New Addition to the Garage - BMW M2 Competition

Much more on this in due time, but there's been a change at Morrison's Garage this month. Welcome the 2021 BMW M2 Competition! She's a beast!

E46 M3 Suspension Refresh

At 136000 miles, my M3's suspension was tired. Beyond tired. The ride of the M3 should be taut, well controlled, and confidence-inspiring. Mine was loose, uncontrolled, and decidedly un-inspiring. I have a new commute for work starting soon, so I decided to get some work done. I'd really like to go through the whole suspension and replace all the bushings but the most pressing issue was the shocks and struts. The OEM suspension on the E46 M3 consists of non-adjustable shocks (rear) and struts (front) made by Sachs. They are very high quality and well suited to the M3 in street form. For my upgrade, though, I decided to go with Koni Sport adjustable shocks and struts. They're very affordable (cheaper than the Sachs) and have been the go-to adjustable shock in sporty-car circles for decades. I have no desire to lower this car, and don't see myself tracking or autocrossing it any time soon. I will be taking it for many spirited drives in the mountains, since the legendary roads of the East Tennessee and Western North Carolina mountains are just a few miles away. So, I figured the Koni's and stock springs offer the best combination of sporting character and affordability. I ordered them from ECS Tuning on a 20% off sale and got them within a couple days.

I also ordered new top strut mounts and reinforcement plates. The plates are an OEM BMW part that is meant to prevent deformation of the strut towers. Mine were showing no signs of any issues so I guess I didn't need them but I suppose they can't hurt.

Getting the strut out is pretty straightforward. You disconnect the swaybar link, remove the bottom clamp bolt and wiggle the strut out of the spindle. Mine were quite stuck and I had to use a drift and a rubber mallet to strike the top of the hub and work the bottom of the strut out. Then you remove the three top mount nuts and the whole strut will fall out. The original strut, once out, is disassembled using spring compressors so the springs and a couple washers can be reused.

Assembling the strut with the Koni shock requires a little ingenuity. The top of the shaft is 11mm hex, which you have to hold in order to keep the shaft from spinning while you tighten the top nut. You can see how I solved the issue with a 1/4" extension and a spark plug socket with flats that allow the use of a wrench.

Once the strut is assembled, getting it back in is quite tricky. It's a Chinese puzzle and nothing I write here will help you.

The rear shocks are easy to get out and easy to assemble. The Koni rear shocks have a 5mm hex socket on the head which you can hold with just an allen wrench while you tighten the top nut with an open wrench. I had to reuse the bump stops because I neglected to order new ones. They look bad but seem to be serviceable. I used new top mounts and also bought the ECS rear shock mount reinforcement plates.

Installation is super simple. One bolt on the spindle and two nuts in the trunk.

The top mount with the reinforcement plate. There was no apparent issue so I probably didn't need the plates, but they're cheap.

I tested the old shocks by compressing them by hand. They were very easy to compress and the rears would barely re-extend at all. The fronts were a little better but not much. The new shocks are set at full soft in the front and one turn up from full soft in the rear. This brings me to the one major drawback of the Koni sports. The rears can only be adjusted for rebound by removing them from the car! You have to compress them completely and then turn the shock body in relation to the shaft. The fronts have a knob on the top for the adjustment, so no big deal to make changes to fine-tune the ride, but if you are an autocrosser or track star and think you may want to make frequent adjustments you might want to look for another solution.

E46 M3 Cooling System Refresh

I've owned this 2004 BMW M3 for well over five years now. It had 82,000 miles on it when I bought it in 2009 and at the time of this writing has just over 128,000 on it. I got it completely caught up on maintenance when I first got it, but other than regular periodic maintenance, it's needed very little else in that time. The only unplanned repair it has gone down for was a seized front brake caliper which I replaced. At this mileage, though, I know I've been driving on borrowed time for a while. The E46 does not suffer from the same cooling system weaknesses that the E36 did, but it's still a very critical system on the car and the consequences for poor maintenance are dire. So I decided it was time to completely go through the cooling system and renew everything I touch.

As usual with my blog, this is not a how-to. It's a you-can. There are plenty of forum posts and blog entries elsewhere that will tell you everything you need to know to complete this maintenance.

I started with an order of parts from ECS Tuning.

• Genuine BMW Remanufactured Water pump #11517838118
• Genuine BMW Radiator #17102228941
• Genuine BMW Thermostat #11531318274
• Water pump gasket #11517831099
• Thermostat O-ring #11531318402
• Water pump O-ring #11537830709 (qty 2)
• Coolant pipe O-rings #11537830712 (qty 2)

This order with shipping came to $710.

Thankfully the water pump for the M3 has come down a LOT in price since a few years ago. It used to be over $500. This one was $300 and I've seen a few other cheaper options as well. Shop around. Make sure you get a pump with a polymer impeller. It will last forever. The front bearing of the pump will wear out, not the impeller. If you get a metal impeller I can't say the same will be true. Here's a pic of my removed water pump (right). The impeller is perfect. This pump was not leaking but the bearing is pretty loose. This also shows how well the BMW coolant protects the engine from corrosion. There simply is none.

To start I removed the lower engine shield, fan with clutch, fan shroud, intake filter housing, hoses, belts, and finally the radiator. The lower radiator hose was impossible to get loose from the rad so I left it in place and removed both through the bottom of the car. You have to move the oil cooler out of the way but you can leave it attached. Support it with something so it's not hanging by the oil hoses.

When removing the thermostat housing there's a coolant pipe that runs between the housing and the bigger pipe that runs to the back of the engine. It's about 2 inches long and machined from aluminum. It is sealed with O-rings (#11537830709) on both ends. Mine pulled free from the engine end, not the thermostat housing end, and thus the whole housing was too big to remove from the space it occupies. I had to work for quite a few minutes to get the pipe loose from the housing side so I could remove it. Most write-ups I've seen don't tell you to remove that pipe at all, but there is an o-ring on the engine end that you should replace as well, so it's just as well that it came out that way.

Once the thermostat housing and thermostat are out of the way, you can unbolt the water pump. A firm pull disengages the pipes on the back side and it easily comes out.

At this point I assessed where I was and decided I needed a few more parts to do a more thorough job. Again from ECS, I ordered:

• Radiator Fan Clutch #11527831619
• Aux fan switch O-ring #13621433077S
• Expanding rivet (qty 4) #17111712963
• Heater hose #64216902679
• Heater hose #64216902680
• Hose #64216902678
• Air filter #13721730946
• Cooling fan blade #11521712058

This order came to about $160.

Replacing the heater hoses requires removal of the intake manifold. Due to the M3's six individual throttle body design, there are six individual hose clamps to remove. The factory clamps are Oetiker-style clamps that require a special pair of pliers to remove without destroying them. The Lisle 30500 CV Boot Pliers will do the trick. Using the pliers I was able to remove the clamps without damaging them. The intake manifold, having never been removed before, was very hard to dislodge from the throttle bodies. The throttle body boots are pliable rubber, but were VERY stuck. Rather than risk breaking something, I opted to carefully cut the boots with a knife and pry them loose a bit. After unclipping all of the hoses and wires that run along and around the manifold, it finally came out. This means I had to order new throttle body boots, part #11617830265. About 17 bucks a piece. I also ordered new clamps for the manifold side of the boots (#11617830306). While the throttle-side clamps can be reused, the manifold-side clamps are one-time only. They're a bit over $3 each, and I had to buy a tool to crimp them, the Lisle 30800 CV Boot Clamp which was about $25 at Amazon (photo above). You can use traditional hose clamps, but these are simple and look factory.

Once you have the intake manifold off it's easy to replace the coolant hoses that feed the heater core. There's one other hose that doesn't connect to the core, but rather connects the heater valve to the back of the coolant pipe alongside the cylinder head. I found it rather hard to find the part numbers for these hoses. Even ECS's website doesn't tell whether they fit the E46 M3 or not. They do, and the correct part numbers are in my list above. The photo here shows them fairly well. For what it's worth, my original hoses were still nice and soft, and looked pretty much like new. I think I could have easily gone another 50k miles on them.

Once I had the hoses replaced, everything went back together quite quickly. Access to the cooling system on the M3 is very good and doesn't require many contortions (except for those three hoses under the intake manifold). While I was in there, I also replaced the main serpentine belt tensioner spring and pulley. I had bought them a long time ago so they are not listed in the parts list above. The bolts that hold the water pump to the block should be tightened to 7 lb-ft of torque. That is NOT VERY MUCH. I don't even have a torque wrench that will read that low. I used a 1/4-inch ratchet and very gently torqued these bolts down. The bolts that hold the pulley to the water pump snout are also torqued to 7 lb-ft. Be careful!

Quick Update

I'm sorry for the lack of new posts for the last year or so. I hope to get back to actively blogging in the next few months. It's just that I've been devoting most of my time to my house and property for the last year. It's been long overdue, and we're getting a bit closer to the end of the major projects. I wish I could say one of the projects was a big new garage, but I don't have the room for that, and other things became more important. I still have Gorilla Garage Tampa, though, where I have plenty of room for my workshop.

I will give a quick update on each of my project cars.

• 
  2004 BMW M3: has been pretty bullet proof, but has 127,000 miles on it now and I feel the need for some pre-emptive maintenance. I plan to go ahead and replace the radiator, water pump, and a couple of hoses that I have not already replaced once. Then it needs new shocks as it still rides on the originals. I have a fuel filter waiting to go in it, and the brakes need to be bled. I'll install a new/reconditioned steering wheel as the leather on the original one is getting worn, and the B and C pillars have some of the cloth lining peeling off, so I'll replace those with new. All of that adds up to a couple thousand dollars, but this BMW has been pretty easy on me so far, so I'll treat it right and get what it needs to be 100%.
• 
  1994 Mazda Miata: as always, my reliable daily driver. It's been over 2 years since my major reconditioning of it, and I've hardly done so much as wash it. It would benefit from new shocks as the Tein suspension is now 10 years old, and it needs brake pads all around. It's still a joy to drive and looks pretty decent considering my amateur painting skills.
• 
  1992 Jeep Cherokee: As primitive and unrefined as it is, I love this vehicle. I've been using it for almost 2 years as a utility vehicle and occasionally driving it to work. Other than the initial tune-up I did on it and a little cosmetic restoration, I've not done much to it. The brake lines still need replacing, the shocks are still dead, the tires are hard as rocks, the driver window is still balky going up and down, the A/C still (despite my best efforts) does not work. I have replaced the entire A/C system, with the exception of the evaporator, and it still isn't cooling. So I have a new evaporator ready to go in, just waiting for a free weekend to pull the dashboard out and install it. If that doesn't work I give up. I plan to install new shocks and maybe a minimal lift kit, get new tires, and get the thing painted. If the A/C works, it'll be a decent vehicle. If it doesn't, I'll probably end up selling it.

I also hope for the garage at the house itself to be a project in the next year or so. It just needs some cleaning up, paint, and I'd like to put down a new floor. I don't expect we'll be in this house for more than 5 years or so, but I also know how 5 years can suddenly turn into 10, so I need to keep it together.

Gorilla Garage Tampa Octoberfest

The first annual GGT Octoberfest is on for October 13, 2013. We'll have our project cars on hand, along with some brews, cooked meat products, and plenty of bench racing.

Gorilla Garage

So it's been a long time since I've posted. Life has been busy and I've not had a lot of time to do car stuff, and even less to write blog posts. Nevertheless, there is news afoot in Morrison's Garage. We've moved into an actual garage; namely, Gorilla Garage Tampa. Formerly the site of the Gorilla Theatre (the name kinda stuck) and housed within the walls of a nondescript warehouse in the strip-club and industrial warehouse district of Tampa, the GGT is almost 3000 square feet of space, shared between myself and three other gearhead enthusiasts.
 

	Panorama of the GGT showing a couple of the other residents' projects.
	My M3 in for a rear brake job.
	It's nice working with a TON of space. I'm still working on getting my work area set up and sorting out which tools stay at the house and which go to GGT.
	A pic from up in the loft. My neighbor is a '61 Austin-Healey 3000 that is in show-winning condition. I think my cheap Jeep and Miata will feel a little inferior.

My plans for the GGT include finishing the Cheap Jeep and possibly getting it ready to sell, sprucing up the BMW a bit and bringing it up to A+ condition, and maybe another engine project for the Miata. I'd also like to purchase and restore an older BMW or Porsche. More to come...

Mystic Blue BMW M3

I got a few new snaps of the M3 this weekend. It has 113,000 miles on it now and it's perfect. It was an overcast day with the strong summer sun filtering through and it seemed to give the car a softer sheen.

