On my next maintenance session I decided to try and tackle that oil leak from the beginning of ownership. I swapped out the oil filter housing gasket, vanos line, power steering hoses, power steering fluid reservoir. While I was in there I also installed an oil pan heating pad, and a factory block heater to combat the winter temperatures and aid in cold starting. I believe I also changed out the fuel filter somewhere around this time as well (that was more annoying that I thought it would be).
Since my wife works from home and we live in a cold climate. She often doesn’t need to drive far and typically goes short distances to go shopping or run errands. I started to notice a mayo type of build up in the CCV lines and under the oil fill cap. This was cause for concern especially after I started reading about the potential for hydro locking the engine if the lines clog up to the point where oil backs up and into the intake. The solution I ended up going for was an M56 valve cover swap with the integrated CCV so this would delete the CCV under the intake. As soon as I got that valve cover on I no longer noticed this mayo type of build up in the engine anymore which was a great improvement.
Everything seemed to be going fine and dandy, and as murphy’s law would have it, when I needed to travel overseas for work for 5 months, about a week before I left the car decided to have major troubles. On a very cold day (-25C), I noticed the car was not pumping out heat. My coolant temp gauge had previously been acting up and not reading correctly due to a faulty sensor. As I was driving the engine began to stumble at a stoplight and then die. I proceeded to open the hood, and steam was coming from the engine bay. The car overheated due to complete coolant loss. After the car was brought home, some investigation revealed that the transmission cooler had popped out of the radiator and that’s where the coolant was completely lost causing the engine to overheat. After getting the car running again it ran fine until it got up to temp and then misfired on cylinders 3 and 4. I suspected I likely blew the head gasket after some further investigation. I brought it to our local euro mechanic, and he proceeded to quote me over 6k to replace the head gasket in the car. At this point my wife desperately needed a car and I didn’t have the time to dive into a head gasket replacement job. We tried selling the car as is for about 3k. We got a few bites but nobody wanted to deal with the headache even though the rest of the car was still in great shape. We made the decision to just keep the car in the garage and for my wife to buy a cheap beater car to get around while I was away for work.
I was in Latvia for about 5 months, and it seems for some reason they are the capital of E53s. I kept seeing fine examples of E53s everywhere that were still on the road and being kept alive. Plenty of M57 diesels. At the time I was highly considering just finding a clean diesel replacement and shipping it back to Canada. Here was a cool one I saw over there.
When I got back from overseas, recharged with energy and all the parts already waiting in the garage for me, I ripped the cylinder head off the M54 and took it to a machine shop to change the valve seals, check for cracks, deck the surface and clean it. While I was waiting for the machine shop to do that work I knocked another big project off my list which was replacing the shingles on my garage.
