Hi guys and girls! I hope everyone's well and enjoying their weekend!
This post is about two weeks overdue! I meant to post to share the great day we'd had working on my zed 'Felix' as soon as Id gotten back home, but as it does, life took over! Nevertheless, this needs a special mention, so here it is
It's the people that make the difference, and that's what I love about this forum and the zed community as a whole - the people.
So I wanted to share my experience. Here I am, mad enough to have given up a well paid and secure career to become an impoverished student once again to study medicine.It's been amazing thus far, but it is very tough on you financially! And expenses like running a car and paying your rent can be a worry at times. I took my company car very much for granted (not to mention the fuel card that came with it!) and it came as a bit of a shock when I suddenly had to pay for my own fuel and car bills, especially when there wasn't the income coming in anymore.
Felix has always been a brilliant little car! I bought him 5 years ago from a man down in Birmingham. This man had bought him new from the showroom and loved him from the day he drove him home. He handed me a big shoe box full of every receipt and service certificate that he'd ever had. I knew my car had been loved and looked after, and I wanted to continue that. As I say, felix has been brilliant, but of course there's always that worry in the back of your mind 'what if something goes wrong' or 'what if at some point im facing a huge repair, at huge cost?', more so when you haven't got a good wage coming in every month and it's all going out on university fees and bills. And this is where the people come in. The community, the support.
Whenever I have had a problem, a question or a query, you have been there to help me out! From @Brian H sending me a sensor and @BMBabe kindly offering to put me up at hers for the night before santapod to @Aceman rushing over to help me fix Felix's engine troubles a few months ago and most recently helping me proactively replace a few parts for general maintanence! So it's to you all that I want to say a huge thank you, because it makes ALL the difference!
So that's enough of me being gushy! And onto the real nitty gritty!!
@Aceman has been nothing short of amazing in all he's done to help me out. He created a 'shopping list' for felix, with all the parts that it might be prudent to consider replacing in the near future. Over the last few months ive been buying and stockpiling these! And two Friday's ago we met at Ian's to get under the bonnet to fit them!
So firstly we decided to tackle the DISA valve. Earlier in the year, unbeknownst to me, the plastic flap in the valve that regulates the air intake into the engine had snapped. Felix had started idling very roughly all of a sudden and had lost power. Id been very worried! Id had a panic and taken felix to a friends garage. They found the broken disa (which Ian had already correctly guessed might be the culprit!) and salvaged the part off another bmw to help me cut costs down. Felix was fixed! His engine was immediately running much more smoothly, though didn't seem quite as perfect as he had been before.
The idea last Friday was to replace the plastic flap in the disa for a machined metal upgraded part. I had been lucky that the broken plastic flap hadnt snapped off and gone into the engine, so I didn't want it happening again.
We took out the disa valve which looked like this...
The White stuff is silicon that they'd presumably used to seal as the o ring had perished away.
We went to put the new metal valve into the plastic unit and found that it too big! About 1cm or so taller and wider. I wish Id taken a photo of them side by side to illustrate this...
At first we thought i must have ordered the wrong part. But then it dawned on us that maybe the replacement disa valve they'd put in at the garage wasn't the right one for the car. Ian checked the part numbers on real OEM and, sure enough, the valve belonged to a 2.5l model and not a 3.0 like felix!
The next step was to ring Quarry motors at Sheffield to see if they had the right disa and thankfully they did! Since Felix's engine was at this stage in bits, we decided a little road trip to quarry motors in Sheffield in Ian's car was a good next step!
We'd also drained the coolant tank to be able to take apart the bits of the engine that we needed to, and the brittle plastic radiator plug snapped in half when we tried to put it back in! (Culprit plug shown below) The bmw garage didn't have any in stock and I was panicking as we needed that tiny little plug in able to fill my radiator again so that I could drive home at the end of the day! So we decided to ask quarry motors about that too when we got there
We picked up the disa from quarry motors, but despite Having hundreds of radiator screws, they couldn't find one with the same thread as ours! So we decided the only option was to do a blue peter glue and tape job to enable us to fill up the radiator until I could collect and fit a new plug from the bmw garage the next day! How did we do that I hear you ask? We went to b&q and bought some superglue! That's how
When we got back, we compared the old disa valve to the 'new' one and sure enough it was much bigger and the right size to house the upgrade metal flap! We fitted that and finally fitted the valve back on to the engine with no problems!
