Or look at the title? Registration? Hear it?

I thought that was just the nature of carbon pads vs metallic. Mine are mild bite early as well. Not sure if it's 1/4, but definitely less initial bite than OEM were. Either way... amazing value and good braking performance. The corvette guys track these. Not that I would do the X5, but I probably would not feel unsafe doing so on a fresh set of these.

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

I bought my x5 via auction. It was the only one in about 700 cars that was in my budget that I was interested in. I didn't have x5 even on my radar because I made my list based on historical service records literally i used a top ten most reliable used car list. Not surprising to anybody reading this: X5 is not in that list!

I actually didn't even know what engine options existed until I got the car.

In the end: $5800 for 128,000 3.0 with a nearly unused interior: the drivers seat had been replaced and apparently the car was used for commuting mostly solo. Sport suspension.

In addition the engine didn't have a single speck of oil on the block or on the skid plate. I've literally never seen an engine so clean in my life. (I did of course check out the engine bay, but with no knowledge of x5 and no badges it was not obvious)

The check engine light was on, so I figured that suppressed the price but we got in a bit of a bid war that cost me $800 extra could have had for $5000.

The SES light was from CPS which cost me $105 and solving introduced me to xoutpost. It took about two hours to install because it's a bitch to thread that sucker under the intake manifold it likes to get stuck.

Having no payment and averaging about $80/month in repairs means that I effectively get about 80mpg by having no car payment and $40/mo full coverage insurance with $0/250 deductible. I love my car.

Even today when I had an insane roller coaster day:

I forgot to tighten the output terminal from my alternator I just refurbished. The symptoms were exactly the same as the malfunctioning alternator before I replaced the brushes and slip rings!

So just about every light on the dash came on in sequence including two new ones: the TRANSMISSION was the scariest but the EML eventually came on.

The high resistance of the loosely hooked on but no nut had so much power & voltage lost that I was only getting 12.5 volts and at some points more like 11.8.

I wiggled wires and got normal ish voltage so started driving with voltage shown on dash command real time.

Got to Home Depot and took the air box off so I could get a better look. I dropped my flashlight and it turned off and I saw an orange light down behind the alternator. I thought it was just light leak from running lights coming though. I turned off the lights and the glow was still there.

I discovered what the glow was "the hard way" when i grabbed the output terminal and burned the inverse of the threads into my thumb and finger! (The glow was the terminal and/or the wire eye glowing From being that hot !)

So after ten minutes I gave up trying to determine the size of the damn nut and took an educated guess: M8-1.25 FYI.

Ecstatic that I solved it and with voltage clamped to 13.6 above 1500 RPM and holding 12.5 at idle, I head on home.

On the way home engine stuttering at idle even stalled. I had to use two feet to drive so could keep From stalling.

EML light came on! Aaaaarghh!

No SES but a scan shows about six pending codes including speed sensor intermittent and the classic bank one and two lean.

About 20 min. drive home and park and open the hood and it only took seconds to determine the problem: to reach the alternator connections I had to pull up on the air intake hose and I managed to pull the air intake boot off the intake body!

It is darn near impossible to get to the hose clamp for that boot: the previous mechanic installed from under the car! I literally had to cut the older one in half to remove so I could get to the underside clamp.

It's infinitely easier to work on intake boot with DISA valve removed.

Here is the magic how i tightened the boot clamp:
https://uploads.tapatalk-cdn.com/201...080ce26bbe.jpg

A long straight extension and TWO flex connectors!

Also you have to remove the small boot connector to get to the big hose clamp.

So: once the alternator actually was ATTACHED electrically and the air intake boot was likewise attached to the car everything came right back to life and engine is working perfectly!

Tomorrow: full exchange of brake fluid. Yay.


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Fluid refresh: front/rear diffs and MT @126k. Shifting feels much smoother than before. I ended up using redline ATF but might go MTF or 50/50 in the future.


