What have you done to your car today?

[VaderDSL]

Mine is absolutely caked in salt and grit from
Driving into work this week. Off Sunday, so need to give it a blast with some snow foam/wash and if not too cold a proper wash underneath.

 

[MagicBoy]

Looked at it covered in muck, then realised all the car washes are closed due to Tier 4.

 

[Mr_Cool]

Fit my rear view parking camera that’s been sat there for months.

No more black screen on radio when in reverse.

Need to take my car on a motorway journey not really drove it to keep battery in good shape. Not drove it much over last month or so

In other news no NIP for red light/speeding yet it’s approaching 14 days but I know which Christmas and new year post may be delayed.
Starting to think/hope I just imagined the camera flashing and it was the car behind me headlights or it flashed them instead.

See if anything turns up next week

 

[inflames]

Not today, but yesterday I serviced my car. Then today I looked at thought about washing it and then went back down.

 

[Berger]

Been driving around smug on my all season tyres in the snow....

Replaced the exhaust clamp from centre to back box as it had rusted away to a nothing and was half missing. I knew it was on its way out for ages now as you can see it without removing the wheels and I give the car a quick walk round once a week usually.

A quick trip to Halfords and bought all the clamp options in the ballpark as it was about 1 3/4” eyeballing it (43,45,48mm). The clamp now probably doesn’t do anything as the two parts are likely fused together with rust, but for £1 per clamp I’ll just fit a new one.

 

[Akagi]

Its a good source of spare exhaust clamps. After a few months of driving in our climate just take all the clamps off cos its rusted together anyway.

Voila, a set of spare clamps.

 

[tres]

Replaced budget tyres with some Continental Premium Contact tyres.
The difference is astounding. (Don't really drive in icy weather.)

 

[Rroff]

Got MOT this morning... and it is like -4C out... gonna be interesting with a big dirty V6 diesel

Replaced budget tyres with some Continental Premium Contact tyres.
The difference is astounding. (Don't really drive in icy weather.)

TBH given the difference between budget tyres and my Bridgestones in the wet I'm not sure budget tyres should even be legal

With some of the torrential weather we've had watching so many people struggle/lose it on what are clearly budget tyres when I'm not even noticing it is ridiculous.

One I posted about recently - loads of people were struggling here - multi-car pileup due to the conditions (fortunately nothing serious just people aquaplaning at relatively low speeds into each other) - according to one of my colleagues who came through after me another vehicle struggling to stop on the wet surface went into the back of the incident as well. Not even the slightest hint of trouble on my tyres.

Spoiler

 

[adam cool dude]

Car was frozen this morning so ran inside and got a jug of water but left the front door open. As I left I had my missus on the phone going on about calling 999. After thinking it back my exhaust fumes set off the carbon monoxide alarm as I could see the smoke coming in when I returned with water but thought nothing of it.

At least I know the alarm works!

 

[Rroff]

Deiced a bit before I was due to leave - and used some good deicer as well - by the time I got back to it the windscreen was already starting to ice again enough I had to clear it again :s

EDIT: Looks like it got past the MOT without advisories though still waiting to see what they turn up needs doing from the service, etc. :|

 

[Jonny ///M]

My MOT expired but I still had an abs light on so I've been trying to fix that.

One side the abs sensor wire had worn through due to rubbing on the drive shaft after it came out its clip when I did a wheel bearing. I used block connectors every year and it got through an MOT which lasted a while.

This year my speedo was going crazy so that turned out to be the connection from abs sensor wire to chassis join. Terminals were blue so I tried the same as the other side. After wasting too much of my life I ordered 2 wheel bearings and 2 wires. Voila. Should have done it sooner.

Also had to replace;

Rear calipers, discs and pads.
Track rod ends
4 Eagle F1 AS5.
Coil pack to cure a misfire.

Upon doing the track rod ends I discovered the nuts were seized to the inner rods so waiting on new boots so I can fit the new parts without having to mess around grinding the old parts to remove the boot and trying to reuse the clips. Need that sorted before tyres get ruined.

Going to get rear axle polybushes when they do the MOT.


This is after the clutch in April, rear shocks and an engine mount this year.


Think I'll try get another 2 years out of it now! 12 years old and 150k on the clock so could take it up to 180k.

