[MotorMouth93]

So, first attempt at cylinder head installation failed miserably.

I cleaned the bank 1 block deck, cleaned bank 1 head, ultrasonic cleaned and installed the camshafts and caps, put the sealant on the block timing cover seams, installed the head gasket, then head, then bolts and snugged them down. Bolts felted a little snug going in but I assumed that was due to the tighter tolerance between some head bolts and threads.

Notice anything missing?

Once all the bolts were snugged I remembered the head bolt washers. Months ago, I threw away all the original cylinder head hardware including washers, thinking my Victor Reins head bolt kits had new washers with them, because the listing on RockAuto where I got them says "head bolts with washers". Turns out they do not include washers. And once I had everything back apart, I noticed that most of the VR head bolts are all slightly warped. So now I need to order new (OEM) bolts, washers, and a new bank 1 head gasket since mine has sealant on it and I don't really trust a gasket once sealant has been applied, since if it gets between the layers and dries in an un-compressed state it might not seal perfectly, and the absolute last thing I want is a timing cover leak at the head gasket.

Also, has anyone here run headers, factory cats and resonators, then a muffler delete? That's what I'm planning on trying, I got the delete pipes from Turner and my fab guy is going to weld in 4 V bands, 2 at the headers and 2 at the muffer connections, but I'm not sure if it will be obnoxious or not. I actually don't really want the car to be loud, I just don't want to deal with installing the mufflers since they were a pain to get out.

 

[Trizzuth]

Damn motor mouth that sucks! But to be honest, in an area like head bolts of all places, I would not be using Victor Reinz for that application either OE or even something like ARP from what I've read. Glad you figured it out and hopefully you can get this sorted out soon with new head gaskets. This area is the most crucial part as you totally understand.

My car has stock headers and cats, a Rogue resonated X pipe and Turner muffler delete. It's pretty loud, not for everyone but I have loved it ever since going to the dark side, I used to have a Dinan rear section before this. A video or two below for you. BtWillias garage also posted up a sweet 4K video recently and I believe he has headers, cats an X pipe and mufflers on the rear. A few sound comparisons for you:

 

[ThePhantom]

Just a simple muffler delete is pretty tame. I thought it might be obnoxious but it’s not loud at all when casually driving. Once you stomp on it, it sings but nothing crazy loud. Just actual v8 sound vs the practically silent stock system. I watched many videos and some made a muffler delete sound overly loud, others not as much, but nothing can give you the real sense until you try it out and judge for yourself of course. I did the muffler delete pipes and staggered tips from turner too, and I think it’s perfect. I flipped the exhaust tips though because I didn’t want to see any logo/branding on there. Also wrapped the diffuser on my Silverstone:

 

[technician117]

Well that stinks. At least you realized the mistake before going further!

Re: exhaust - that setup might be a little loud. Headers definitely increase the volume in all conditions. My OG M5 came with stock manifolds, cats a Tubi resonated x pipe and mufflers. I added headers years later but kept all else equal. There was a noticeable increase in sound. I'd still say go for your plan as is. You can always swap out the muffler delete for mufflers if it's too loud.

 

[95naSTA]

I have headers with a completely stock cat-back with the exception of opening up the front of the cats to 2.5" to mate with the header outlets. For normal driving and at idle it sounds stock. Nobody can tell I have headers. It's louder when you get on it but not by much.

 

[GeorgeH]

I've found the stock resonator does A LOT of work. I bet you'll be fine, if you remove the resonator or swap it for aftermarket thats when I think it'll get obnoxious.

And I vote BMW headbolts, I know people use the VR (and I have in a pinch on an S54) but I didn't like it. Genuine BMW are less than $150 a set.

Also, just clicked that you are in Austin. The BMW CCA Tejas chapter has a small cars and coffee get together every 3rd saturday starting from 8:30am at Austin Grind on Parmer. Its generally pre E9x chassis and lots of 12v cars.

 

[MotorMouth93]

Thanks for the input guys! seems like the delete pipes should be just fine. I like the idea of turning the tips over, I don't really care for a Turner logo either. I wonder if bead blasting would work to remove the logo too...

While waiting for parts again, I started on another project I've been meaning to do, which is resealing the vapor barriers with new butyl sealant, replacing the lock actuators preemptively, as well as inspecting the window regulators for impending failures.

