N00b with an e39

[pgnuta 4]

Hi All,

Just introducing myself, I've recently bought an e39 540i as a second car for convenience and a bit of a project.

I've been out of the performance car scene for some years now with a young family and home ownership taking my primary focus but recently made the decision that if i needed a second car then it was going to be a fun toy. I've previously had a bit of a spotty history with cars:

• 1980 Mazda 323
  My first car, not great in any respect, certainly not fast but i think that was by design. Totally awesome though because with it came my freedom.
  
• 1990 Suzuki Swift
  A hopeless car, totally top heavy, but the envy of others at the time because it was quite new. Only really got it because my parents were going to trade it in otherwise so sold it to me cheap ($3000).
  
• 1993 Nissan Primera 2.0TE
  My pride and joy from when i bought it for $12,000 till when i rolled it off a cliff in a late night drive to Christchurch from Nelson via the Lewis Pass. In the invervening years i'd poured tens of thousands into it in the form of body kit bits, performance upgrades, adjustable suspension, competition winning stereo installation. I vowed never to spend that much money modifying a car again.
  
• 1993 Nissan Silvia Qs
  The car that saved me from my boy racer years. It had a totally pointless body kit that hit the ground whereever you went and god help you if you encountered a rabbit on a dark road in the middle of the night because that would be the end of the front bar. I struck up a good relationship with a local paint and body shop as a result though and they would repair and repaint by front bar for $180 a shot. I soon realised that this car wasn't any fun to drive because it was so stressful and i was driving my Honda City Turbo more so i sold this one.
  
• 1982 Honda City Turbo MK1
  What as awesome fun little car, i'll still tell anyone that will listen that if you haven't driven one of these then you're missing out. They have a good power to weight ratio with ~100HP to 700KG, but ultimately they are just good fun to thrash around and because they cost next to nothing you just don't care if you do anything to it.
  
• 1986 Honda City Turbo MK2
  The next logical interation, i picked this one up from Westport where it had been thrashed to within an inch of it's life. It came to me coloured blue and with serious frontal damage. Unfortunately because they are so rare and parts are hard to come by it had to go to the panel beater to have its front wings unmangled. While it was there i thought i'd get an complete respray in a rather fetching 'old gold' colour. After fitting huge (for the car) 15" Civic Type R mags, a rediculously over-speced Greddy type R blow off valve and the remnants of the stereo system from my poor old Primera it went about making a reputation for itself. The sort of reputation that in all honesty wasn't totally warrented. While it was a good performing and very loud car it was far from the Holden Commodore destroyer that everyone else seemed to think that it was.
  
  I lost so much money on this car but it was worth every cent, i bought it for $1800, spent $1500 painting it, sold it to a rally driver for $1500, bought it back again several years later with a different engine for $3000 and eventually blew it up and sold it as scrap for $200. Since then i've seen it back on the road again so it seems that it wasn't quite as dead as i thought.
  
• 1998 Mitsubishi Legnum 2.5V6
  This was an oportunistic purchase from my father who was upgrading to a VR4 Legnum (that i also bought from him, see below). It was a good towing car and really marked my decline towards sensible family cars. Not really very good or bad at anything, ok for towing i guess and fecking thirsty on the fuel.
  
• 2003 Mitsubishi Legnum VR4 Type S
  This was an excellent car! All the power in the world and all the space of a big car. I once wound it so far off the clock that the needle came back around to the zero mark again, so much for the 180kph speed limiter i thought it had. It also had active yaw control which Mitsi stole from the Evo so it was damn near impossible to crash. I would frequently throw it into corners at far to higher speeds, plant my right foot and the computers would sort everything out. Ultimately the turbos started to get a bit long in the tooth and so I traded it in on a Ford Falcon. This one lost serious money over the few short years my family owned it. Bought for $20k by my father and sold to me 18 months later for $12k, i drove it like my hair was on fire for a couple of years and sold it for $3000.
  
• 2001 Nissan 200SX Spec R Manual
  My dream car ever since i first saw it in the showroom in 1999, i finally was in the financial position to buy one so i thought "what the hell". I found a mint condition unmodified one and it was everything i always dreamed it would be. I unfortunately got a job a short time later that came with a company car and so this sat in the garage one day until i made the stupid mistake of thinking i should liquidate it because i wasn't driving it. What a stupid person i was. I didn't lose much money on it though because i kept it original and i think that people appreaciate that.
  
• 2006 Ford Falcon XR6
  I bought this as a family car to replace our aging Legnum VR4, ironically before we had a family. It was as you'd expect in most respects, solid, heavy, powerful, unreliable. We sold up from the suberbs and moved to the country while owning this and so it had to go to be replaced with a more practicle 4x4.
  
• 2003 Mitsubishi Challenger 2.8TD
  This is a good car for the reasons that we bought it. Its got lots of grunt for towing, lots of space for the family (now with two kids) and lugging stuff around, lots of 4x4 capability for the odd ocasion that its required.
  

