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Headliner back in - a very satisfying job. Also gave me a chance to do a few jobs I was waiting to get the headliner out for including properly fitting the dog net mounting points and whipping of the roof rails for a repaint in matte black.

Fully agree; but buying a lot of cars these days can be a risk too, unfortunately. However to whitewash every car with the same blurb 'that they're tonced up shitters etc' is just completely wrong; hence my direct & blunt reply There are poor examples of cars everywhere you look; it's all about due-diligence and giving the cars a proper once-over and trusting your gut, not your hearth when buying etc

Its Daimler 250 V8. I used to have one. 2.5 Hemi engine.

I took a slightly different approach when doing mine. I left the strut in place and dropped the hub carrier off the strut. In saying that I’d replaced the arms and shocks just prior to the bearings so knew all the bolts would come loose. Rough steps: jack up wheel off track rod end off undo level sensor depending on side remove strut bolt, arb carrier and brake hose bracket remove brake calliper/carrier and disc remove abs sensor unbolt both arms from subframe drop carrier from strut. Need to wedge something into the clamp to free it remove bearings and clean mating surface. in true Haynes fashion the assembly is the reverse of disassembly. Make sure to tighten all bushes with the suspension in normal position ( I jacked up the hub carrier till the car lifted off the stand) An impact driver is a god send for doing this, especially when removing the bearing bolts. also worth mentioning that it’s best not to cheap out on bearings as there are reports of abs errors with cheap bearings.

Winter alloys & tyres on... From: To:

I too wondered if the vacuum method of oil extraction would leave some oil in the sump. It probably does leave a little in but not a significant amount on my cars. The handy markings on the side of the 6.5 litre capacity Pela pump means I can gauge pretty accurately how much has been extracted. Normally it shows about 6.3l taken from the sump of my 530d (oil capacity including filter is 6.5 litres), plus a bit from the oil filter holder. Total extracted is circa 6.4 litres. I'm happy with that. Actually, I'm delighted since I can do an oil and filter change standing up in front of the engine bay and not have to furk around crawling about under the car! That's a big win in my book! As far as I can tell my Pela pump more or less takes all the oil from my M5 but only if the oil is warm/hot. (If the M5 engine oil is cold the pump has real problems taking the last 250ml). The M5 will have a different oil pan to the 530d meaning that the dipstick bottoms out at a lower point compared to the 530d. So I don't think there's a universal rule about the effectiveness of vacuum pumps over a sump plug drain oil change. A lot depends on the individual characteristics of each engine/oil pan. There are many videos on YouTube documenting the success or otherwise of vacuum oil extractors. Conclusion seems to be that vacuum pumps work well on some engines but not all. One guy found that the pump left over 1litre in a VW sump but most conclude that 100ml or less is left.

After much deliberation I decided to go for the simplest option to get a little more grunt in my 1995 touring - upgrade to the 2.5 lump. This was helped by both this forum and finding a car that ended up being at a friends brothers garage in the north east. A one owner 525i saloon with 112k on the clock. Failed it’s MOT on rust but runs well. After some haggling it was put on a trailer this morning by a tow company I found on Shiply (see below). It’s off to Angus BMW in Colchester where we will asses the car then take as much off it as possible to improve mine. By the end I hope to have more power with the same reliability I have enjoyed with my current smooth and trusty 2L engine. A lot of this car (including the 525i auto box) and my old M50b20tu will be for sale so please message me if interested, could do a deal on the main parts or sell it all as a job lot. Thought I would do this project during these strange times as it’s both interesting and quite exciting. Sure it won’t be plain sailing and a bit costly when all is said and done but hey, that’s to be expected. I love my e34 touring and want to keep it long term, don’t see many on the road anymore!

Not today..but Wednessday. And I drove the e34....most of the day

I've always found it's been a risk - as with all risks you might get lucky or unlucky. Another for example is a lwb Alpina B12 6.0 in rhd with very low miles, no history but good condition. No sooner had it landed than it needed an Alpina gearbox rebuild, no sooner had the owner got it running than it needed £20k of engine work... and the owner was a specialist in importing cars from Japan. The low mileage was the massive lie - probably well over 80k miles hence the gearbox melt-down and lack of servicing precipitating the wrong engine oil and subsequent damage. He'd imported dozens of cars over the years, some with some work needed, a lot with none, but this one bit him hard and deep. I'm really pleased that Dan and Loadmaster have got great cars but you can't say fairer than you're taking a risk - there are reasons some cars get sold and exported relatively cheaply, and just like any auction car - you could get burned. For info, the silver E38 B12 5.7 that was sold had mismatched rear lights, no PDC sensors, facelifted front wings, headlights and indicators, non-working headlight wash and missing rear valance Alpina exhaust trims; turns out it had been in a multi-car pile up and suffered front and rear damage.

I had a crane like that which came with an M30 lump and an engine stand - didn't used any of them so sold them on - had i had bigger garage they would probably all still be squirreled away! When i changed my head i had the manifolds off in situ and its still a hefty lump! Keeping the manifolds on sounds a great idea as the exhaust manifolds particularly are an arse to do, slightly better engine out but if they can be left be so much the better!

Yes an engine crane is very useful I got this one from Machine Mart. It folds up reasonable small so you can pug it away in a corner.