I've found that using a blob of butyl and sticking it against the stuff on the door will pull it off fairly easily, then any remnants can be wiped away with WD40. Removing it from the vapor barriers is more difficult so I just scraped as much of it off as I could with a plastic scraper before sticking a bead of new sealant down.

I also took this opportunity to turn some 6AL4V titanium into door lock pins. Should look a little nicer than the black plastic, and I used an M4x0.7 die to add threads to the lock rod to thread it on. I used a sharp carbide insert and it leaves a nice finish on the titanium so I didn't do any further finishing.

Speaking of locks, with the actuator removed, I decided to remove the risk of the door getting stuck shut once and for all. The little golf club shaped lever is the double lock lever, when that gets pushed over to the right by the actuator, the unlocking lever (activated by pulling the inside handle when locked, and by the lock pin sticking up) is physically decoupled from the locking mechanism.

I took apart my old actuator and now I dislike the system even more than I did before, it seems like such a terrible and over-engineered design. But I did find out that I the golf club lever can simply be cut off without the car being any the wiser, so that's exactly what I did. And to prevent any mishaps, I drilled and tapped the lock assembly housing and threaded in a 3mm machine screw to physically block the lever from moving to the double locked state. The lever is spring-loaded to pop back, but if the lock ever gets grimey or sticky this is just a guarantee. I used a bit of blue loctite, but the screw also can't back out without hitting the door shell.

Here's a photo from below showing the screw that blocks the double lock lever. I hooked the battery back up to test it, and now when you lock the car from the outside (key hole or remote) you can still unlock the door by pulling the handle, then if you open the door the alarm goes off, which in my opinion is the way it should be from the factory. So now to do this 3 more times...

Door back together. The leather around the door pull has seen better days but I'm not sure of a good way to restore that, I might have to ask my upholstery guy if he has any good ideas that don't involve peeling the whole door card. Maybe that section could just have new dye sprayed on. Also need to buy a few new clips for the back of the door card.

I like the little details.

 

[Trizzuth]

Titanium door locks are sweet!!! nice work!

 

[herrubermensch]

And I vote BMW headbolts, I know people use the VR (and I have in a pinch on an S54) but I didn't like it. Genuine BMW are less than $150 a set.

We use S62 BMW bolts on our 640bhp race motors. Can't do any better.

--Peter

 

[MotorMouth93]

Block and Head Reunion

I noticed that a few of these bolts on the ends of the camshafts had the faces polished looking, and found that they were making contact with the disk behind the preload spring. This is not desirable, so I stuck the offending bolts in the lathe and took a few thousandths of an inch off the faces and they no longer touch.

In preparation for installing the heads, I set up the timing chains like this. This allows the heads to be dropped on and the sprockets to be slipped over the end of the camshafts easily. I ended up removing the thermostat housing as it was blocking access to some of the upper timing cover bolts. (also huge thanks to @herrubermensch for providing me with a replacement TDC thingy on the lower timing cover, I broke mine a few months ago)

Final clean and air blasting of the cylinder heads before installation. In the 2 holes where the dowel pins go I put bolts, which makes it far easier to align the head with the block as you just drop the bolts into the dowel and they'll guide the head down. Otherwise, if you aren't spot on, the dowels will gouge the soft aluminum head surface and potentially cause a leak point.

The five large holes along the bottom edge of the head are the oil drains, one of them has a scoop/funnel thing for scavenging oil from the head under hard cornering, but the other 4 are just open, and assembly lube will drip down these holes while you're putting the heads on and get all over the head gasket. So to prevent this, I put paper towels in those holes with enough sticking out the top that I could just grab them with pliers afterwards, and it worked perfectly. No drippage.

Here's where the block, head, upper timing cover, and lower timing cover meet. The process for assembly is a little bit strange, you torque the horizontal bolts to 2nm first, which allows the cover to slide up and down a bit, then torque the vertical bolts into the lower timing cover to 10nm to pull the cover tight against the head gasket, then tighten the horizontal bolts to 10nm. I'm not worried about the sealant, but I have a hard time trusting the little 6mm bolts to provide sufficient clamping force on the head gasket to provide a long term seal.

In a departure from factory procedure, I did not use upper or lower timing cover gaskets and instead just used a thin layer of sealant that just barely squishes out around the edges, we will see whether or not this decision paid off soon.

It's finally starting to look like an S62 again. Next up is rewiring my VANOS assemblies and timing the engine which I'm looking forward too. I really like the way it's done on the S62, it's a simple and elegant procedure...unlike the M62.

