Its hard to say that about a car i love but ive had the car less than two months and the thing has been giving me a hard time. to be fare most of it i think is due to pore upkeep. the week before last it began having a bad misfire. i checked the plugs and found the #5 cyl spark plug had no electrodes left of the four it once had, they were those fancy "100,000 mile pugs". give the car has 158000 mile god nows how long it has been since they were installed. I installed some new double platinums and the car ran like a dream for a week, but then out of no wear it stalled on me a block from my house. i found that if i let it sit for a bit it will start back up but stall out again after about 30 seconds. it has no dtc's and the spark is good. i had put some of that sea foam stuff when i changed the spark plugs don't know if that was a good thing or not. i ran a compression test and found they all had around 230psi in each cylinder. looked up the spec's and found it was only supposed to be about 180psi. still need to check if the injectors are getting signal and if the fuel system pressure is good, the weather has not been very good the last few days hopefully i can get back to it tomorrow but i just wanted to see if any one had some tips to diagnose this thing.
Wow, hard to accuse an 18 year old car that has gone 158,000 miles a lemon; that car was once somebody's loved and reliable transportation. Sounds like an indifferent previous owner has used it up and has not bothered with ordinary maintenance. My suggestion is to accept that this car needs some attention and invest the time to do all of the deferred maintenance. There is probably a laundry list of things clogged up, leaking, stuck or broken somewhere in the engine bay. Replace all the rubber hoses, clean out all the filters. Search the web to find out what e34's do as they get older and address those issues. Sounds like you bought a nice car, which needs a lot of attention, so make the best of it and learn all you can from this. Good luck!
talked to the last owner/ brother in law. he told me that he had done the fuel pump a little over a year ago, he also gave me a new fuel pressure regulator that he never had the chance to put in. the job looked ez but there are those one time use clamps on the fuel rail lines, so again i have to put it off till tomorrow until i can get new clamps. i do still believe the e34 was the last of a dying bread. the pre OBDII bmw's were the shit. i have owned an e30 and an e28, and drove both of those cars well over the 250,000 mile marks. great cars, if i can ever get this thing running again i know it can last just as long as those old tanks did.
I thought the fuel pressure regulator just screwed into the end of the rail. No removal needed. Edit: Looks like a press fit. Still shouldn't require removing the fuel rail.
in the end it was the newly replaced fuel pump after all. i replaced the fuel pressure regulator anyway just because i had it. i found no pressure at the rail when i checked the fuel line. i then checked the tank and found that the electrical plug at the pump was not there just a couple of crimped on pins and a bad wire going from the pump to the electrical connector on top of the tank, and one pin had come loose. not a lemon gust a shoddy repair. the good thing is that i just put better ends and replaced the wire and it started up good. cost me nothing. and i already had a new regulator and filter that came with the car. runs very well now thanks
