Deep Spring Cleaning

09 May Deep Spring Cleaning

You know what hasn’t had its own blog post in a while? Gold Wheels. Let’s change that today.

This job originally started as a bit of spring cleaning. As we store the cars in the shop over the winter, each spring we’ll pull them out and start addressing any issues that may have cropped up over winter, or issues that came about in the fall of last year that we didn’t have time to fix. As we pulled Gold Wheels onto the lift to look around, we noticed that both the upper and lower oil pans were cracked. Oh joy. Sucks to roll hard!

Once we realized that we needed to drop the motor to address the upper oil pan cracks among other issues that would keep Gold Wheels immobile, the decision was made to inspect and address Gold Wheels’ innards, including rod and main bearings. After all, nothing’s worse than putting a motor back into a car and figuring out that something else is the issue. Therefore, we set about dropping Gold Wheels’ M5-sourced S62 V8 out from underneath the E38 body, and getting it attached to an engine stand so that we can rotate it for easier access to certain areas.

It looks a little scared. But don’t worry, little guy, we’re only here to help.

Once the engine was on the stand, we flipped ‘er upside down and the disassembly of the block’s lower half began.

From there, we moved back up top, where we removed the VANOS units, cam gears, and everything else that connects between the heads and the block, and eventually the heads themselves. Like the title suggests, this will be a very deep spring cleaning.

With the heads removed and set aside (for another blog post!), we continued to disassemble the block, removing the crankshaft, pistons, bearings, and pretty much everything from the block itself. We’ll be shipping the block out to get hot tanked, which is a deep cleaning process that will leave us with a completely clean block, ready for reassembly with the necessary replacement parts.

Since it’s a deep clean, we’re not stopping with just the block. Come back next week to see what else we’ll be doing with Gold Wheels’ heart. Until then, have a great day, and make sure to come back tomorrow for your humble narrator’s final FMU blog post!