Thx for all the nice feedback. This caliper problem has happenend to me twice now,first on with my old E53 (X5, sold now) and now with the Zeds. They both have in common that they are old, but low in mileage. So if I get an aged BMW again, this will be one of my first maintenance task.
Anyway after the nice trip, I just needed one day to get my motivation back to fix car properly. I decided to overhaul the brakes on both sides as mentioned in my last post. So Wednesday was spent to order parts for a complete overhaul.
This meant that I had some preparation todo before the new parts would arrive.
First this one had to come off, was nice and fun during the trip. Not so much anymore
Then it was time to get airborne:
This how a cheap no brand brake disc look like after about 500km with old pads. The borrowed caliper is coming off and will be returned to the owner. I guess donate the disc to a friends E46.
The driver side (left) parts came of easily as all the rusty bolts had been loosened during emergency repair during the trip.
However the right side was more tricky. But some elbow grease and much willpower (WD40) always wins!
I had a mate over to help me, very grateful for this. A brake overhaul is indeed a one mans job, but it is really a lot easier when one got 4 hands to work with.
However he did go fast when the preparation task was done and it was time for tidy and clean up the garage
He is a big fan of E39 and is currently overhauling the one on the picture. It is in mint condition in my opinion, however he always finds minor things to improve
Before calling it a night I did a minor organizing of the used parts. The borrowed caliper is the one to left. You can notice a different in that one compare to the ones I had on my car. Even tough the part number is the same, it did fit perfectly tough.
Anyway, I did order almost everything new. Did not want to put old rusty screws or other rusty part back on the zed.
My order list:
- Disc (OEM)
- Pads (OEM)
- Calipers (OEM - overhauled, swap in solution where I hand in my old ones for the new ones)
- Brake hoses - wanted braided hoses. However was long delivering time on these. So I bought some cheap ones and will change to braided ones during the winter.
- New bolts for all parts
- Calliper carrier - Not ordered, but I did delivered them in for sandblasting. Will paint them my self.
- Brake shields - Realized that on the Zed that I needed to take out the whole bearing to change them. So they are added to my todolist, when I change bearings sometime.
So I left the Zed for the night like this:
Thursday morning before work, my caliper carriers where delivered to my indy and later that day the same indy called me with message "your parts arrived and the carriers are ready as well".
Picked up the parts on my way home from work and after some mandatory family time, I was allowed by the wife some garage time. (Actually she said, "shouldn't you be working on the car?")
This how my "new" calipers carries looked like after the sandblasting, could even read the part number now
And the box with the new parts, love working with clean and new parts! Such a motivation boost!
Frst I needed to paint my caliper carries:
However the paint I used needed to be cocked for some time, I misread that when I bought the paint. So I figured I use the heat gun to harden the paint, will digging out the gun I realized that I had a old kitchen stove that we used when we renovated the kitchen. So I figured why not try that ;-)
Preparing the stove:
After one hour on 160 degrees it looked like this. I was a bit surprised how well this worked out. First time I'm doing this kind of painting. Actually this was my first time overhauling brakes, learned everything during the weekend when the crisis happened.
As mentioned earlier I also wanted to replace the brake shields. However this meant the bearing parts needed to come off, which I didn't have tools or skills (yet) to do . I decided to just rust work and paint the current shields on the car. As they looked bad, but still is fully functionally.
I also did originally plan to paint the new calipers, however when I saw how good the looked and that to paint them properly meant dismantling them (which is exactly what I wanted to avoid by buying new ones). I decided to see how black carries with silver caliper would look like. In worst case they (carriers) can come off during the winter and get some silver paint, when I plan to overhaul the rear brakes.
After some work I had this result, new disc, pads, calipers, painted carriers, new bolts here and there and new brake hoses on.
Only remaining task was to refill with brake fluid and air out the system. This was postponed to next day as my mate could come over and help out ( I offered him free beer
).
The day after we finished the whole project with refilling and some serious airing. A quick test drive did reveal that the everything worked perfectly again, the brakes of course need some time to bed in.
Now I can continue the season knowing that I have reliable brakes again (at least in the front).
Some good pics that tell the story. 
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