So much like guntherrex suggested it was time to go for a longer drive and see what all the fuss was about months ago because it seems to be running ok now and we all know that these things rarely heal themselves.

Few slow laps around town to warm up and it's time to get on the faster road.

About a couple miles down the road I was turning around in a parking lot as another vehicle passed me and I thought to myself "Man that guy's brakes smell"

oh wait....

I stick my head out the window and sure enough there's smoke coming from the rear driver's wheel. Wonderful

limping back home we go.


Now this isn't my first seized caliper on a BMW so I usually have a spare kicking around but there's some conflicting information on realoem if the rear calipers of the E83 will fit the E53 and as I was doing some googling I happened across a new rear caliper on Amazon for $50.

That's significantly cheaper than anything else I've seen. The pic n pull yard is $25 and who knows hold old the caliper is so let's see what a $50 caliper looks like shall we?















From what I see the machining is on par with other "name brand" aftermarket calipers and I don't feel there's anything sketchy about them so in they go.

Seeing as my last experience working with the brakes resulted with introducing a generous helping of air into the system and having a really hard time barely getting some pedal feel back I'm very apprehensive about taking off the brake line but whacha gonna do right?

During the caliper swap I tried a little bit different method than I usually do with leaving the bleeder screw open on the new caliper while I connect the dripping brake line back on. My theory being that the fluid might help bleed the air out of that caliper as gravity does it thing.

Caliper back on, bleeding procedure with my Motive bleeder / triggering ABS pump with ISTA and test drive time.

I cruised around the neighborhood slowly pumping the brakes repeatedly, checked for any leaks and time to go for another high speed run.

This time around everything seemed to go smooth and we made it back to the driveway without any incident. Yay!