How the F*** am I supposed to find replacement door lock actuator bolts? Not one but TWO of them stripped on my driver-side DLA. None of the parts websites seem to have them. And yes, I am used a Torx driver and not a Hex.



I am absolutely at wits end with this german garbage car. Not only this, but the slidey part of one of the electrical connectors on the driver's side window switch broke and the connector will not come off now.

Junkyards…they’re full if E53 X5’s

Try row52.com

It turns out that the buttery-soft bolts, despite me being unable to remove them with any of a dozen hex or Torx bits, or a flathead, or anything else I tried, are loose enough that I could easily turn them out by grabbing them with vice grips.



Now that I have the new DLA in... nothing works. All my other door-lock actuators worked with the old DLA and when the new DLA was unplugged... and now nothing works no matter what I do. The door lock rod on top doesn't move whether I try to push it in by hand or electronically. (Note that nothing works whether my brand new BMW DLA is plugged in or unplugged.) I am afraid to shut the driver's door, because I don't want it to get locked closed without being able to reopen it.

I logged on with PA soft and cleared the code. Do I need to do anything to make the new DLA work? Pelican's write-up doesn't say anything about coding.

What am I missing here guys? (Besides the obvious that I should have walked or ran away from this car instead of buying it)

OK, after taking it apart I believe the part of the DLA where the driver key cylinder sticks into was misaligned, preventing any of the door-locking functions from working. That's my best guess because I didn't fix anything and after taking it apart and reassembling it a few times it worked.



Now to try to steal some DLA bolts from elsewhere on the car since I won't have time to scour a junkyard for at least a couple of weeks. Hopefully they don't melt like butter like the others did. What a joke.



I think the worst part about this car is not that everything on it breaks all the time, it's that a simple job like replacing a door lock actuator (Pelican's website says "1 hour" and has only three steps) always takes 4x the time that it should on any other car. Always, guaranteed, simple jobs turn into ridiculous disasters. Here I am four hours later, almost the entire day wasted, and now I still have to visit a junkyard because BMW doesn't sell the bolts that are made of soft cheese and disintegrate.

What did you do to / for your E53 today??
 

Bolt is M6x12mm. You can replace with a similar bolt from hardware or auto store.

https://www.fcpeuro.com/products/bmw...er-51219130334

Exact part.

You likely had the DLA not in the center position glad you lucked into fixing it.

You can cut a slot and make a giant flat head screw out of the stripped bolts.

Thanks for digging that up... neither Pelican nor FCP could figure it out. I suppose I should have gone straight to newtis.

I used RealOEM then search duck duck go with part number and bmw and a top result was fcp. Good price!

Got my new o2 sensors installed, but not my wheel speed sensor due to my ass catching fire [emoji28]

0900....https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/202...ef8b146237.jpg

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Wow, it's been a month and roughly 600 miles since I had to do anything to my e53 other than add gas. Even then it was tires, nothing mechanical...

Of course now I'm sure I've cursed myself. I'm sure it'll be fine for the drive home from work this morning...

Nothing substantial. Just changed the oil and filter (Liqui-Moly 5W-40) and regreased the steering half-shaft.