A Small Relief

I got my M3 back from the body shop today. The work was done by Gene Perez Body Shop in Tampa and I'm perfectly happy with the work they did. They did a good job of communicating with me and provided a high level of service. It was relatively quick and painless and the other guy's insurance picked up the entire tab.

The repair total came to just over $5100. This included a new fender, bumper cover, right headlight, and some other miscellaneous bits needed to put everything back together. They blended the color in to the door and hood and it looks to me like a perfect match.

The only issue is that now the left headlight lens looks shabby compared to the new one so I've ordered a new lens for $57. I also need to replace the fog lamps because they are very road-rashed and now look very bad compared to the rest of the car, which looks brand new!

It's good to have all my toys back in the garage. It's been 3 weeks to the day since the accident. It's strange where one finds comfort. I've had some difficult times the past few weeks and these machines in my garage make me a little bit happier.

BMW M3 Valve Adjustment, S54 Engine

My M3 is way overdue for a valve adjustment. The maintenance schedule calls for doing it at every inpection interval which is roughly every 30,000 miles. I've had this car for 19,000 miles but I have no record of it ever being done. It probably was done at least once, but I'm betting it's way overdue. When I measured the clearances, every valve was out of spec, and all were on the "loose" side of the spec, which is actually better than them being on the "tight" side. They weren't really TOO far out of spec, considering. Just a few hundredths of a millimeter, on average. The worst one was 0.08mm out of spec. The car has 102,000 miles on it now so I want to get it in spec and give everything a good going-over so it will be ready for the next 100,000 miles. As usual with this blog, this is not a "how-to" but rather a "you can". On my difficulty scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being putting air in the tires, and 10 being an engine rebuild, this is about a 3. Seriously, it's not hard. All you need is your basic hand tools, the BMW shim removal tool, and a digital micrometer. I paid about $30 for a cheap-ish micrometer specifically for this job. I paid $30 plus a crazy $20 for shipping for the shim removal tool, and I'm spending about $50 on shims. If you need to get this done in one day you'll need to buy the full shim kit which is about $375 but that includes the removal tool and when you're done you can easily sell it online for most of what you paid. I didn't do that so my car will be down for about a week while I wait for the shims to come from Pelican Parts. So I'm into this for about $130 and maybe 4 hours of labor, probably 5 by the time I'm done. A shop quoted me close to $1000 for this service, so it's a good DIY project. I referred to an excellent video on YouTube that covers the project in good detail. I definitely recommend you watch a couple of those before you start.

Valve cover is off and I'm ready to start measuring clearances and removing shims. It takes about 30 minutes to get to this point.

Here's my spreadsheet where I recorded all the clearances, the thickness of each shim, and do a little math to find out what size shim would give me the exact clearance I want. I calculated the Theoretical Best Shim (TBS), and compared that to the shims I actually have (24 of them) to identify which shim should go in each location. Doing this, I was able to reuse 14 of the 24 shims. I have to buy the remaining 10 because none of the 10 I have left are the right thickness. No way I could have kept all this straight without a spreadsheet. It took me a couple hours working slowly to measure and record all the data.

Here's where I laid out my shims to keep them straight until I did all the math. A few have already been put back in the engine in this photo. Now that I have the exhaust side all done, and none of the remaining shims can be used except two on the intake side, I no longer have need of these shims or this sheet of paper.

Here's the official BMW shim removal tool. I say removal tool because it was far harder to put the shims back than it was to get them out. This little plastic tool was almost $50 with shipping and everything, but it's a necessary evil. I finally got the hang of using it to put shims back in, but not before dropping a few shims. It is IMPERATIVE to block all the little oil passages in the head so that errant shims can't disappear into the engine.  That would be BAD. A magnetic pickup tool helps fish them out from where they fall. God help you if you lose one in the engine.

This is the micrometer I bought for this job. It was in the $30 range at Harbor Freight. It may not be extremely accurate, or it could be that I just had to learn to use it. That thousandth's decimal place should definitely be taken with a grain of salt.

