BMW E46 M3 Maintenance

Had this little BMW in the shop this week for a laundry list of maintenance items that it needed to be caught up on.

A pile of suspension parts ready to refresh the car! Bilstein HD shocks, new upper mounts, all new rubber, reinforcement plates, etc.

Rear shocks in place.

And front shocks in as well.

Also on the list was to replace the front belts, tensioner, and rollers to get rid of some pulley noise.

New main accessory belt pulleys going on.

When I picked the car up, it ran overall pretty crappy. Suspension was shot, lots of vibration from the engine, etc. As soon as I put it up in the air, I noticed the engine was sitting on the front sway bar, so that told me the engine mounts were collapsed. Support the motor, drop the carrier down slightly, and replace the mounts.

Passenger side mount is the easier of the two.

Driver side is a little harder to get to, but not bad.

Supporting the engine from below to change the mounts.

Passenger mount out of the car.

And as you can see, there is a little difference in mount height between new and old.

And with new mounts in, the engine is no longer resting on the sway bar.

The AC was also not working well, and someone had put some dye in the freon at some point, so I found the AC compressor covered in yellow dye, so I replaced that while in there. Unfortunately, that didn’t 100% solve our issue. I could not only feel cold ac at the vents, but also warm air, so I figured we had a problem with the heater control valve not closing all the way and allowing heat to the cabin which canceled the effectiveness of the A/C.

And while in here, new coil packs and spark plugs! After that, it was out the door!