Desalinated it yet again. Hey, there's paint under that road grime. Once the weather finally stabilizes, I think it will be time for a LONG overdue full detailing.
Hit 200,000 miles on Thursday. Here's to another 200,000 miles of pure driving excitement. In honor of the event I changed the oil. Also swapped out the fog bulbs with Hella Optiplux Extreme Yellow bulbs. The real test will be the first time I drive it in the rain at night. I plan to give it a full 200,000 mile once over in the next few weeks.
Well, I finally wrapped up what seemed to be the never ending project. When all is said and done, I gave my E46 some 200,000 mile loving. The project list included: Replaced the Vanos with a Dr. Vanos unit from Pelican Auto Which of course resulted in replacing the valve cover gasket New thermostat and housing Replaced the original (don't know how I got 200k miles out of it) water pump with a Stewart High Performance water pump New radiator hoses and sensor (the radiator was replaced just 30,000 miles ago so I left it alone) New pulleys New belt tensioners New belts New heater hoses and Pipes. Boy was removing the intake manifold for this part of the project ever a treat. Same goes for fishing the cracked pipes out of the head. Fresh BMW anti-freeze New cold weather CCV system and vacuum line Cleaned up the intake manifold as best I could and cleaned the throttle body New Vanos oil pipe New power steering reservoir One new power steering hose (the less expensive one that is harder to get to) New intake manifold gasket Fresh Red Line MTL in the transmission Fresh Red Line in the differential Hit it with a can of intake valve cleaner (boy was this scary on the clean out drive an hour later) New spark plugs New upstream O2 sensors Cleaned the mass airflow sensor Oil change with Mobile One Euro Blend and Mann oil filter New passenger side turn signal During this whole process, I cleaned the 200,000 mile of gunk off the engine block, components, etc. This is a large part of what took me so long. I'll tell you what, WD40 is a great engine degreaser. This is biggest project I've ever undertaken. Pelican's write up had the coolant pipes etc. as a 4 out of 5 wrenches on the complexity. Wasn't so much complex as it was utterly time consuming. I hit 203,000 on my way in to work today and it's running smooth as a well aged Scotch. Boy is it ever nice to be driving it again after sitting for a month and a half.
