Performance BMW — September 2017

SEPTEMBER 2017 85

New Valvetronic motor

has been fi tted

Air con has

been re-gassed

and now works

properly

iDrive took

20 mins to

remove

Blocked rubber

pipe the cause

of wet carpet

Diagnostic equipment

employed to help track

down the engine fault

plush, deep pile black ones. Much better. I also

noticed recently that the steering wheel roundel

has been pressed in and is now concave, rather

than convex as it should be. Someone must

have dented it and, while you can’t replace it

as it has arms that latch around the back of the

airbag, you can buy very thin roundels on eBay

in the right size that you can stick over the top,

so that’s the plan.

There were, however, a few more serious

problems that needed urgent attention, and for

these I headed over to BMSport in Bexleyheath,

which has looked after all my BMWs for years.

I mentioned last time that the driver’s side rear

passenger footwell carpet was soaking wet,

which was down to a blocked drain hole in the

engine bay. Water collects in a compartment by

the fi rewall, where the brake master cylinder

is located, and, as it’s got nowhere to go, once

it reaches a certain level it starts to leak out

was low on gas. I think this might actually be

the fi rst time I’ve bought a car where the air

con has just needed a re-gas to get it working

again; that’s what sellers always say it needs,

but in my experience it’s always ended up

being condensers and compressors that I’ve

had to cough up to replace. Initially, after the

re-gas, the air con still didn’t seem as cold as

it could have been, but it seems like the more

I’ve been using it (and I always have the air con

on, all year-round) the better it’s become and,

in conjunction with using the iDrive to set the

centre vent to its coldest setting, the cabin gets

pretty frosty pretty quickly now.

My iDrive refusing to work with sat nav DVDs

was diagnosed as most likely a faulty DVD drive

and BMSport directed me to a guy on eBay

that they use for all their iDrive repairs. After

getting in touch he told me he could replace the

drive for £150 or, for £400, he could sort the

DVD drive and rebuild the mainboard with new

components. I decided to go for the latter option

because the iDrive unit can fail completely

and with mine now being 11 years old it

seemed silly not to in the name of preventative

maintenance. Removing the whole unit took

me about 20 minutes as I found an excellent

video on YouTube specifi c to the 6 Series with

all the instructions I needed; it probably took

me as long to fi nd a box big enough for it to fi t

and pack it up securely to send it away. The

turnaround was a few days and it came back

good as new so that was money well spent.

Finally, we come to the biggest problem

and that was the engine almost cutting out

at random moments. It was really awful and

pretty scary as you never knew when it would

happen and leave you completely without

any throttle response. The guys at BMSport

started off with the most likely cause, that

being a faulty Valvetronic motor and as these

do fail, I was happy to get a new one fi tted as

preventative measure. Unfortunately it didn’t

solve the problem so the guys got back under

the bonnet to work out what the problem was;

after eliminating the usual suspects they began

searching for other possible causes and that’s

when the discovered a massive hole in one the

breather hoses. They were amazed it hadn’t

thrown up any warning lights on the dash as it

was causing the engine a lot of problems, but

somehow the N52 had managed to soldier on

regardless. With a new breather hose fi tted the

problem has completely disappeared and the

630i feels very healthy indeed.

With a new gearbox sump having recently

been fi tted before I’d bought the car, the only

boring maintenance thing left for me to do is

to get a new water pump fi tted as they are a

notorious N52 weak spot and do fail, but once

that’s done we can get onto the fun stuff and I

can’t wait.

THANKS AND CONTACT

BMSport

020 8304 9797

http://www.bmsport.com

where the master cylinder is mounted and runs

down the driver’s footwell and collects in the

rear passenger footwell. Not only do you get a

soggy footwell, the water can also damage the

master cylinder, so it’s really not great. Jags

opened up the driver’s side compartment and,

while it was dry, there was a visible tide mark

showing us that water had previously been in

there and when he pulled out the small rubber

pipe that sits within the drain hole itself it

was completely blocked with muck and gunk.

Once this had been thoroughly cleaned out

and replaced Jags poured some water into the

compartment and torrent streamed out of the

bottom of the car. Success!

Whilst at BMSport I also got the guys to

re-gas the 630i’s air con. It hadn’t been doing

a very good job of providing any actual cooling

and, sure enough, when they plugged the car

into their machine it informed us that the system

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