Quote:
Originally Posted by semcoinc
Yeah Danny, I spent several hours one night reading every step of these DIYs
https://www.germanautosolutions.com/..._diy.php#thumb
DIY: Timing Chain Guide & Timing Chain Replacement
and it was not exotic but a ton of tedious and precise work (not a stranger to this type of DIY work, but as a rookie to it, I'd sure feel better with a pro supervising me).
This year I tore into the front of my M62 to deal with a SEIZED alternator! I have never heard of such a thing but it happened on my X! I did all the stuff on the front of the engine, tensioners, pulleys, belts, every cooling hose, and of course the alternator.
Check out my post on that disaster here:
http://www.xoutpost.com/1093483-post44.html
My vehicle maintenance philosophy is to maintain to a long term up-time reliability standard and if I'm touching a 92K mile component during a job, I'm highly motivated to evaluate putting in a new one. After this alternator job I learned of the chain guides issue (which was just a little deeper from what I see), but that issue seems to occur from what I've seen, at much higher mileages.
At 6K miles or so/year, I'll be a few years away from guides, but if something changes, I'll get it out to you. :thumb up:
Mike |
You shouldn't have any issues with the chain guides until at least 160k miles. Even at that mileage the guides are usually fine unless the car has gone through a lot of heat cycles in a cold climate or hasn't been maintained well. The X5 that I bought had the guides die at 213k miles, which is a pretty long run when you think about it. I see some people replacing their guides at less than 120k miles which is completely ridiculous and unnecessary.
The thing about the chain guides is that they don't destroy the engine with no warning. They generally start to make a harsh metallic noise once the plastic on the guides is gone. At that point you can still run the engine, but it'll be noisy and you'll start seeing P0011/P0021 camshaft timing codes due to the chain slack. You'd have to run the engine with bad guides for a pretty long time for the chain to wreck the engine.
Both my X5 and the 740i have a horrible racket and P0011 codes when they run, but guess what, they still run fine on all cylinders! You could probably limp around in them for quite a while without wrecking the engine.
Here's a video I took of my X5's engine running with obviously bad chain guides:
Link if the embed doesn't work:
https://youtu.be/y6VZMN1TbII