Sankekur
///Member
So yesterday afternoon I head over to my good friend Mr uber's house for both car and non-car stuff. So as I am about to leave (this is now early evening) I start the car, it runs for a couple of seconds and I just say goodbye to uber, and as I look back at the instruments in my car I see that the battery light hasn't gone out, so I thought that's not right. And I think, the reasons for this could be a stuffed battery, stuffed alternator or the belt has come off. So I turn off the car opened the bonnet and low and behold the main belt is no longer on the pulley. So that would be the reason why the battery light did not go out, as there is no belt driving the alternator pulley so battery not charging. For those of you that don't know this is really bad as this the main belt in the front of the engine that also drives the powersteering pump and very importantly the water pump, so no belt no cooling.
So now what your (my) normal friends would do is offer to keep the car there till you can organize to have it towed to wherever you choose on say monday morning and give you a lift home. But this is uber we are talking here, and he and his dad had no problem with getting their hands dirty to get to the bottom of the problem (I did not even have to ask), I mean sure the belt is off, but is not really the problem, the problem is: Why is the belt off in the first place? So uber's dad fiddles around with the belt a bit, and is able to get it back on the pulleys. That is definitely not right as you should not be able to just slip the belt back on, you would need to de-tension the tensioner before you can do this, so something was not right.
Getting the car in front of the garage so that we can get more on light on the matter, we quickly found the the whole top hydraulic tensioner is almost completely loose. So we proceeded to remove the intake snorkel and the fan, to get a bit more room to work. Removed the bolts that just seemed to be barely keep the tensioner in place and removed the tensioner, and this is what we found:
The whole mounting bracket is broken in half:
The rest of the bracket:
But more shocking that this is this:
This is what was removed from the block, the remains of the big bolt that was supposed to hold the tensioner in place.
Thankfully we had uber's dad there to very skilfully remove the remains of the bolt from the block. (This would have taken me ages and I probably would have ended messing it up further)
And thanks to uber and his dad we were able to quickly and very painlessly sort out the biggest problem, now I just need to get parts to refit and get my car back on the road again.
I would just like to thank uber and his dad again for the help (on my car and for helping me out with 540i parts in same day) the hospitality and for their inconvenience of my car sleeping at their place for a while, while I source parts, I really appreciate it.
I am just glad this happened there and not on my home on the highway as you don't really want to stranded next to the highway in the middle of the night.
And my car now also gets to spend some time with the best possible company next to the e24 :=):
We ended off the evening with ice cream with chocolate sauce.
(Pic or it didn't happen :grin
Thanks a lot guys for everything, you guys are true BMW fanatics.
So now what your (my) normal friends would do is offer to keep the car there till you can organize to have it towed to wherever you choose on say monday morning and give you a lift home. But this is uber we are talking here, and he and his dad had no problem with getting their hands dirty to get to the bottom of the problem (I did not even have to ask), I mean sure the belt is off, but is not really the problem, the problem is: Why is the belt off in the first place? So uber's dad fiddles around with the belt a bit, and is able to get it back on the pulleys. That is definitely not right as you should not be able to just slip the belt back on, you would need to de-tension the tensioner before you can do this, so something was not right.
Getting the car in front of the garage so that we can get more on light on the matter, we quickly found the the whole top hydraulic tensioner is almost completely loose. So we proceeded to remove the intake snorkel and the fan, to get a bit more room to work. Removed the bolts that just seemed to be barely keep the tensioner in place and removed the tensioner, and this is what we found:
The whole mounting bracket is broken in half:
The rest of the bracket:
But more shocking that this is this:
This is what was removed from the block, the remains of the big bolt that was supposed to hold the tensioner in place.
Thankfully we had uber's dad there to very skilfully remove the remains of the bolt from the block. (This would have taken me ages and I probably would have ended messing it up further)
And thanks to uber and his dad we were able to quickly and very painlessly sort out the biggest problem, now I just need to get parts to refit and get my car back on the road again.
I would just like to thank uber and his dad again for the help (on my car and for helping me out with 540i parts in same day) the hospitality and for their inconvenience of my car sleeping at their place for a while, while I source parts, I really appreciate it.
I am just glad this happened there and not on my home on the highway as you don't really want to stranded next to the highway in the middle of the night.
And my car now also gets to spend some time with the best possible company next to the e24 :=):
We ended off the evening with ice cream with chocolate sauce.
(Pic or it didn't happen :grin
Thanks a lot guys for everything, you guys are true BMW fanatics.