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That may be. I'm going to bleed the brakes just in case it's related to the pedal travel - didn't open the system but had some fluid leak from under the reservoir cap.

That aside, I absolutely agree with the value and performance of the BrakeMotive kit. I'm not tracking the X5 either but I'm comfortable with these handling anything I'd throw at them. Beyond the quality parts these guys were just great to work with - fast and free shipping, domestic company, great communication, etc. I

Installed a Dinan cold air system and replaced the spark plugs as per required maintenance. Looking forward to the results.

Let us know your results. I did a full fluid flush when I did my brake job so I'm curious if you come up with a different pedal feel after the fluid change.

Last year I did a full brake fluid flush with Motul DOT 5.1 when I put my stainless steel lines on the E53.

http://pi.roostin.com/images/items/l...L0003/X001.jpg

Much firmer pedal feel but I attribute that to the SS lines :dunno:

Been running DOT 5.1 in my E46 for several years with no issues and great performance.

Will do likewise with my E90 which is just turning 50K miles.

Mike

rear bearing :)
 

Well, today I decided to do my rear bearings on the e53 , if any one decides to try this at home, trust me its not easy :)
started off with the car on the ground and removed the main drive shaft nut , which came off pretty easily , wohoo I thought I could be on here, jacked car up and took calliper off and then removed disk , and here it went downhill :(
rear disks are knackered, so are the pads, but I've bought new pads, just needs to get new disks now. any whoo.
then you have to remove the driveshaft from the hub flange 2 hours later using a 5 lb sledgehammer it moved. then used a slide hammer to split the bearing (45 minutes).
then after another hour I finally got the old bearing off the hub, easy bit over
then tried to remove the old bearing off the car. following the autodoc video on YouTube started taking the suspension and stuff together, jacked lower arm up then BANG
bloody jack moved dropped everything to the floor, airbag fully extended thought oh FFS. I'm going to have to sort this out , ended up taking the entire inner hub off the car as I couldn't get to the 4 bolts. and then draining the air on the right side bag to deflate it so it wasn't pushing everything down, removed the 4 bearing bolts, so now I got a x5 in bits awaiting parts
I'm hoping the airbag will just push back up into itself I'm thinking reassembly is going to be a pain aswell :)
I took the speed sensor out of the hub it was filthy. should these be clean?
but to top it all , on way to parents, on motorway (70) car jolted threw up a trans failsafe error ,car felt like it was firing on 6 ,juddering ,tick over in D was 400rpm, I thought It was going to stall, no power on acceleration on take off, so needs codes reading on that one , that's ontop of the dsc inactive it threw up last week after the mass rain ( 3 yellow warning lights) (see above regarding speed sensor)
not touching it now till weekend, ill edit this with reassembly :)
nackered Steve

I had all the same errors from bad voltage regulation. If trans goes into limp mode you get gears 3&4 that's it.

Make sure you have 13+ volts and engage parking brake and turn engine off and on a couple times to reset trans.

Speed sensor is hermetically sealed its life is always going to be one of gunk but if it's wacked it will trifecta your dash lights : brake, dsc, abs. (But also voltage dip below 12v will trifecta the dsc). If brake is yellow that's most likely a sensor or voltage blip. If brake is red than low brake fluid (ask me how I know)

I've seen a couple ways to remove the bearing and for diy the easier way is to remove the cv axle from the differential so you don't have to deal with the spring (air bag) pressure which normally is dealt with using an additional jack.

I think it may be possible to get to the e-torx using a couple flex adapters rather than removing cv or dropping the suspension.

Im going to be replacing rear bearing on my wife's x5 within a week or so I will post my solution if I figure out an improved method.

Thanks for the head up on the slide hammer difficulty. I think I will use the method I used for the front bearing an push the bearing apart using some long bolts through the lug holes.

For re installing I've beefed up my bearing press that used to self destruct. Had a 3/4 " threaded rod good for 23,000# but apparently it takes 30-40,000# to press front x5 bearing so I now have grade 8 1" bolts good for 62,000#


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