Next came the new water pump and thermostat! Whilst Id had no problems with these, Ian did explain that the water pumps are prone to failure with their plastic impeller, and that it might be prudent to get a metal impeller upgraded pump.
We were very surprised and impressed to find his old pump only had the tiniest tiniest bit of give in it - and it looked like the original OEM part! Not bad going for a 15 year old car! Though probably still a good move that we replaced these in the long term
Old parts above. New parts below
We also changed the belts as one especially had quite a few cracks in it from perishing rubber...
So felix has had some real tlc and a real pampering recently!! Once we'd put everything back together and finished up, I started him up, excited to see how his engine sounded now he had the correct disa valve in! The old valve had definitely helped tide him over after his original one broke, but with it being too small a valve for his engine, the air intake won't have been right and would have explained why he hadn't been running quite as well as he used to. And boy did he purr when I started him up!!
Ian has discovered I have slightly loose seat bushings - which as you all probably know he is the master of! So that's next on the to-do agenda as well as my passenger seat which has a jammed up and down motor - so its stuck as high up as Itl go. Not a problem for me, but it is a problem for my tall passengers! Hehe!!
I am going to be sending all the photos I took on to Ian and my hope is that we might be able to make some 'how to' guides for others (but I haven't a clue what half of the bits are exactly, so ian is better placed to do this than me!)
I arent very technically minded, I wish I knew more about my car and it's inner workings than I do, and I wish I had the knowledge and expertise to repair things myself - but for what it's worth, if there's anything that I can ever do to help anyone on here out, please just ask! To return the favour and do someone else a good turn is what I want most!
Thanks everyone and have a brill weekend over and out!
Ps. The superglued radiator screw held out! I replaced it the next day with a new one from
Bmw
This post is about two weeks overdue! I meant to post to share the great day we'd had working on my zed 'Felix' as soon as Id gotten back home, but as it does, life took over! Nevertheless, this needs a special mention, so here it is
It's the people that make the difference, and that's what I love about this forum and the zed community as a whole - the people.
So I wanted to share my experience. Here I am, mad enough to have given up a well paid and secure career to become an impoverished student once again to study medicine.It's been amazing thus far, but it is very tough on you financially! And expenses like running a car and paying your rent can be a worry at times. I took my company car very much for granted (not to mention the fuel card that came with it!) and it came as a bit of a shock when I suddenly had to pay for my own fuel and car bills, especially when there wasn't the income coming in anymore.
Felix has always been a brilliant little car! I bought him 5 years ago from a man down in Birmingham. This man had bought him new from the showroom and loved him from the day he drove him home. He handed me a big shoe box full of every receipt and service certificate that he'd ever had. I knew my car had been loved and looked after, and I wanted to continue that. As I say, felix has been brilliant, but of course there's always that worry in the back of your mind 'what if something goes wrong' or 'what if at some point im facing a huge repair, at huge cost?', more so when you haven't got a good wage coming in every month and it's all going out on university fees and bills. And this is where the people come in. The community, the support.
Whenever I have had a problem, a question or a query, you have been there to help me out! From @Brian H sending me a sensor and @BMBabe kindly offering to put me up at hers for the night before santapod to @Aceman rushing over to help me fix Felix's engine troubles a few months ago and most recently helping me proactively replace a few parts for general maintanence! So it's to you all that I want to say a huge thank you, because it makes ALL the difference!
So that's enough of me being gushy! And onto the real nitty gritty!!
@Aceman has been nothing short of amazing in all he's done to help me out. He created a 'shopping list' for felix, with all the parts that it might be prudent to consider replacing in the near future. Over the last few months ive been buying and stockpiling these! And two Friday's ago we met at Ian's to get under the bonnet to fit them!
