Quote:
Originally Posted by Steelewheels
Had the recall completed this week on my 2011 328i xdrive with 135K km. Check engine came on witj ppor idle and no power soon followed by an ear piercing whining noise from the top end. Of course it happened late saturday afternoon but fortunately not on the long trip planned the following week.
Managed to limp it to a local garage and had the codes pulled 2A87 and 2A7A. Had the car towed to the local dealer to prevent further damage monday morning. Call from the SA to confirm vanos bolt recall campaign and all work done under this campaign no charge. I looked up the parts list online afterwards and estimate tje parts alone at 2500 CDN plus a day of labor at 138/hour. Both exhaust and intake vanos replaced at 1000 each unit.
The technician cracked the valve cover while removing it and noted on the invoice brittle plastic cracked while removing. This gave me a new valve cover and gasket at about 600 CDN included as part of the warranty eork. I would say Christmas came early.
Im happy with the service i received from BMW. The technician know their stuff. One thing that mystifies me and i think the technician eluded to it in the repair is why on a performance german import do we have plastic valve covers that are unserviceable and aluminim bolts securing Vanos units? My exhaust Vanos had two bolts with sheared heads and both units had bolts that had backed out.
|
Glad to hear your problem was resolved fairly painlessly.
My Bentley manual has this section at the beginning that describes the E9X lineup, including changes/updates that happened during the model run. The plastic valve cover was listed under the N52KP engine update for 2007-2011. 2006 cars came with the N52 engine with a cast magnesium valve cover. The way Bentley describes the N52KP redesign is that it was "an improved and cost-optimized version of the N52". So, basically the plastic valve cover is a cost reduction move to replace the expensive magnesium unit. As for the aluminum bolts on the VANOS cam gears my guess is that it's for weight reasons. The desire to keep these fast spinning gears light weight probably drove the material choice. That I can understand. What I can't understand is not coming up with some type of thread/bolt locking, like interference threads that deform when engaged, serrations under the bolt head to bite into the mounting surface, etc...