...Tracking my track madness: June 2010

Not-really-but-sort-of-related rant:

  Friday was truly a great day, but now that I think back to it I don't think I actually got anything at all accomplished and I was mostly annoyed the whole day. I spent all day with the car, having won the day off by wrestling it from the hands of a vicious wolverine, so nothing to complain about there.

   However I have to say I'm starting to believe you could predict weather patterns based largely on my schedule for working on the BM. In fact, I think in a few weeks time there will be several phone calls made my way to inquire as to my plans for the weekend, and if they include working on the car then the caller will be canceling a weekend camping trip with the family and instead staying inside with a good book.

You see Friday was due to be sunny by all accounts made by men of industry and science. The first thing I saw that morning was not a good sign. Grey. Sheets of grey clouds, but at least to start there was no moisture on the ground. So I woke up to grey, I drove to the office in grey, I drove to Maple ridge in grey, and just as I pulled in to the garage the grey started to pelt me with some mildly wet weather that spent 8 hours creeping up behind me until all the sudden I was wet and bothered, and that is the only context for those words that means someone did not have a good time.

  Yes I know I have a covered garage, and yes I know I'm in Vancouver so this is not worth being surprised by but it's still nearly supernatural the way the rain arrives and leaves with my efforts to repair my new project because once again on the way home after 8 hours of mildly damp weather this was my sight:

So yes, annoyed with weather. Now on to cars.

Sure, I remember to connect that.
I think.

Today was a big day. Packed across two cars were parts galore. Among many smaller parts that I don't even remember ordering much less what they do was my new tires, my new alternator and my new suspension parts (some of which new-to-me and donated graciously from the black BM shown).

Sadly it didn't go quite as planned.
I still don't understand exactlly why but I decided to install the alternator and new belts with the car outside and then move it inside, ignorant of the fact that the rain was starting and the car only needed to be moved 8 feet, albeit diagonally.

So an hour later when I had just finished installing the alternator and I realized I had neglected to actually connect the alternator to the car, I was a bit irked. I don't know if you've ever found yourself in a situation where you have struggled with a stubborn, frustrating, hard to see, slightly damp, slightly dark, slightly out of reach mechanical device but every second it isn't doing what you want is another second your ego starts leaking air, and it compounds exponentially until you think you're obviously terrible at this sort of thing and you should really quit now and pay someone else to solve problems for you.

If you have you know that the best feeling in the world is the moment when it finally works and you realize that you have achieved something that had been very recently beyond your limits.

So if you have ever had that moment then you also understand that when that moment is followed immediately by a moment where you realize you didn't actually install it properly, you might suddenly feel like less of a man.

So all things in perspective when I forgot to connect the car harness to the alternator outputs there may have been some crying followed by a lot of swearing, which evolved into more swearing as I realized that the posts were on the back of the alternator.
Behind the dust cover.
Under the air intake for the alternator.
Up against the power steering fluid pump.
Beside the frame.
Under the air intake for the engine.

Plus, I couldn't find the Nuts for the posts (which are some bizzare thread pitch that no other nut on the car will fit, and are each a different size because why the hell not damnit, we're BMW and we can do whatever we want).

Check the work bench, check the car. Checked the work bench, checked the car. Bench, car, bench, car, everything in between, inside house, inside pockets, inside cars, inside tool boxes, inside stacked tires, on ground, and then just as the last standing part of my ego was feeling up to poking his head above ground after the last incident... "oh look, they're right there, already on the alternator posts."

That little part of my ego crawled back into his hole and died.

So much later when the alternator was installed (and connected) I started the car and hey look at that, it's charging properly, no more warning lights.

So I moved it inside and tried to get on with the agenda.

Initially that went quite well actually. First I checked to make sure that my engine computer wasn't flooded (apparently it's known to happen due to some bad plumbing routing. They're Germans, not Italians) which it wasn't, then I spent an hour waiting for some other BM owner to finish installing his expensive go-fast-boutique parts (I mean, his awesome new dampeners which enabled him to generously give me the old ones...) Then I removed the later model side skirt to see why the hole in the skirt doesn't line up with the hole in the frame used to raise the car with the special jack that inserts into the frame. I gently removed the very rusted screws holding the skirt on, and right as I was about to stick my fingers into the black void between the body and the underside of the side skirt I pondered how many spiders might be living in there. Turns out, a lot but they had all been killed or moved on. Removing the side skirt revealed no more than 4 large collections of spiders eggs and several dozen dead spiders, and that was enough to make me glad I was wearing gloves.

After removing the skirt I realize it was fiberglass, which means aftermarket, which means no wonder it doesn't fit because the aftermarket doesn't actually bother wasting time measuring and fitting onto the cars they're building parts for. I mean, why bother making sure that your installed part doesn't interfere with the ability to maintain anything on the underside of the car. Who in their right mind would want to do that!

So after removing them and comparing to the OEM parts sitting right next to me on the visa BM with the fancy suspension, I realized that the holes were simply to low. Oh well.

So with the skirt off I went to install the jack only to nearly have a heart attack.

The heart attack moment:

You see, this car has a rebuilt status on the body (not the heart attack, i'm getting to that). This is actually very common with mid-90s European cars that are coming down in price because a minor accident that requires some new body panels and some paint can end up costing a ridiculous amount of money. For example, if you need to replace a factory wheel because someone drives over a curb, that will be 2000$ if you're ICBC and need to buy it from the dealer. Four wheels will cost you more than you could pay for an example of this decade old car with zero miles on it and a free BMW engineer to maintain it for the first 5 years.

