Quote:
Originally Posted by Nyc Dito
She cleans up really well!! Nice work!
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Thanks
I actually detailed her even further this past weekend, I just haven't had a chance to take any good pics yet. Did a thorough wash with Ammo Foam, dried everything off, put on another coat of Ammo Spit spray wax, used Back To Black on all the plastic trim pieces, Invisible Glass on all the windows, and Ammo Mud tire shine on the tires. She looks really sharp now!
I went to the weekly car show on Saturday afternoon. It was pretty empty initially but as the sun set and the temps dropped it got pretty busy. Lots of cool cars there as always. My buddy's Imola Red 740il is parked next to my X5 in this pic:
I also did another quick repair last night. Over the weekend I noticed that when I was at a red light or otherwise idling I would feel an occasional bump. It almost felt like somebody was lightly nudging the car from underneath. I tried shifting into P and N but that didn't affect it, so I ruled out the transmission. I then tried turning off the AC which didn't affect it either. I then pulled out my laptop with INPA and started scanning for clues. There were no obvious errors or codes, but I did notice that the engine RPM fluctuated ever so slightly when I felt the bumps, so I narrowed it down to being an engine issue. The digital readouts didn't tell me anything new, so I switched to the analog readouts to try and make some sense of it all. The roughness graph is what clued me in to what was going on.
Most of the cylinders looked fine, but cylinder 7 was quite a bit rougher than the others:
I noticed that every single time I felt a bump, the cylinder 7 roughness bar would jump up. Now that I narrowed it down to a specific cylinder, I went through my mental checklist of what could have gone wrong. The spark plugs are all brand new NGK Iridiums installed about 1000 miles ago, so that wasn't the issue. The injectors were all good too, so I ruled that out as well. The only unknown was the ignition coil, which dated back to 2002. Before the X5 broke down I had ordered a new Bremi ignition coil just in case, since it was only $35. I fished that out of my parts box and replaced the cylinder 7 ignition coil with the new coil. It was a little tricky with how hot the engine was, but I got it done without burning myself. After I replaced the coil, I started the engine and would you look at that, it's now buttery smooth!
It looks like the original ignition coil on cylinder 7 was on its way out, but it wasn't bad enough to throw a misfire code yet. Swapping the coil seems to have solved all of the problems and I have not had any issues since then. I'm sure I would have eventually gotten a CEL for the bad coil, but it was nice to fix the problem before it became more serious.