:53 PM

Looks nice, Rob. Good luck!

arob 03-02-2016 09:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rob in VA (Post 549129)
Jazz, I discovered the same problem w/ the hoses on my soon to be racecar. After removing the majority of unneeded stuff for a race car, I went on a shopping spree to replace all of it.

Some pix here of my SE46 build - https://www.instagram.com/robgagliardo/

PS - I'm always impressed at how you take on projects.

I too, enjoy reading Jazz's project posts. :)

Rob - you building another SE46?:?

Jazzbass 03-03-2016 02:15 AM

6 Attachment(s)
So this past weekend was productive-ish. The goal was to get the manifold back in and the car running, but I didn't quite get there thanks to the wrong size vacuum hose (my fault) and the wrong power steering hose (not my fault). First problem is the vacuum hose. Standard small vacuum hose sold literally everywhere is 5/32", which is actually a nice metric 4mm. But this is BMW, man. Standard 4.0mm vacuum hose? Way too big. 3.5mm hose? Perfect. The amount of time I debated between 4.0mm and 3.5mm hose is the stuff of idiocy and I really don't want to go into it here. Suffice to say, my idiotic concern with things made me go to BMW of Silver Spring and get official BMW 3.5mm vacuum hose for (seriously) $16 for 1 meter. You can buy this stuff all day long on the interwebs for $1 a foot, but I wanted it NOW because I was getting this car back together this weekend. :roll:

So I get to this point - VANOS installed, valve cover back on, new spark plugs installed, new water pipes, hose and water pump in and I'm ready to put the oil filter console back on:

Attachment 50396

But first - let's get the power steering line from the rack to the cooler on - it'll be easy now. Grab the new line from the pack - WTF? How the hell does this thing fit? It's just not working. Did they send me the wrong line? The part number on the sticker is correct, but compared to the old line - ah crap. They're different:

Attachment 50397

To their credit, ECS overnighted me a new hose first thing Monday. Here are the two hoses side by side - bottom is the first (wrong) one they sent me, top is the (correct) replacement. Note the ECS stickers - same sticker, same part number. The Rein stickers, however, show different part numbers (interestingly, none of which are the one I ordered, which IS the one on the ECS sticker :?). RealOEM indicates that the incorrect hose is for a 325xi, so it makes sense that it would be different.

After the hose didn't fit, I decided to finish up a few more items and pack it in. I wasn't going to put the manifold back in until the new p/s hose came in so I could get a torque wrench in there from the top - a decision that in retrospect was unnecessary as the torque wrench fit much easier from the bottom. So I finished up the oil filter console, power steering pump and high pressure line, alternator, thermostat, VANOS oil line, and new tensioners and pulleys. I also got a roll of 3M friction tape and taped up all places in the wiring harness where the plastic covers and wire loom had been pulled off by previous ham-fisted mechanics or fell off after 17 years of heat cycles and road vibrations. I do love me some friction tape, I gotta say. Oh, and BTW that alternator looks original. $20 says I'm replacing it within 6 months. Ditto for the starter, which will be infinitely more annoying.

Attachment 50398

While doing all that work, I took the chance to swap out the high pressure p/s line under the car with a newer one I picked up from a parts car a month or so ago. The donor car was a 99 as well but had had this hose replaced. This is the car I got the rear caliper piston from earlier in this thread, and the guy threw in this line for $5. A new one from BMW is $250 and a quality aftermarket one is $100. Since this is actually a pretty easy line to swap (aside from the mess), I thought I'd see how this one does. Also, unlike the other p/s lines this one doesn't have hose clamped ends that start to leak as the rubber gets brittle. The fun thing about THIS line is this:

Attachment 50400

There's a rubber isolator (green arrow) that holds the line in place in front of the steering rack. Since this whole thread is about what happens to rubber after 17 years, it should come as no surprise that the green arrow is not actually pointing to a rubber isolator. Instead, it's pointing to the zip tie that the PO replaced it with after the isolator dry-rotted and fell off. After that happened, the line then had more freedom of movement, so it started to rub on the front sway bar, and was doing a pretty good job of wearing through the hose (red arrow). The replacement line I had isn't worn through like that, but you could see where it'd been a little polished by the sway bar (it's isolator was intact but had seen better days). So I replaced the isolator and used some of this big-ass heat shrink tubing made for high voltage wires to give the line a little more protection from the sway bar:

Attachment 50401

Finally turned my attention to the manifold as started to reassemble that. I changed all the o-rings for the upper plenum, cleaned a lot of the oil out, and installed the new cold weather CCV system. It was pretty easy with the manifold out, but holy shit would that be a nightmare to do in-car. Especially with all the insulation on the CCV tubes and oil separator. Here you can see the manifold, all clean with it's new CCV, freshly PORed brackets, and brand-spankin'-new $5/foot 3.5mm official BMW vacuum hose. Oh, and all new plastic clips. They were $3 for all of them, how can I not replace them?

Attachment 50399

N0tt0N 03-03-2016 09:57 AM

So clean! Great job, man!

Roo 03-03-2016 10:05 AM

Great documentation/write-up Chris.
And bravo for your persistence and patience with parts surprises.:grrr:

Jazzbass 03-03-2016 01:12 PM

9 Attachment(s)
So, a normal person would have finished up with the clean up work Sunday night, closed the hood and relaxed for a couple days until the rest of the parts came in. A OCD nutjob would use those days to tackle other projects on the car. If you've read this far into this thread, you know which category I fall into, so the following shouldn't be a surprise.

