535i Andrew

oh joy!

Is the reason the gear strips as safety feature to prevent excessive torque being applied to a part of a mechanism that cannot cope with it. Gear strips to prevent something else being damaged, as it's the weak link, a sacrificial part if you like? Or is that just wishful thinking and it's a poor design?

Hey if it says LL04 on the bottle why not. Every little helps and you can get your Tesco points to spend on useful stuff like beer and pizza.

Sorry just picking this up after being out of action for a while. Yes that's the filler pipe, it leads up to the filler cap next to the jump start terminals. I can only assume it's to do with routing a suitable size of pipe from the filler cap location to the the tank. It does mean that you should fill it slowly so there is time for air to escape out. The BMW screenwash I use suddenly becomes quite foamy when poured into the filler neck and floods back up the filler neck.

As a guess.....In the UK that’s the one that gets the worse splashing from the puddles on the kerb side. The wheel arch will be a wetter environment on the near side than the offside. A point I proved when removing the wheel arch liners on both sides. Water gets in everywhere when it’s hit by a 8.5” wide tyre and then sprayed everywhere in the wheel arch by said tyre doing 70mph.

^ I had similar. Mine has rotation specific discs so there is an offside and near side part. My dealer could only get one disc initially. Very odd. As they sell them as singles and not as a pair does that mean that garages only fit one disc say after an accident?

Should add while you are in there, clean out the scuttle drain.

Probably a seal on the pump, as above remove rear wheel arch liner, a few 8mm hex head screws and a couple of expanding rivers, reveals this. Carefully unclip the feed pipe, the clips are on the tank and look fragile. There is a single bolt holding the tank in place. To get to the pumps you need to manoeuvre the tank out from behind the wing and remove the wing mounted indicatormif pre LCi, It should lift up to clear the brackets then come out. I have to confess that I couldn't get mine out and decided to leave it well alone as I had no reason to take it out. Welcome on board, that's a nice rare car you have.

That’s very interesting that a replacement socket has pins 10 and 11 wired but the socket supplied with the towbar when bought as a spare part isn’t fully wired up. That means there are two sockets out there, one supplied with a towbar which doesn’t have pins 10 and 11 (as per my car and @dandles) but a replacement socket does. I checked my new trailer module (fitted last year) on my dads Swift caravan at the weekend. There was no LED hyper flash on the caravan. All lights worked as they should except the indicators which flashed faster and I got the trailer indicator bulb failure warning on the dash. This is an improvement over my old trailer module 2012/2013 vintage. As mentioned above Sargent make a box of tricks for Swift to cure the hyper flash. It plugs into the wiring loom in the caravan. Sargent make the wiring in Swift caravans so it is a proper fix and not a fudge with a ballast resistor.

Thanks for sharing @DayvG, Am I correct in thinking that your new socket has pins 10 and 11 wired with cables going to the plugs then?

Good to know about the reverse camera towbar zoom facility being already there and it just needs the Westfalia module to talk to it to activate it. Thanks for sharing.

^ I would agree with that.

Is the rear subframe really that different from a saloon? Reason I ask is that TIS permits lifting an F10 on the diff (not the rear cover) https://www.newtis.info/tisv2/a/en/f10-535i-lim_201301/repair-manuals/00-maintenance-general-note/00-02-raise-vehicle-tow-away/CMkVjKk4 Lifting by means of the diff will put the load into the rear subframe, its mounts and then into the chassis from wherever the subframe connects to the chassis. If its good enough for the saloon why not the touring? But its not un heard of for TIS to be wrong. Problem with the rear of the car, is the only really suitable place for an axle stand to go is exactly where the trolley jack is, i.e. under the black plastic jacking point. Good advice re-hockey pucks, its what I use to protect the car from the trolley jack.

I have very similar ones also bought from eBay but a different seller. They are machined from hockey pucks and I use plain hockey pucks as jack pads between my trolley jack and chassis members on other non BMW car. I’ve also got ones to fit the top of my axle stands too. Great bits of kit.

It gets the blame for most things. Most recently in automotive circles, the pull out of Europe by Infiniti is being blamed on Brexit rather than the fact they are just expensive Nissans and no one fell for the hype.