Car Maintenance Part 4
This was supposed to be it, but I’ll have to wait at least another day before I can get the car out of the garage. I finished with the P/S reservoir and hoses today along with the main coolant hoses. The fan clutch, main fan, and radiator were reinstalled. For the cooling system, there are three hoses that have clamps that are very hard to get to so I decided to forego them. The distributor cap and rotor were also replaced. They even gave me a new plastic cap cover. Whoo hoo! Then things went awry.
I got the valve cover off and found it difficult to to reach the crankshaft hub because there was no space for a socket and ratchet. So I had to turn it with a wrench instead. This wasn’t so bad except I didn’t have enough clearance from the top of the engine bay so I had to turn it from underneath. This made it impossible to see the position of the valves. Then to my utter horror, I realized that the head bolts were of the hexagon variety (newer ones are torx head), which in the bimmer circle is a very bad thing — the old hex head bolts tended to snap right at the head of the bolt and bust a hole in the cylinder head thus leaking coolant right into the oil passages and vice versa. Fortunately after 15 minutes of vehement cursing and internet surfing, I found that the brand installed in my car, Kamax, was not the one that was prone to breakage: Ribe. This made things better, but I still had valves to adjust. I spent a good while trying to figure out how to use the feeler gauges to measure valve lash but gave up in the end. I gave into reason and called it a night.
I love working on cars but I’m tired of running in to the unexpected and unprepared. The garage is now filthy and totally disorganized. Hopefully tomorrow will be the last of it and I can test drive it a few days before the autocross on Sunday.