I think the days of car phones have been and gone unfortunately, the new arm rest looks good though. As for the rain, be glad your car is a good colour for hiding muck Glad that puncture ended well! Could have been worse. I'm a tiny bit bugged at your tyre fitter for not lining up the yellow dot with the valve but it's a very, very minor grievance. The lighest part of the tyre is marked with the dot, to be lined up with the valve - which is usually heavier - so less weights can be used in correcting the balance. Given the precision in modern manufacturing (Bridgestone is Japanese so a fairly high bar) it's likely not a huge difference either way. As for the kink in the arch, short of lending an arch roller I used to see large tubes being deployed to roll the arches when I used to mess about with (excessively) lowered VW's. I wouldn't worry too much about it as it's not too noticeable, check the back of it for cracks in the underseal as you don't want moisture getting in there.

Hi Ivor Not sure if I can really help you as it was 20 odd years ago since I did an M30 head gasket. I have done it twice, and I believe that I used Reinz and Elring gaskets supplied by eurocarparts. I didn't look for any specific make, its what they had at the time. Both worked fine. The most important thing is to get all liquid out of the head bolt holes in the block. A bit of cloth and a bit of wire does the job. I just took the whole head, together with the inlet or exhaust manifold as one. Just took the rubbery inlet bits and bobs off inlet side and detached the exhaust downpipe from the manifold and lugged the whole thing off. Not sure I could do that now. Regards John.

On longitudinal engine there are two options how to jack up car to get most of oil out - either jack up opposite side to drain plug, that will make drain plug to be approximately lowest point, or best way is to remove drain plug, lower down car back on wheels and let all oil to come out. On transverse engine, oil plug always is at the back, so front can be driven on portable ramps and all oil will still get out. Without rush, oil change on driveway roughly tooks about 30-40 minutes ( jacking car, draining out through plug and filter change, refill etc), most likely time wise there's won't be day and night difference between both ways how to get oil out. So twice a year I can get myself under the car to get it done this way. By the way I'm having two sons myself, 3 and 5 years. Kids are time consuming, but not too bad, you can still find some time for car things, especially when they grow up a bit

As a conclusion to this post , I did get the Camera image sorted out. I was helped out by a fellow member who very kindly went out of his way to meet me locally, plugged in his ISTA software and duly flipped the image for me, job done . So a very big thank you to Matthew Ashton for his time and knowledge and helping me as I’m sure he’s helped many others previously, a 100% genuine guy. Cheers Pete.

Well - my first 5 Series and new to the forum - already proven tremendously useful! I'd been hankering over a 80s/90s touring of some description and have been perusing eBay, carandclassic etc. on and off for a year or so. Back in July M160 PMO popped up near Bristol on eBay but as a proposition was far from what I'm normally looking for in a car. No service history, last MOT expired 2 years ago and by the looks of previous MOTs some potentially expensive work was likely due. I exchanged messages with the seller asking a few questions but the bidding quickly went above what I was willing to pay for the vehicle given the (lack of) history. It ended and I thought nothing of it but a couple days later I got a message from the seller explaining the high bidder hadn't made contact and asking whether I was still interested. A few messages later we agreed a price and the following weekend I found myself making my way to Chippenham to look at the car. The story goes - the car had a few owners early in its life but found its way into an old boy's car collection and over time had fallen out of use. His entire collection of cars was put up for sale and the chap I bought it from bought it with the intention of sprucing it up and back on the road but one too many projects meant this had fallen on the back burner. He seemed an honest chap and was transparent about the work he thought the car needed. So off I went home with this in tow (apologies for the low res pics, these are from the original ad):

The AUC sensors tend to fail, its located next to the bonnet switch on the pollen filter intake. I honestly think its an expensive waste of time. Basically if you were to follow a dirty tractor in a tunnel and the climate control air is set to sense air and recirculate if dirty air detected, then after a minute or so of being smoked out the system should force the air into recirculation mode. Too late to be of any use, you might as well just punch it on manually when you notice pollution in the cabin. Then click it off when you forget and it gets too stuffy (also resets to circ off between journeys). > Heater blower makes lots of blowing noise but that doesn't translate into much air... Your problem could just be the iDrive climate control settings. See my 'Individual' mode setup recommendations in this thread. > Aircon is cold but not ice cold... Check the iDrive center vent override setting is not set to heating ;).

It's been pissing it down here, and I've done a lot of B road and smaller driving through puddles. Nothing looks like it was in the well at all. Will get a bit of rust treatment on them and a removable bung.

You need a press for the bushings, plenty of working room, ideally video yourself stripping the box for reference purposes (and so we can take the piss) As for the Zip kit, if you read up on it and think you can do it then go for it, if not get the mech unit rebuilt.

It'll say on the top of the calliper, the 296mm have 60/22/296 on the top. The 324mm have 60/30 on the top And a final pic on my 324mm discs and callipers installed

Not me mine's gonna be like the e34's I keep admiring (Triggers broom)

The one I mentioned originally & have on mine has 110ah & 920ccc with a five year guarantee, But the one Dan linked on Amazon is £16 cheeper ( Yuasa ) Mine fit's at treat, snug but fit's. It's dim's are 393mm length, 175mm width, 190mm tall. Oh & I just checked I paid £97 delivered because there was an offer on.

I'm not worried about any issues, I just like to get out as much as possible. Key to success always is hot oil, even with drain plug. Of course always some oil will stay in cylinder head around tappets, oil pump, oiling ports etc, but at least nothing is left in sump.

Technically yesterday, but used it as my wedding car.