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Old 05-13-2013, 11:21 PM
gregk gregk is offline
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Join Date: May 2013
Location: Myanmar
Posts: 16
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Thanks to all for these posts. I live in a remote area of the world and they helped me so much.

For others who may have difficulty getting parts try this website. Great prices.
Schmiedmann - Styling/Tuning/Spare parts for BMW X5 (E53) - New parts

Here is a little story that may amuse you all. I will post it all somewhere else later.

But thankyou all for helping me to get my car going again.

BM Trouble You.

Last year with the easing of import restrictions for cars into Myanmar
we imported a used 2006 BMW X5 from Germany. This was the beginning of
my journey into how hard it is to run a luxury car without back up in
a far off country

The car has always run well and then one day the front drivers door
handle broke. Nothing special involved just lifted the handle to open
the door and the mechanism inside the door broke and this was the
beginning of a year long saga. So I searched online found forums with
owners with the same problem and the solutions arent hard to find.

I found an expat here who has a German Car repair shop and we order
the parts wait a few months and it gets fixed. But then I started to
notice other things wrong with the car. Bad wear on the rear tyres
noises from the pulleys in the engine bay, airconditioning.

Ok so I look at the tyres and then notice that the whole car is out of
whack. The front left tyre sticks out an inch more from the side of
the car than the front right. The rear is the opposite it is in on one
side and out on the other. I show many people we put it up on lifts
and inspect underneath. The guys with lots of experience have no
answer.

I try a guy who has a alignment place at the side of a road for
Japanese cars. He puts it up on stands over a pit gets underneath
shakes a few things and then shows me a rubber bush that is obviously
broken. Well spotted. He showed me some other rubbers he thought were
bad too and told me to fix that up and bring it back.

So at this stage I have this horrible dangerous wear on the rear, the
front wheel on the left is sticking out 1 inch more than the left and
the rubbers are broken. At this point I had to park the car and not
use it because of the rear tyres problem.

Months go by as I try to get parts. I have a shopping list and visit a
dealer in Bangkok but the prices are too high for my family so I
slowly whittle it down to major stuff. My wife goes to take the car to
the swimming pool within 1km of our house and the passenger door
handle breaks. Time to add one more part.

I find a company in Denmark that I can order parts for this model
online and ship to anywhere in the world and the parts are 1/3 what
they are in Thailand.

Then I found a new workshop near my house who has only just opened
up. I make friends with them and they have an alignment section. I get
on the internet and download videos from youtube which show how to
adjust the rears on x5s which have a common problem of eating tyres. I
show these guys and we play with the adjustments and by eye we make
the car drivable again. One problem solved.

I get my rubber bushes for the front from Denmark and put them in.
That fixes a shake in the front, but there is still this wheel
sticking out an inch on one side. We test, we shake, we probe. Then we
start to measure this point to that point. Top to bottom clearances
from everything on both sides of the car. As we do we realise the rim
on the left is sitting different to the one on the right. One inch
different. There is nothing wrong with the suspension to make this
happen it is the rim. We look at the rims one has a little F on it
and one has R. Front and Rear. The tyres are all the same size on all
four and the spare, but the penny drops and we realise the rims on
BMWs are different from Front to Rear. One side of the car the rims
are on backwards. Simple fix to rotate the wheels. Nightmare finished.
Problem solved high fives all round. A good 10 people and experts
would have looked at this and no one noticed.

Personally I have never seen a car with different curves in the
spokes of the rims from front to back in my life before.
Have you? Keep it in mind. I can see how cool the engineers at BMW
must that thought they were when they invented it. I bet it improved
the handling too. I wonder if they thought of the consequences if
someone got it wrong. It is not even mentioned in the Owners manual.

BM Trouble U.
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