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Old 06-19-2021, 06:15 PM
bnfaustin bnfaustin is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2020
Location: Austin
Posts: 16
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What did you do to / for your E53 today??

It has been a marathon of abuse on my end lately. About 16 months ago, the remote control keyfob actuated lock/unlock died on my 2001 e53 4.4L. Me being naive, called my BMW German mechanic and mentioned it. He said that he was too busy that week but could look at it the next week. SO…. I drove the car for another 3 days, put a medical full O2 cylinder (with wheeled stand) in the car and drove home, planning to drop that cylinder off to a friend who needed it for his brother coming back from the hospital…. That evening, I go back out and try to unlock the car with my key, and the driver side (and only lock) on the car spins freely without any possibility of getting into the car….

Many searches and hours of trying to unlock the car myself, as well as having two lock smiths come out, ordering the special extension / air pillow unlock kits off amazon, trying the “double release of the door handle” etc., etc., etc. later, the car battery dies.

So now, it has been several days, I’m still locked out of the car, the door lock still doesn’t work and I have a dead battery. More YouTube and xOutpost searches, and I try:
- Taking the driver side wheel well apart,
- Taking the kidney out of the hood trying to get the hood to release,
- Removing the light out of the tail gate to try to recharge / jump start the car by connecting into the electrical system that way….

To no avail. So, I talk to my mechanics, and they recommend drilling out the lock and using a flat head screwdriver to get into the car that way….. Oops, that was a waste of time and money, I had already ordered the rebuild kit for the lock but that is now wasted money. Since the lock had completely failed trying to catch the lever with a screwdriver did nothing…. So, onto the “break the driver window to get into the car” that was 5 weeks ago….. Now the REAL fun begins :-):
- I tape the window every way possible to minimize the glass explosion,
- I broke the window and cleared up as much glass as feasible,
- Get into the car, FINALLY!!!!
- Open the hood, recharge the battery for about 25 min before it will start again, WOOHOOO!!! Put plastic on the window, clear more glass out of the interior while the car is idling to recharge the battery…. I shut the car down, go in, shower, come back out, finish sealing / reinforcing the plastic window while the car is idling some more, and the engine dies…. My guess, bad gas from sitting in the tank for so long…. Call my mechanic and have the X5 towed to his place since it will not restart even with a jump start…..
- Car sits around his lot over Memorial Day, he checks it out and says that it is the alternator that is dead….

So, I had the magical double whammy: Dead door lock and dying alternator, NO WONDER I could not get into the X5! He replaced the alternator, which entailed draining the fluids since it is “water” cooled, and recharged the battery and lo and behold, the beast came back to life happy as a clam. Now to tackle the broken window and drilled out door lock….
- Since we were already there, we replaced the clutch / pulley, serpentine belt and AC belts, since these were all showing signs of wear,
- I had already ordered a replacement window regulator for that driver side window since the window had been non-operational for a couple of months prior to this whole mess. Figured, if I’m going to break the window and have to replace it, might as well fix the darn thing as well,
- I ordered a replacement tinted window off eBay, and we replaced both the regulator, window and clips on the driver window, but…. It still would not work. Turns out it was the driver side control module that was dead, not the regulator, so…. Ordered one of those up and saved the old regulator since it was not dead after all…..
- Since I had the front driver side door card out, I glued all the panel anchors etc. back to the card so that it would go back onto the door more securely that it came off,
- We also replaced the door lock, so now I unfortunately have two separate keys one for the physical lock and one to use with the remote system and to start the car….
- Replacement driver side front control module arrives, I pop the old one out and pop the new one in, and all the windows worked, for a minute…. :-(, until the rear passenger window regulator gave a bad squeal, and the window dropped into the door…
- So, I ordered a new window regulator for the rear passenger window and off to YouTube to figure out how to take that door apart, including the privacy shade screens off of it,
- Several hours of taking things apart, glueing that door card anchors back onto the back of the panel,
- A couple of days of waiting and I received a replacement rear passenger door window regulator, so I assembled that, since I did not have a replacement clip for it (delays in shipping, they won’t get here until today), I took advantage of a trick that someone posted about using a plastic license plate retainer nut / screw to screw the window onto the regulator traveler instead of putting all that stress on the little brittle plastic clip that BMW engineers designed for the job. So, I clipped the last remaining nut retainer tab off the BMW OEM window clip, put the plastic license plate nut instead of the metal OEM nut, and used the license plate screw instead of the OEM M8 bolt, and VOILA!!! Fixed passenger side window, you say……
https://youtu.be/JwFFd7OJGaI

NOT SO FAST, turns out that window switch also died in the meantime, so that is ordered off eBay too :-),
- Thanks to [mention]mrbmwx5 [/mention]thread on how to reprogram the key fobs, I finally have both keys recharged and repaired to the remote and operational. After many YouTube searches, he had the magic sequence to get multiple key fobs re-paired to the central locking system in his battery replacement thread:
https://xoutpost.com/bmw-sav-forums/...y-key-fob.html

Bottom line, the moral of the story is:
- If your central locking system starts acting up, DO NOT IGNORE IT, check the driver door lock for signs of eminent failure and save yourself a TON of heart aches and $$$$
- If your car dies, don’t leave it for over a year sitting in a parking spot, sitting around does not help old brittle plastic bits

Thanks to all the other gear heads, especially [mention]andrewwynn [/mention]on this forum who have imparted so much knowledge and advice, without all the searches that I did and reading up, it would have been even more expensive and more painful to get the beast back to working order!

Last edited by bnfaustin; 06-19-2021 at 08:24 PM.
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