Spec X5 Overland Build

[Henn28]

With the block ready to go, I decided to build it up in my shop, then move it over to the garage I belong to, where it will live until I find a suitable car to graft it into. My solution to a workbench that I could also roll it out amd load into to my X5 eventually is as follows…cheap but effective:


First up is the small oil valve in the back of the block. I can’t find mention of it in TIS anywhere, so I torqued it like an oil drain plug 18 ish ftlbs.



Then it’s getting down to the business of installing bearing shells and after taking a look at my collection of crank shells, I realize I have too many cap shells, and no crankcase side (grooved) shells. Clearly I screwed up the part numbers when I ordered them, but this gives me an opportunity to take stock of the crazy color coded bearing system BMW uses and what I need. That’s when the wheels fell off my bus. Up until this point I thought I had this all sorted out , thanks to some great help from forum members, but after looking at TIS, my notes and pics from disassembly, and RealOEM, and the old bearing shells that I kept, I’m quite confused.


The shells come in three sizes (.25mm increments) to account for cranks that have been machined and each of those three sizes has three color options (yellow, green and white). Since I measured my crank I know it has virtually zero wear so I’ll need OE sized shells (70mm). TIS says the block gets 5 yellow shells of the appropriate size (70mm for me) so that’s easy, and the caps get shells of the appropriate size (70mm) and color. The color is denoted by a dot on the crank, next to the journal it corresponds to. In my case:
journal 1 = Yellow
journal 2 = green
journal 3 = green
journal 4 = yellow
journal 5 = TBD (no legible color dot here so my plan was to use a yellow shell since I mic’d the crank and all journals were 70mm (OE) spec. I also planned to plastiguage this journal, per TIS just to be sure I shouldn’t use a different color)

So I think I’ve got it suitcased and go to find in TIS and write down shell part numbers (there are 24 separate part numbers for top and bottom shells to account for sizes and colors) and decide just as a backup I’ll see if the old cap shells I left in caps have numbers on them. In fact they do, when is when I lost all SA.

The number stamped in the back of the shell includes all three possible color combos…


In the case above (bearing 5 cap) the number has the last three digits for yellow, green and white stamped into it. In this case “…908, 909, 910). I thought maybe there is a little tic mark next to the actual color of the shell, but I don’t see one. So obviously the size matters, but does any of this color crap matter?


So I ordered the five yellow block side shells (the ones with the oil grooves) in the OE (70mm) size that I somehow screwed up months ago in my original order, but I expect all three color part numbers will be stamped on the back. These shouldn’t matter as much though since TIS says to use all yellow shells in the block. I guess I’ll use the cap shells I have on hand and revert back to using plastiguage to check the clearance. Happily I saved the original bolts.

perhaps when the M62 first came out the colors denoted a very, very small difference in shell size to accommodate slight crank differences. However bmw found that as they transitioned to very lightweight oils for fuel economy, it simply didn’t matter any more so they did away with the color scheme in practice (but not in TIS or part numbers! ).

who knows. Since I hung on to the original crank bearing bolts I may plastiguage them all, just to be sure I’m in spec.

So I’m at a standstill until my 5 shells for the block side come in.