 

[KevinM]

Every time I revisit this thread, I'm amazed at the work you are putting into this car. This car won the lottery when you purchased it! Much respect to you.

 

[MotorMouth93]

I’m hoping that the car repays me by being reliable and relatively problem free for the foreseeable future! If not I’ll just have to ship it to Peter to sort out along with a blank check.

Before setting the timing, I noticed that two is my already rebuilt little splined insert thingies with the Beisan bits felt a little looser than I would have liked, so I readjusted them with some sandpaper to get them a tiny bit more snug.

For the timing I followed the Partee Racing procedure. Since I don’t have a fixed torque wrench for the 10mm bolts though I did this, but only after verifying the torque setting with an accurate dial wrench on the far end. As long as I kept it close to 90 degrees, the applied torque was accurate.

Since some of my cam caps have timeserts the depth of the studs had to be adjusted. With the oil rails in place they stick out 12.5mm nominally.

Feels nice to have this all back together with the correct hardware and repaired threads, if you remember from a few months ago the bank 1 valve cover was leaking pretty badly and attached with a bunch of random junk hardware. The front cover had a stud in it for example, one of the bolts was some Audi part with a bunch of silicone on it, a few studs were pulling, etc.

At this point I did a leakdown test as a sanity check and found all cylinders to be in the 8-10% range which is not amazing by itself but is about what we saw before (minus the #3 issues) and not to the point of being concerning, and is extremely consistent cylinder to cylinder, and roughly what is to be expected given that the engine is cold and the ring gaps are wide enough for your mom to fit though.

Valve covers cleaned up. I decided it wasn’t worth the effort to remove all of the oil staining, they were also in good enough shape that I decided not to refinish them. Lots of old sealant in the gasket grooves where it doesn’t belong to be scrubbed out though.

Then a few more hours of hunting through piles of parts and looking at old photos and diagrams and here we are. Fortunately, I had already cleaned most of the parts so I didn’t have to spend too much time on that it was mostly just trying to find stuff and figure out how to put it back together. All of the hoses and O-rings and other rubber bits are new as well, along with all of the difficult-to-reach sensors including knock sensors, cam position sensors, and throttle position sensors.

Does anyone know of a source for the updated VANOS accumulator with the electronic valve? I looked briefly and it seems to be discontinued.

I redid the wire harness on one of the VANOS assemblies to do away with the PCB, and instead mounted extremely heavy duty high temp fly back diodes directly to the solenoids with new connectors and tefzel wire. I’m not sure if I will stick with this or just use the original PCBs yet but it was an interesting exercise.

At this point I need to adjust the throttle plates and start putting the fuel system and wire harness back on.

 

[Trizzuth]

This thread is CHOCK FULL of awesome neat ideas!!! Love that you keep posting up detailed pictures I am enjoying this thoroughly!! I also did your trick here when torqueing the small bolts on the cam sprockets, it worked perfectly and I'm still driving a year and a half later... really curious to see if your vanos PCB board solution works out.. keep us posted!

 

[SP Productions]

… the ring gaps are wide enough for your mom to fit though.

😂 Thanks for making me spit out my coffee!

Great thread! Learning a lot!

Sean

 

[Redshift]

Damn this is a thread...making the rest of us look like total amateurs. Fantastic. Now, do it all again but this time in video format so I can relax and watch it on YT. Please and thank you.

 

[technician117]

I’m hoping that the car repays me by being reliable and relatively problem free for the foreseeable future! If not I’ll just have to ship it to Peter to sort out along with a blank check.

Before setting the timing, I noticed that two is my already rebuilt little splined insert thingies with the Beisan bits felt a little looser than I would have liked, so I readjusted them with some sandpaper to get them a tiny bit more snug.

For the timing I followed the Partee Racing procedure. Since I don’t have a fixed torque wrench for the 10mm bolts though I did this, but only after verifying the torque setting with an accurate dial wrench on the far end. As long as I kept it close to 90 degrees, the applied torque was accurate.

Since some of my cam caps have timeserts the depth of the studs had to be adjusted. With the oil rails in place they stick out 12.5mm nominally.

Feels nice to have this all back together with the correct hardware and repaired threads, if you remember from a few months ago the bank 1 valve cover was leaking pretty badly and attached with a bunch of random junk hardware. The front cover had a stud in it for example, one of the bolts was some Audi part with a bunch of silicone on it, a few studs were pulling, etc.

