So the car is a Z4 2.5 auto (March 2003 build date car) in Titan Silver with red leather and it's not an M Sport. I believe that build date makes it one of the very earliest cars, as according to Wikipedia, they were not launched in Europe until March 2003.
It's done 97k miles and only 6k miles in the past 5 years (with 4k of those miles being from myself in the over the last year and a half). There are two working remote keys.
I bought it in August 2022 off a retired policeman who'd only had it for just over a year. He bought it with no prior service history (brave!), though did say the previous owner had owned the car for circa 7 years, which checked out when you look at the HPI history and when the personal plates were added / removed. It's had a high number of owners though, I am the 11th(!!), though I'm only the third owner in the past 10 years, so it changed hands a lot early in its life.
The chap I'd bought it from had spent about £1,500 on a full service, and some ABS issues plus works to the brake lines and had paperwork to back that up. At the time I thought he seemed fairly honest, but with the benefit of hindsight, I think he knew the car needed more work (and leaked in the rain!) and either he'd had enough, or his wife had told him to get rid of it!
So, what's gone wrong with it and what have I done to it? I'd recommend getting a cup of tea at this point before reading on, as this is rather long!
- Intermittent non starting issue. After much head scratching (and a new battery it turned out I didn't need), the Green Flag man was about to recover it on his truck and it suddenly turned over in neutral (it's an Auto). Turned the key all the way and it fired up. The automatic gearbox was not selecting Park properly. I had a gearbox service done and the oil was like marmite / treacle and thankfully this has cured that problem. Changed twice though in 3x months (expensive!) as without going to a gearbox specialist there is no way to drain the oil out of the torque converter.
- Parking sensors. It was just unplugged apparently according to my local mechanic, though two days later they stopped working again. He wants another £100 to take the bumper off again so I'll do it myself at some point.
- The Alarm. This still goes off randomly at times, though keeping the battery topped up seems to resolve it weirdly.
- Oil leaks. I've learnt from every mechanic that it's a common BMW problem apparently! It was leaking pretty badly from the valve cover and oil filter housing gaskets. Oil filter housing is now perfect, but the valve cover gasket is leaking again but in a different place. I'm going to look at this soon with the help of enuff_zed, as clearly my local independent didn't do something right!
- Water leaks. I had a wet passenger footwell for some time. This turned out to be the passenger door membrane, where stupidly I initially used just double sided tape after repairing the window regulator cable. Do not do this! Use the proper butyl tape or some other form of decent sticky sealant!
- Window regulator. The passenger side cable snapped. I used a cable repair kit to save some cash but I'd really not recommend going down this route. It's an absolute sod of a job, just buy a new or used regulator, it's easier!
- Violent limp mode / lack of power. There is a long thread on this here, but in summary this was a failure of the original 21 year old MAF and a very badly split (and bodged with electrical tape!
) air intake boot.
- Cracked (both!) exhaust manifolds. To be fair this one wasn't the cars fault! I hit something in the road at 70mph on the M11 and whatever it was smashed into the where the exhaust manifold joins the mid section. £600 later and this has been repaired via welding, though this in turn knackered a post cat o2 sensor, which is partly why the total bill is so high, as it had to go back for that.
- Further full service and Auxiliary belts changed along with air and cabin filters
- Gearbox oil service - oil replaced twice over a 3 month period
- Valve cover gaskets replaced (inc screws)
- Oil filter housing gasket replaced
- New Battery
- 2x front shock absorbers replaced
- Replaced 4x tyres with Bridgestones (not run flat - so much better!)
- Replaced the broken passenger window regulator cable
- Replaced passenger door weather seal (this had been causing a leak - now fixed)
- Replaced the front inner steering rack joints (which came up on the last MOT)
- Replaced the MAF sensor
- Replaced the rubber air intake boot
- Exhaust manifold welded and new gaskets / nuts between front and mid exhaust section
- Replaced broken o2 sensor (following damage from welding above)
- Replaced a broken oil level sensor
Stuff already done to the car (out of choice / to improve it):
- Retrofitted cruise control (brand new stalk)
- Retrofitted cupholders with the correct SUPER RARE grey faceplates (thanks again Enuff_Zed!)
- Retrofitted LED interior lighting (footwells and boot light too - much brighter, more modern and uses less power)
- Replaced the rear centre brake light (OEM red original)
- Replaced both boot struts
- Replaced the hazard warning / door lock switched (original was very scratched)
- Replaced the front lower suspension arms, bushes and links (this along with new tyres significantly improved the handling)
- Replaced the ashtray unit (the moving lid was broken)
- Replaced the xenon headlight bulbs
- Replaced the engine and transmission mounts to cure a bit of engine vibration. This made the car feel SO much better!
- Replaced the gear selector surround (with a used, but better than my existing one from eBay). I'll have a go at painting the old one in an attempt to make it look like new at some point.
The current list of jobs (still to do):
- Roof motor relocate and some coding (I'm off to see Enuff_zed next weekend)
- Fix an intermittent cylinder 2 misfire (hopefully just a coil pack)
- Fit new aux in cable (bought from this forum)
- Fit new interior door handles
- Replace stuck rear eccentric bolts (so rear wheels can be aligned)
- Fix the valve cover gasket oil leak (again!)
- Diagnose and fix the rear heated screen (heated mirrors do work)
- Fix the parking sensors
- Fix the sodding interior rattles!
- Do a scuttle drain clear / flush and replace the broken scuttle clips
- Seats out proper carpet clean with a vax type wet hoover
- Some rear suspension / subframe surface rust removal and protection
- Install new door speakers*
"Maybe" jobs for the future (if I keep it long term)
- *I've got a full set of the Carver DSP speakers, though I'd still need the amp / boot wiring loom and subwoofer brackets / grills (plus a forum members help!) to fit these. As it's an early car, the door speaker wiring is already in place. So the stop gap to improve things a bit, is to just put in the door speakers for now, with the hifi loom left alone, and the wiring spliced off the tweeters (for now) for these.
- Swap my electric (but annoyingly not heated!) seats for some heated ones
- Do the top hifi retrofit
- Do a full rear suspension refresh / potentially replace or repair (shotblast etc) the rear subframe (need a lottery win for this one!)
So why the 'unintended' title? Well I certainly hadn't planned to be doing this much by way of fixes / improvements on this car when I bought it! To be honest I don't really want to total the money spent on it, as I'm pretty sure I've easily spent the purchase price of £3,700 on it again at this point! The car has certainly tested my patience at times. Towards the back of last year / early this year after all the limp mode and then the exhaust problems (plus other family health issues), I was getting a bit sick of the car and had I not already invested so much in it, I probably would have considered breaking it for parts. But now it's back up and running I'm really enjoying it again. I'm meeting up with Enuff_zed soon, I'm hoping to get a bit more confidence around doing work on the car myself. I know it will seem daft to many on here, but I was really pleased with myself for being able to fix the air intake issue as a complete novice!
The jobs left to do though are all relatively minor, so I'm hoping that I can now have a good summer out of the car without any major problems.
Pictures to follow!
)