So the value of the car in the body shop world is less than the cost of repairs, which then means the insurance provider asks you to choose between paying to have it "rebuilt" or just taking a payout for the car. For some cars such as this, the payout in their twisted system of evaluating value of various vehicles isn't enough to buy the same car from the classifieds, requiring you to say "Yes I would like to keep my expensive car and not downgrade to a kia thank you" and then requiring the insurance company to declare it "rebuilt".

In the case of my car, after finding out it was rebuilt we spent a bit more time lining up various key areas, checking clearances and figuring out what the hell happened. We already knew it had a fender repaired as the drivers side was a different color of biege, but that was it. Turned out the car was perfect. The underside was completely symetrical and every suspension or chassis point I checked had not been "repaired" or otherwised hacked back into working order.

So as I went to put the jack into the perfectly round hole in the frame, I was a bit alarmed when it didn't fit. I looked into the frame support hole and it was bent in at the sides like an "8". After some more swearing, a cigarette and some thoughts of how much damage it would take to do that, and how much clay must have been shoved in the giant crater behind the fender to make everything bolt up properly again, I looked with both eyes and then pulled the plastic insert tube out of the frame support hole, put the jack in (perfectly) and put my heart back in my chest.

After that scare, all I could do was sit around for an hour waiting for Zach to finish his fuel filter install which meant I couldn't even smoke. What a jerk.

Cut to an hour later and my car is up on stands with the front wheels off.

The first bad sign had been the visible condition of the struts. They actually had a "wear" curve in them from where they had been slowly worn down by the motion of the strut over who knows how many years. I honestly would not be surprised if these were the original struts put on the car in 02/92 when it left the factory.

The other factor that served to reinforced this idea was the bolts keeping the strut onto the wheel spindle. I probably owe BMW for using high quality metals for fasteners, because I have never had to fight a bolt the entire way out of a car. Normally, you crack it loose and the rest is easy, but these bolts had to be grabbed by the scruff of the neck and twisted all the way out.

After wrestling with the strut and finally getting it out, I for the first time thought to check if my non-M springs would fit on my M struts.

(non-M left, M3 part right)

The answer is no.
No they will not.

So, back in the struts go, or they would except that the amount of internal destruction that has occurred means the struts could expand to be taller than they were ever intended to be, which means reinstallation is either painful and bloody or involves a BFH (Big F@#$* Hammer) and a hope that nothing gets to badly relocated.

On any other car, I would have used the hammer. Damn you BMW for making a car I don't want to injure anymore than I have to.

So in closing for today.

Tires: Not installed
Dampeners: Not installed
Alternator: Yes, but I don't really feel I can claim this as a victory after the nature of the battle.
Fuel filter: No
M3 suspension bits: No.
Cigarettes: 15
Beer: Not enough
Rain: Yes. We have that.

Also, it's totally normal to keep slicks in your house, right?

Updated.... but not greatly. Have boxes of parts to install tomorrow.

However what I hadn't yet mentioned was the awesome piece of troubleshooting that was performed last weekend.

When I bought the car, I neglected to mention that it had a steady miss at idle (obviously at idle, not like I was revving a car that had 16 month old gas in it)

Sunday after the rain started the only thing I could think to do was work on the engine in the cover of the garage, so I set at it.

First I wanted to identify which cylinder was out but it turns out with such a quiet engine that is already down a cylinder that can be a bit tricky. Certainly not as easy as it would be on a high strung 4 cyl like I was used to.

I pulled off each coil connector in turn, and I thought I could hear a difference on all of them. The number 3 cylinder did seem to make *less* of a difference, but it wasn't enough to convince myself. At this point I did a compression test which immediately ruled out a major mechanically problem as numbers came back 220-215-210-210-200 psi, so I put things back together with new plugs (no luck there, but they definitely needed changing anyway, that moisture you see is unburned fuel) and called it a day.

Then purely by chance later that day I was reading a thread about how an inline 6 is harmonically perfectly balanced, and how BMW likes to impress people by leaving glasses of water on the engine while it's running and being reved, and then some random forum goer happens to mention using the wave pattern on the surface of the water to track a difference in vibration caused by a miss.

Bingo.

It's really simple actually, i was a bit sad I didn't think of it myself first. Put a glass of water on a flat spot on the head, start the engine and observe the surface vibration (keep in mind I was already down a cylinder. Tested on a perfectly running I6 engine that was there helping, the water is nearly still)Then simply unplug each coil in turn, watching for a change in the water. If it doesn't change, there is your dead hole. Turns out my ear was right and it was #3.

So, I was excited that I could now simply replace the coils and have a mechanically beautiful engine.

But wait, it got even better.

The next day I went back out to the car to remove the alternator (it needed replacement) and had some time to kill so I figured, why not check the coil plug boot? I didn't expect anything, but hey who will it hurt.
So I pulled the 1 and 3 coils, swapped the boots and started her up.

The misfire followed the boot!

So in the end I Tracked down a misfire that turned out to be just a fricking coil plug boot. How awesome is that, I got a stonkin deal on the price because when it ran it had a steady miss. I actually bought it believing 100% that it would need a rebuild.

Turns out all it needs is a 6.47$ Coil plug boot.

What a day!