So this brings me to my decision to buy a BMW. I was ok the lookout for a cheap car to get me backwards and forward from the train station. We were expecting another child and my wife didn't want to have to bundle everyone in the car all the time to ferry me to the train. I eventually settled on a BMW after doing a bunch of research and driving my brother-in-laws 318i. It seemed like the best power to weight ratio would be in a 540i and the best engine came out after 1998 so there was a base line requirement. Further research seemed to indicate that there was actual value in the m-sport pack if you could find a good one for the right money. Money was of course a major concern and i initially had a $3000 budget for a second car, this budget went out the window fairly quickly and i resolved to spend 'what was required to get a good one' even if i needed to walk to the train station for a few months and save some more money.

Then one fateful sunday night this one came up on trademe.

It wasn't the m-sport model but it was only $4000 so i jumped on it. It is a 1999 e39 540i with the M62TU Engine and 216,000kms on the clock. It was in Wanganui so i got a friend to go and look at it, he seemed to like it and so unfortunately skipped the AA check that i should have done and talked myself into buying it sight unseen.

Since receiving it i've discovered a few things wrong with it which i'm slowing going through trying to fix.

• Misfire on cylinder number 2.
• Airbag light on.
• Parasitic battery drain, usually over several days but sometimes catastrophically over the space of about 30 minutes.

So thats my story, sorry for the lack of photos, the car is currently in bits in my garage but i'll be sure to get some more photos when its back together. I'm really looking forward to driving it with all 8 cylinders firing because i haven't had that opportunity yet.

[BreakMyWindow 1870]

Congrats on the purchase.

In my 5 years of experience with the exact same model I had one big repair job which was the timing chain guides. Mine gave up at 250k.

If you're handy with IT stuff get an old laptop, buy a diagnostic cable of ebay and install INPA and DIS. These tools should help you track down your mis fire issue and Air bag problem.

At that age and mileage expect to replace all cooling system components including the valley pan (inlet manifold off job) Oil leaks (valve covers, CCV) and suspension bits and pieces.

Torque converters and transmissions sometimes play up.

the water cooled alternator is rebuildable.

That's about all the $$$$ stuff I can think of. Enjoy it otherwise!

[Event Horizon 12]

Nice car pedigree!

Don't worry about skipping the AA report, their reports are worth about as much as a child's crayon drawings.

[pgnuta 4]

Cheers for the info. My brother-in-law is fairly good with cars and i've had quite a bit of experience. I've got an ELM327 bluetooth OBDII adapter and am using that with an android phone to diagnose the cylinder misfire. I picked up 4x cheap NGK BKR6EIX plugs on trademe last night for $30 and will have to source 4x more from somewhere. I will go through and replace the plugs which don't look like they've ever been done because the service book is fairly complete and the plug i pulled from cylinder 2 is the original BMW stamped NGK plug. It smelled fuelly so its definitely a spark problem. The other plan i had in that respect was to swap one of the coils over and see if the problem moves to another cylinder.

As for the airbag... The light wasn't on when i first got the car but various battery drains and disconnections later there it is. Probably not also helped by me trying to fix a car-seat in there with no idea what i was doing (car seats are another story entirely by all accounts). I plan to grab an airbag reset tool from trademe, i think they go for around the $60 mark.

And the battery drain thing, i'm just pulling random fuses to see if i can stop it happening. Close monitoring of the battery voltage seems to indicate that it drops from a stable 12.8V down to around 12.1V within 48 hours. So far i've pulled the stereo and sat-nav fuses but i've also read elsewhere that the FSU is probably the culprit. The fuses for the FSU are hard to reach by the sounds but i haven't tried that hard yet.

[qube 3568]

cool history of cars. and i am liking the 540 with the m5 style wheels! seems like it will be a fun/annoying project but im sure you will love the journey! and problems post up in the right sections of this forum, lots of nice people here welcome

[Guest cortez]

Hi there nice ride and read ... similar problems mine had as for the misfire I just took her up to 220km/h misfire gone! . mines on 342ks and a daily driver runs like a dream except for a puff of blue smoke on start sometimes(bad osv I think) will do when chains and guides need doing.anyway enjoy there a pleasure to drive

[OneStep_TwoStep 21]

I had a battery issue with one of my e39s once, it turned out to be frayed wires in the rubber flexi hose thing between the boot lid and the car (by the hinge). Little bit of solder and heat shrink and you're away. Just don't be dumb like me and forget to put the wrap on before you solder, I did it about 5 times, f**king idiot.

[pgnuta 4]

How on earth did you find that? I think that's what really scares me, if it's not obvious then it could be an intermittent dead short and given the amount of wire in that car it could literally be anywhere.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[OneStep_TwoStep 21]

I can't quite remember, I took it to auto electricians and pros and none of them could find the issue. I think I was trawling through forums one day and one guy mentioned that he was having a similar issue and to check the flexi joints for frayed wires as they short out and stop the car going into sleepy time mode and drain the battery. Good luck!

[allan 295]

Welcome it's a common fault with the e39 over the years the wires are twisted back an forth when the boot is opened and closed in the end they brake. Just peel the cover back and check them all out carefully. As you mentioned the final stage unit is another problem but the heater should be giving you some indication, runs on full hot, will run weirdly and won't run at all etc. Due to the age of the e39 most of these faults are well documented now so a search on google or even here should be of some help best of luck.