UPDATE: 5/14/2011

The shims I ordered from Pelican Parts on Sunday arrived via USPS on Friday. Perfect timing. So this morning I finished the job. Unfortunately, when I put the new shims in place, most of the clearances turned out tighter than I had calculated them to be with my spreadsheet. A couple were just under the minimum and I wasn't comfortable with that. Upon re-measuring things today, everything was measuring bigger. Checking my technique with the micrometer with the new shims of known thickness, I think I was cranking down too hard on the micrometer last week. You can definitely influence the measurement by how hard you turn down the dial. Once I standardized my technique and got consistent results, I ended up re-measuring all the clearances and moved several shims around to get closer to the clearances I wanted. My main concern was to not leave any valves too tight as that can lead to problems. In the end, I got all the clearances on the lower end of the tolerances. The minimums are 0.18mm on the intake cam, and 0.28 on the exhaust cam, while the maximums are 0.23mm and 0.33mm for the intake and exhaust, respectively.

Most interestingly, and to my surprise, the engine really does feel smoother and a little bit quieter after the adjustment. I swear I can feel and hear the difference. I didn't expect to. The S54 really likes proper maintenance. I also took this job as an opportunity to inspect the bolts on the VANOS system as there have been internet reports of them backing out and causing catastrophic failure of the timing gears and chain. Everything looked absolutely perfect so I didn't touch a thing there. I feel better having had a look at them, though.

M3 Update

The project of the weekend was some new brake pads and rotors on the BMW M3. You can spend thousands of dollars on brakes for these cars, but the stock brakes are not bad by any stretch of the imagination. Rather than bling it up with fancy cross-drilled and/or slotted rotors that sell for several hundred dollars EACH, I went with an OEM equivalent rotor by Centric, purchased from rockauto.com for a handy $62 each. I've bought lots of rotors before and these are the nicest I've ever gotten. The hub area and hat are coated in black, as are the outer edges and the insides of the vanes in the vents. That pretty black paint may burn right off under track use, but should last a long time and keep the hubs looking nice for a while with street use.

For pads I went with another OEM equivalent from Ate (pronounced AH-tay). I've been using Ate's high performance brake fluid in my racing cars for years, but had never tried their OEM replacement parts before. Much to my pleasure and surprise, when I pulled the old pads off I noted the name Ate on the original pads, clips, and yes - even on the M3's calipers. So these aren't just OEM-equivalent. Ate is an OEM supplier to BMW.

Anyway, you can see from the photo that I also painted the calipers red. It's overdone, I know, but I like it and that's all that matters. The calipers were slightly rusty and not looking great, so the paint freshens things up a bit. I used some Dupli-color ceramic caliper paint, applied with a small brush.

So far life with the M3 has been pretty good. No mechanical problems have come up, but I've done a TON of maintenance, cleaning, and general refurbishment. One of the best improvements I made was fixing the sunroof headliner. It is supposed to slide back and forth under the glass moonroof. The tiny plastic guides that it slides on had long ago left their stations and the headliner was now all loose and floppy and wouldn't open more than a couple inches. For about $25 in parts and an hour of my time, the sunroof now operates as it should and there's no more flopping around above my head. Now that the brakes are up to snuff, my only remaining mechanical concern is an oil leak that I need to chase down and fix, and doing a flush of the cooling system.

More on my new toy

As alluded to in the previous post, I have recently bought something new. I had been toying around the with idea of selling my Corvette and I mentioned it to the wrong person. Next thing I knew, he referred a coworker who was REALLY looking to buy a Vette. I showed the car and he made me an offer on the spot. So then I had to go through with it! Anyway, the sale of the Vette freed up my monthly car budget and netted me a little cash, so I went out and bought a 2004 BMW M3. Here's more pics.

I've had it a few days and like it very much. It is a LOT of fun to drive, and looks like a million bucks. Due to the fact I'm not made of money, the M3 I bought has a few miles on it and needs to get caught up on maintenance, but overall it's still a pretty young car and is in really nice shape. I'm not afraid of cars with high miles because I do all maintenance myself and that saves me a lot of money, and I keep my cars in top shape at all times. There is a TON of info on these cars out on the web so I'm confident I can tackle anything that might come up. Parts are plentiful and while there are a few that are priced like they are gold plated, most are reasonably priced.

We really miss the Vette, though, and will have another one before too long. We might get into a C6 or get another C5.

I don't know the history of this car, other than I am the fourth owner and it has been in Florida most of its life. I have a LONG list of maintenance items and a couple very minor repairs that I will try to document here on this blog. Should be fun.

A New Relationship Begins