At this point I did a leakdown test as a sanity check and found all cylinders to be in the 8-10% range which is not amazing by itself but is about what we saw before (minus the #3 issues) and not to the point of being concerning, and is extremely consistent cylinder to cylinder, and roughly what is to be expected given that the engine is cold and the ring gaps are wide enough for your mom to fit though.

Valve covers cleaned up. I decided it wasn’t worth the effort to remove all of the oil staining, they were also in good enough shape that I decided not to refinish them. Lots of old sealant in the gasket grooves where it doesn’t belong to be scrubbed out though.

Then a few more hours of hunting through piles of parts and looking at old photos and diagrams and here we are. Fortunately, I had already cleaned most of the parts so I didn’t have to spend too much time on that it was mostly just trying to find stuff and figure out how to put it back together. All of the hoses and O-rings and other rubber bits are new as well, along with all of the difficult-to-reach sensors including knock sensors, cam position sensors, and throttle position sensors.

Does anyone know of a source for the updated VANOS accumulator with the electronic valve? I looked briefly and it seems to be discontinued.

I redid the wire harness on one of the VANOS assemblies to do away with the PCB, and instead mounted extremely heavy duty high temp fly back diodes directly to the solenoids with new connectors and tefzel wire. I’m not sure if I will stick with this or just use the original PCBs yet but it was an interesting exercise.

At this point I need to adjust the throttle plates and start putting the fuel system and wire harness back on.

1.) the accumulators went NLA years ago. Best bet is to contact Adam B (Clemster) in Maryland or Mikhail in Florida for a good used one.

2.) TIS has a good procedure for this and if you have DIS you can actually run tests on the throttles before you button up the plenum to verify everything is good.

It turns out that there was no issue with how far they opened via command versus via command with some added help from me.

 

[MotorMouth93]

Thanks! I messaged Mikhail and Adam so hopefully an accumulator will pop up, but neither had one currently. I'm not too worried about it

I can assure you I am most definitely an amateur, but probably lacking in whatever mental safety mechanism it is that prevents us from getting in over our heads.

Rear Door

Similar treatment for the rear doors. The vapor barrier here was detached at the bottom as they usually are at this point and I'm surprised I didn't have wet carpet. The window regulator was in surprisingly good shape despite appearing to be original. I will probably regret not replacing it when it dies in 6 months.

Getting the old goo off of the foam barrier itself was kind of a pain, I found that using a plastic scraper to get most of it worked the best, then using the remaining stuck on goo as sort of a primer for the new stuff. Using a heat gun to warm up the barrier and remaining butyl resulted in an excellent bond between the new and old butyl, and the door itself is pretty easy to clean just by sticking a ball of goo to the stuff on the door and pulling it off repeatedly then cleaning anything leftover with WD40. Butyl sticks really well to clean paint so hopefully no issues for a few years.

The rear door panel pocket was starting to separate a bit so I need to glue that back, but I'll do that when I replace all the door card clips in the future.

The rear latch assembly is nearly identical to the front. Double lock permanently disabled and a new locking actuator installed and lock rod threaded for TI pin.

Oil Filter Housing

When I took the engine out I sort of just tossed this into a bag and left it in the corner of the garage, where it has sat for the last 8 months. It was filthy before and even worse now, and needs to be fully cleaned before it can be used again. The two main hoses appear to be in good condition so I just cleaned and flushed them out with brake cleaner and compressed air. The drain hose, however, is done for, the rubber hose has hardened and spins freely on the crimps, and it is seeping pretty badly. There are 3 options here: buy a new one, fix this one by cutting the crimps off and installing a new rubber hose with regular hose clamps so it is easily serviceable, or 3 just delete it. I weighed options 2 and 3, and we're going with 3.

After cleaning out all the old oil residue in the ultrasonic cleaner, I removed the valve at the bottom of the housing. The filter pushes this valve down and closes it, so when you remove the filter the housing can drain. The reason I deleted it is because this provides a path for all of the oil to be pumped right back into the sump in the event that the valve fails. I've only heard of a handful of incidents like this but I don't want to entrust the engine to a flimsy plastic plunger valve, and the only real downside here is that I'll have to suck the oil out of the housing with a turkey baster or vacuum pump during oil changes. Or maybe install a fumoto drain valve on the filter housing itself with a little nipple to attach a hose? It's a common 14x1.5 thread.