There were several cosmetic issues with the car that we're important to getting it back on the road, but just kind of bothered me personally. The first issue was the right headlight. The left headlight in the car has been replaced, but the right one was original. 17 years old, oxidized, scratched, broken trim and filled with moisture. I pulled the light and replaced the lens, the lens seal and the eyebrow trim and I'm pretty happy with the results:

Attachment 50405

Yeah, they're not angel eyes, but I think few things refresh the look of a car like nice new clean headlight lenses.

Next up was the sunroof. There were two things wrong here - first, the sunshade was completely loose in the roof. This is another one of those very common E46 issues where the clips on the shade break and need to be replaced. The headliner was also pulling off the shade, which is another well known E46 problem.

Here you can see the sunshade removed from the car - the red arrows point to the left side clips, both of which were broken. The right side clips (blue arrow) are a little different from later versions, and here one was broken (and jamming the track) and the other was intact. Inspecting the rest of the roof, I was lucky in that the shade follower that actually opens and closes the shade was in place (green arrow) and the "wiper" part in the rear (purple arrow) was undamaged.

Attachment 50408

Second issue was the roof didn't open at all. Didn't open, did even make any noise, did nothing. This was a little unusual as E46 sunroof failures are almost always failure of part of the mechanical system - the shade clips break and get jammed, the cassette breaks, etc. In these cases the motor will still make some noise and click until the motor protection circuit shuts it off. In this case though, there was nothing. So, the first obvious thing to check here was the fuse, which was fine. Second option was to check the motor and see if it had burned out. I pull the motor cover off the headliner and my finely tuned EE troubleshooting skills were able to figure out the problem:

Attachment 50407

In this picture you can see the blue arrow points to the motor electrical connection and the red arrow is pointing to the sunroof track worm gears that are moved by the motor. What's missing is the actual motor itself, which I quickly determined to be part of the problem. Again, I did go to engineering school so conclusions like this come naturally to me.

Well, ok then. Let's see how much a new motor costs. Answer: $480. :shock: Yeah, so f**k that. The real answer to this problem was to hit Crazy Ray's auto salvage in Mount Airy. They have a 1999 323i that looks exactly like my car - white on beige interior. I headed up there Tuesday, taking advantage of the 65 degree weather and looted the 323i. I got lucky in that that car had a fully intact sunshade with good clips and a non-drooping headliner AND a good working sunroof motor. Replacement cost to me for these parts was $24, and that included the rest of the headliner which I also took because it was in good shape.

With the new shade installed and the motor replaced, it was time to replace the glass. There are six screws (thee per side) that hold the roof in, and these screws have a significant amount of play in them to allow for fine adjustment of the roof height (spec is flush to 1mm proud). On my first attempt I inserted the roof, screwed it in on the driver's side, adjusted it correctly, and then did the same on the passenger's side. Happy with the adjustment, I pushed "up" on the roof switch and held for 20s to reset the roof. It reset correctly and popped up. Sweet! That was easy! Let's slide it back and bask in the open air glory.

So I hit the back switch, the glass pops down, moves about 2mm and **CRUNCH**. Oh, shit. Key off, shut down, WTF? I hit "close" and the glass moved up to the close position, but looking at the roof, it's now crooked and passenger side is 10mm lower than the driver's side. Goddamnit. Looking at it, the rails are now misaligned - the right side is lower than the left. Fortunately each side is independent and by pulling the motor out I was able to get the tracks back in sync. Thinking about it, I think it was my sunroof insertion process that messed things up. I put the glass in, tightened the bolts on one side, then rotated the other side up and tightened those. This put some misaligned stress on the tracks and led to the crunch. So I need to get the glass into position and aligned on both sides and THEN insert the bolts. I thought about shimming it up from the inside, but was easier was to use some cheap Harbor Freight glass holders and some bars to hold the roof in position:

Attachment 50409

The beauty of this is that the curved part of the handles of the suction cups meant that I could move the crossbars right or left within the handle and make very minor adjustments in height. This took no more than 10 mins to set up and align the roof. Tightened the bolts down, reset the roof, crossed fingers and hit "back". The roof slide back nice and smooth. Cross another item off the "broken" list.

The final issue was the stereo. It had two problems - first was the head unit, which worked fine but it was a cassette (1999, remember?). Second, the woofer in the driver's door was not working at all. I pulled the driver's door panel off and removed the speaker. Once again I used my highly developed engineering skills to determine the problem:

Attachment 50410

Once again, my trip to Crazy Ray's helped fix this. The 323i that donated the sunroof parts had a door panel sitting in the trunk with a good speaker in it. $7 and it was mine:

Attachment 50411

Now, this speaker is in decent shape, but notice how the foam baffle is not perfectly round (green arrow). This appears to be a manufacturing defect. This led to a tear in the foam due to the way the foam was pinched. There was also another tear in the foam (red arrow) that may or may not have been caused by me dropping it while carrying it on top of the headliner :oops:. A quick google search revealed that this is a cheap and easily solvable problem. Some cotton cloth and Aleen's Tacky Glue (highly recommended on the audiophile boards) it all it needed:

Attachment 50412

Hooked it up and it sounded great. Crazy Ray's also had a 2003 325xi that was just brought in and hadn't been stripped yet, so I was able to replace this:

Attachment 50413

with this:

Attachment 50414

for $34. This is a late model E46 CD head unit with the much-sought-after "MODE" button. The presence of the mode button means that this head unit supports an aux in port, which will be appreciated by it's teenage driver who owns no CDs or tapes. All in all less than $70 at the junkyard and I now have a working sunroof and a modern, aux-in CD player with fully working speakers.


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