So firstly we decided to tackle the DISA valve. Earlier in the year, unbeknownst to me, the plastic flap in the valve that regulates the air intake into the engine had snapped. Felix had started idling very roughly all of a sudden and had lost power. Id been very worried! Id had a panic and taken felix to a friends garage. They found the broken disa (which Ian had already correctly guessed might be the culprit!) and salvaged the part off another bmw to help me cut costs down. Felix was fixed! His engine was immediately running much more smoothly, though didn't seem quite as perfect as he had been before.
The idea last Friday was to replace the plastic flap in the disa for a machined metal upgraded part. I had been lucky that the broken plastic flap hadnt snapped off and gone into the engine, so I didn't want it happening again.
We took out the disa valve which looked like this...
The White stuff is silicon that they'd presumably used to seal as the o ring had perished away.
We went to put the new metal valve into the plastic unit and found that it too big! About 1cm or so taller and wider. I wish Id taken a photo of them side by side to illustrate this...
At first we thought i must have ordered the wrong part. But then it dawned on us that maybe the replacement disa valve they'd put in at the garage wasn't the right one for the car. Ian checked the part numbers on real OEM and, sure enough, the valve belonged to a 2.5l model and not a 3.0 like felix!
The next step was to ring Quarry motors at Sheffield to see if they had the right disa and thankfully they did! Since Felix's engine was at this stage in bits, we decided a little road trip to quarry motors in Sheffield in Ian's car was a good next step!
We'd also drained the coolant tank to be able to take apart the bits of the engine that we needed to, and the brittle plastic radiator plug snapped in half when we tried to put it back in! (Culprit plug shown below) The bmw garage didn't have any in stock and I was panicking as we needed that tiny little plug in able to fill my radiator again so that I could drive home at the end of the day! So we decided to ask quarry motors about that too when we got there
We picked up the disa from quarry motors, but despite Having hundreds of radiator screws, they couldn't find one with the same thread as ours! So we decided the only option was to do a blue peter glue and tape job to enable us to fill up the radiator until I could collect and fit a new plug from the bmw garage the next day! How did we do that I hear you ask? We went to b&q and bought some superglue! That's how
When we got back, we compared the old disa valve to the 'new' one and sure enough it was much bigger and the right size to house the upgrade metal flap! We fitted that and finally fitted the valve back on to the engine with no problems!
Next came the new water pump and thermostat! Whilst Id had no problems with these, Ian did explain that the water pumps are prone to failure with their plastic impeller, and that it might be prudent to get a metal impeller upgraded pump.
We were very surprised and impressed to find his old pump only had the tiniest tiniest bit of give in it - and it looked like the original OEM part! Not bad going for a 15 year old car! Though probably still a good move that we replaced these in the long term
We also changed the belts as one especially had quite a few cracks in it from perishing rubber...
So felix has had some real tlc and a real pampering recently!! Once we'd put everything back together and finished up, I started him up, excited to see how his engine sounded now he had the correct disa valve in! The old valve had definitely helped tide him over after his original one broke, but with it being too small a valve for his engine, the air intake won't have been right and would have explained why he hadn't been running quite as well as he used to. And boy did he purr when I started him up!!
Ian has discovered I have slightly loose seat bushings - which as you all probably know he is the master of! So that's next on the to-do agenda
as well as my passenger seat which has a jammed up and down motor - so its stuck as high up as Itl go. Not a problem for me, but it is a problem for my tall passengers! Hehe!!I am going to be sending all the photos I took on to Ian and my hope is that we might be able to make some 'how to' guides for others (but I haven't a clue what half of the bits are exactly, so ian is better placed to do this than me!)
I arent very technically minded, I wish I knew more about my car and it's inner workings than I do, and I wish I had the knowledge and expertise to repair things myself - but for what it's worth, if there's anything that I can ever do to help anyone on here out, please just ask! To return the favour and do someone else a good turn is what I want most!
Thanks everyone and have a brill weekend
over and out!Ps. The superglued radiator screw held out! I replaced it the next day with a new one from
Bmw
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