Plugs with crush washers threaded into the block and oil filter housing in place of the drain fittings. After giving it more thought though I think I will put the bottom section of the drain line on the block and cap it off rather than using a plug, as that part is extremely difficult to get to with the engine in the car and that would allow me to easily change my mind in the future.

Throttle Adjustment

The TIS procedure for throttle adjustment calls for a few special tools which I don't have and won't buy, first of all is the little shims to allow some movement between each throttle plate. For these I just looked around my piles of junk and found some M4 nuts that were about the right size to jimmy the adjustment springs

The goal of this procedure is to have all of the throttles resting at their factory set fully closed position, and all open at exactly the same time. There is no shared throttle shaft, instead each throttle has a little "hand" that grabs onto a tab sticking out of the next throttle and they daisy chain together. You do this by loosening all of them so they can all rest at the full closed position, then going in order from 1/2, 3/4, 2/3 you adjust the linkage so they match.

I don't have the double dial indicator thing the manual calls for, but I do have a deck bridge dial indicator, so I zero'd the dial indicator on throttle 1, then took note of the measurement on throttle 2 which was something like +0.003" relative to 1. Then I removed the nut, and adjusted the linkage until 1 read 0.000" again, and 2 read 0.003" again. I made consistent measurements by sweeping the dial indicator pointer across the curve of the throttle plate and noting where the needle changed direction, similar to how you read a dial bore gauge. I did this across all throttle pairs, then across the 2 throttles to set the center linkage. My center linkage was wayyy off, and the engine was able to compensate for it pretty well. BMW uses a very large idle air circuit which allows for fairly even air flow to each cylinder as the throttles get dirty or out of sync over 100k+ miles, compared to the tiny idle passages I have with the aftermarket ITBs on my NSX where the engine idles like crap if the throttle plates get more than a tiny bit out of adjustment, I'll probably drill those out much larger next time I take them off.

With the throttles adjusted, the refurbished injectors and fuel rails went back in, then the main wire harness along with remaining accessories, belts, and pulleys. I'm glad I decided to replace the knock sensors, cam sensors, and throttle position sensors now as those would be absolutely miserable to do later.

At this point all that's left is to hook up a few more connectors and drop it back in. I am pretty anxious about first startup since this is the biggest car project I've ever attempted and there is so many things that could go wrong. And there's still the issue of getting the headers installed. I really do not want to drop the front subframe if I can help it and it seems like the only way to make that work is to install the headers 1 pipe at a time once the engine is back in.

For the first start and warmup it seems like conventional 10w40 is a pretty popular choice for this era of M engine so I was thinking I'd fill the engine with that, let it warm up, then drain and fill again with 10w40 and get the car to the fab shop to have the exhaust finished, drive for maybe 100 miles on it with light to medium load, then drain and fill again with Amsoil 10w60 full synthetic and let it rip. I did a light treatment with AN30 on the cylinder bores so it's possible there could be a little bit more ring seating but I doubt it.

 

[technician117]

Coming along nicely. Amateur tip - install an oil pressure gauge where the oil pressure idiot light sensor is installed on the OFH temporarily (or permanently, like I have). Then when you're ready to fire the engine, crank it over with the fuel pump relay removed until you see oil pressure on the gauge. Giving the starter a rest a couple time, do this to get full oil pressure running through the system for a bit. Then install the relay and bump the ignition a couple times (you will have to cycle it off and back on) to prime the fuel system. I did that on my last engine and it fired up within 1/2 a revolution and didn't make any noise (clattering, etc from the Vanos).

 

[MotorMouth93]

Great tip! I was planning on doing basically that minus the oil pressure gauge and just using the idiot light, and with the plugs/coils removed so there's as little load as possible on the bearings until oil flow is established. I have an AEM oil pressure sensor/gauge somewhere though so hooking that up instead is a good idea, I think I have the right adapter fitting somewhere.

 

[MotorMouth93]

First start, I found a fuel leak under the plenum after a few minutes so I had to shut it down and will investigate, but I suspect one of the crimp fittings at the fuel rails may have given up. Open headers are LOUD even with ear protection. I attempted to use flexi aluminum dryer ducting to redirect some of the exhaust outside, but one of them blew off immediately and the exhaust burned through the other one in less than 30 seconds, which isn't exactly surprising but I figured it'd last long enough to warm the engine up at least.

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