Danny's X5 4.6 Thread

[dannyzabolotny]

Last night, I started taking apart the engine in the X5. Removing the intake and air filter housing was quite easy, it was one 10mm bolt and 4 pop clips. That was the only thing I wasn't already familiar with, after that it was standard M62tu stuff.

I gotta say though, I didn't miss all the secondary air system crap. My Range Rover didn't have any of that stuff which was awesome. That got me thinking about how hard it would be to delete the whole secondary air system on the X5. The trickiest part would likely be coding it out of the DME so there wouldn't be any check engine lights for it. It would be so nice to get rid of the miles of vacuum hoses and that stupid little vacuum cleaner.



The ignition coils are all mismatched which is pretty funny, but as long as they work I don't particularly care. If they start dying I'll replace all of them at once. Everything was pretty clean and dry around the valve covers since the valve cover gaskets were replaced quite recently.

The valve covers were old but not particularly nasty, just typical worn M62tu valve covers. I dropped them off at my powder coating guy's place today, they should be ready late this week or early next week. I'm getting a nice two-tone black and silver finish done, it should turn out pretty sweet.

With the passenger side valve cover removed, I got my first look at the engine. It looked pretty decent and not overly varnished considering it has 213k miles.



Then I looked closer...



Yep, those are chain guide plastic pieces laying around there. The engine must have flung them up there at some point. Good thing I didn't drive this home from Seattle, eh?



These are most likely from the tensioner chain guide on the passenger side. From what I could see, the guide plastic is completely gone on both the U-guide and the tensioner guide. What's surprising is that the chain really doesn't have much slack, but that's probably because the driver's side plastic guide is still somewhat intact. This engine could have either run for another 5k or exploded on the next startup, haha.

The other valve cover came off pretty easily, but I had to push some cooling hoses out of the way first. This is what the engine looks like at this point, after about 2 hours of disassembly:



Next up is to drain the cooling system, remove the expansion tank, remove the fan shroud/fan, and I'm also considering removing the washer fluid reservoir as well since it's huge and annoying.

I've also decided that I'll be doing the valley pan gasket and the intake manifold gaskets since that won't require too much extra labor.