Put an E70 rear wiper arm on the wife’s 4.8iS

To get a captive audience for cooling system parts maybe? Who knows. They stopped this 2 bar bullshit as well. It’s just retarded.

Listen, 2 bars is literally 30psi, with 200 degree coolant in rubber hoses. The system also doesn’t run at 30psi. 30 psi is overpressure. That’s when the cap is supposed to release to save the cooling components. There is no way, our systems need to get that high to blow out.

Like stated before. I’ve been running 1.4 for years now, no side effects. 5 years about. Nothing blowing up. And if some indi decides to take it upon themselves to top off your cooling system, you can bet your ass you will be replacing shit with a 2 bar cap.

Oh and while driving, would you rather see steam coming out the cap, and from your hood, or would you be more impressed that the 2 bar cap held its own, while your plastic radiator side blew out under your car and dumped all its shit.

My radiator actually started leaking while I had the 1.4. Cracked at the plastic side seam. So a failure is still possible. Just not dramatic. I still managed to top off and drive from NJ to Brooklyn.

Lots of people saying how they inspect cooling system every week. Yea that’s nice. Hope those people are also inspecting valley pans, hidden seals and soon to fracture expansion tanks.

For me, the 1.4 is a no brainer. There is some dude that was selling 1.2 bar caps. But the 1.4 is direct from bmw and a fraction of the price. But if there was a 1.2 bar cap from them, I promise I wouldn’t flinch when buying it.

^I agree. 1.4 sounds more reasonable than 2.0. Glad I happen to have a few e30 caps lying around here. Also need to install my lower temp thermostat before summer gets here. All the cooling system is here in a box so all will get installed then and hopefully the new parts never have to see crazy pressures.

BMW used to use a cold fill line and hot fill line. You would fill to cold and then when the system pressurized it would raise to the hot line. They had a vent nipple with a hose venting to atmosphere above the hot line in the event of an over fill or an over pressure event. I never had any appreciation for it until they did away with it.

So the point of 2bar is to keep the coolant liquid.

Although coolant certainly has a higher boiling point than water, for water these are the numbers:

At 2 bar, water boils at 120C (248F), just about the max operating temp of X5

At 1.4 bar, water boils at 109.44c (229F)

So the issue is: if the car gets to 110C, it will vent with 1.4 cap. That could be a good thing by giving you the obvious sign that it's running hot but 110 is barely over temp.

I still won't deny the logic of keeping all those mentioned 20 yr old parts at a substantially lower pressure, and the only time I've seen an x5 > 110c was when the ET split wide open and dumped the coolant.


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Truth. But we run bmw magic blue coolant as well. So that brings the boiling temp up. Even not at equal 50-50 mix, the temp will be decently over max operating temp. I know I’m not losing coolant, so I feel safe with it.

Unless you vent it's a good plan.

I didn't remove the lock actuator but rather the lock cylinder the key goes into because it was in the way of the top clip unclipping from the cable support..

I put some T6 on things that moved in there and now the BMW handle feels like a Rolls handle..


On the subject of these cooling systems, why do these BMW engines have to be so scary?

You would think that with all of the wires they put in these cars they could have put in a coolant system pressure sensor to throw a big warning on the dash if it ever drastically decreased or something..


How do these things usually blow?
Do you have time to see steam or any warning before your engine blows a HG or cracks the head if you aren't constantly staring at the temp gauge?
Do you even notice before its too late?

The temp gauge on x5 is useless. By the time it ever moves it's too late and usually means a catastrophic failure of some part usually the coolant reservoir.

There is a way to turn the non gauge been into a gauge.

Usually I notice a problem when it's cold outside and I get no cabin heat because the t-stat fails open. Unfortunately if that part faults in summer you might drive a few thousand miles in open loop running rich. I'll like to put scanner on and drive with Realtime temp display at least monthly

It depends what E53 you are talking about. High level clusters in equipped cars will give you a low coolant warning likely well before the engine over heats. That's how I caught my expansion tank crack hemorrhage before doing any damage to the N62. From what I have read though, lower equipped M54 vehicles weren't equipped with a coolant level sensor or a light in the cluster to notify of low coolant. Pretty dumb if you ask me as EVERY other BMW I have ever seen has a coolant warning light + sensor at the bare minimum. :rolleyes: