After lots of codes. Bad news under valve cover

[Jaegze]

So I pulled off the valve cover gasket and the plastic cover is completely melted to the cam and cover. After cleaning up a bit to take a look, almost all of the brackets holding in the cam are broken.

Could this be causing no compression? Did it jump time and wreck valves? How should I go about diagnosing this??

[Emory39]

OOOOh noooooo!! Looks like the engine starved of oil in the cams. So it overheated and cracked the camshaft holders and camshaft itself.

[oldskewel]

I don't think it makes sense to do much thinking or diagnosing on this one. A used engine swap will almost certainly be better than trying to diagnose and rebuild that one. What if you fix 90% of the problems and miss a few?

Here's a pic of my 2001 M54b30, which I'm tearing down to hopefully replace the head gasket and not much more. This has about 190k miles. And I'm even wondering whether I should be doing this repair vs. swap.

[bcredliner]

As likely a result of driving for an extended period of time after catastrophic coolant loss. Oil pump could have gone out and engine run too long after losing oil pressure. Trouble with this kind of damage is there are so many areas that could be damaged that a complete overhaul would be the only way I would fix it. Cost to rebuild will be higher than finding a good used engine but if you plan on driving it for another 100,000 miles it might be worthwhile to do the rebuild.

[Jaegze]

I’m going to pick up another engine that was in a running 530i that was in a wreck so I plan on swapping engines. Just curious to why this would happen as I really don’t want to go through this again. I’ll pull it apart for fun when it’s out.

Good advice on trying to fix it. The running engine I got for a decent price which is certainly less than head gasket and cam fix alone.

[audiophool]

How often was the oil changed?

[Jaegze]

I recently bought the car is was coming up due for its first oil change with me. I knew the person that owned it and had owned it for a while and owns a mechanic shop. I assumed it was changed regularly but possibly not. The other cam was pretty clean as well as the vanos with only a very slight build up.

[lo_jack]

Ooof, that's hard to look at...I can only imagine what you felt when you saw it. Sorry about that.

On a positive note, it is apparently not too difficult to drop the entire front subframe with the motor et al still attached, take it apart, put the new motor back on, and jack the subframe back into place.

You are going to need the oil pan from your cooked motor and your front differential as well.

I am sure your pan will be full of engine gumbo, and I'd replace every gasket/seal on anything you have to swap over--so the output shaft seals, oil level sensor, all that good stuff.

And since you will have the 530 motor out, you might as well do the important gaskets you cannot get to easily once it's in your E53, like the rear main. The last thing you want to do is a motor swap and then leak oil from a $30 seal that takes 8 hours to get to.

[Jaegze]

Thank you! That is going to save me a bunch of searching. I’m getting my order list ready to go to get them in the mail. I am picking up the engine on Wednesday and hoping to have both engines in the garage on Friday to get everything moved over and gone through.

When I lifted the valve cover, I was like what is that it looks like melted plastic but I thought it was oil buildup. Took me a couple seconds to figure out what it was. I am going to go through the bottom with it. I already have a lot off the engine while I was trying to diagnosis it so it should pop out fairly quickly. Fingers crossed

[andrewwynn]

When I read "holding bracket" I'm thinking "does he mean bearing"?.

Looks like oil starvation on the cam bearings. Holy wow. Somebody mentioned also coolant starvation: without chilling the oil could get hot enough to burn and clog itself.