 

[Akagi]

My MOT expired but I still had an abs light on so I've been trying to fix that

This is the story of my life, ABS lights are my curse.

Fortunately the one on the BMW can be extinguished for MOT time by unplugging all the ABS sensors...

 

[LizardKing]

And mine to it would seem! my car is on its 3rd g sensor in as many years, if it goes again the replacement shall be staying in a safe place till MOT time.

 

[Jonny ///M]

Glad I'm not the only one!

I actually got quite cheap wheel bearings so it cost me less than the price of one of the old wheel bearings for 2 new ones and the wires. Should have been less tight before and had a joyous time with no lights on the dash.

 

[Berger]

Rotated the wheels front to rear. Ideally I would do side to side as the NS are wearing faster than the OS, but it’s difficult to do with my jack/stands so not to worry.

Cleaned up all the hubs as the wheels were sticking due to corrosion and gave it a bit of copper grease.

Compared to last year everything looks about the same underneath and suspension wise, no big issues I can foresee.

 

[Phemo]

Not my car but my wife's car. Stereo kept rebooting and also navigation was refusing to load so I immediately suspected the hard drive in the head unit since BMW used mechanical hard drives in the NBT units which seems crazy to me but there we go. Of course replacing the hard drive is an absolute nightmare.

I had to buy a replacement 2.5" SATA drive and pop it into a PC then boot it from a QNX boot CD. I then had to create 4 QNX partitions which was effort in itself because you can't just specify the size in MB/GB, but you have to specify it in cylinders so I had to calculate and use trial and error to get the partitions to be the appropriate sizes since the old drive was 200GB and the new one is 500GB.

Once that was done I had to run a script that formats them and creates a series of empty directories to prep it up. At that point, I popped the drive back into the head unit and reinstalled the maps from a USB stick and to my amazement it actually worked.

However the electronic manuals weren't on the drive so that side of things didn't work, plus I assume some other functionality may not have worked although it seemed to be ok so I thought I'd have a go at copying it from the old drive. Just to make things even more effort, the hard drive is locked with a password which consists of the head unit's Ethernet MAC address, the Bluetooth MAC address and part of the unit's serial number but in hex format. The serial number and Bluetooth MAC were easy to get but the Ethernet MAC was nowhere to be found.

I ended up having to connect my laptop to the car with a BMW OBD ENET cable which connects to a laptop via Ethernet then run a DHCP server on the laptop wait to see what leases were offered. It gave two out so I looked up the MAC addresses and identified the head unit's MAC so password was sorted.

Then actually running the app that handles the drive unlocking was even more effort but eventually I got that working, I got the security removed from the drive, all the files copied off to another HD and then I unlocked the newly built drive and copied the files back to it. All works perfectly now

Seems a lot of effort but BMW would've charged an insane amount and a replacement NBT unit from ebay would still have cost me around £200 then I would've needed an emulator or FSC codes to activate the navigation again which would be about £30 and it would still have had a 5-7 year old hard drive in it anyway. This way I got it sorted out with my only costs being £15 for a drive and a good bit of effort on my part. Also my car has the same head unit, so at least I know how to replace the drive on that if/when it dies which I'm sure it will eventually.

 

[dlockers]

Not my car but my wife's car. Stereo kept rebooting and also navigation was refusing to load so I immediately suspected the hard drive in the head unit since BMW used mechanical hard drives in the NBT units which seems crazy to me but there we go. Of course replacing the hard drive is an absolute nightmare.

I had to buy a replacement 2.5" SATA drive and pop it into a PC then boot it from a QNX boot CD. I then had to create 4 QNX partitions which was effort in itself because you can't just specify the size in MB/GB, but you have to specify it in cylinders so I had to calculate and use trial and error to get the partitions to be the appropriate sizes since the old drive was 200GB and the new one is 500GB.

Once that was done I had to run a script that formats them and creates a series of empty directories to prep it up. At that point, I popped the drive back into the head unit and reinstalled the maps from a USB stick and to my amazement it actually worked.

However the electronic manuals weren't on the drive so that side of things didn't work, plus I assume some other functionality may not have worked although it seemed to be ok so I thought I'd have a go at copying it from the old drive. Just to make things even more effort, the hard drive is locked with a password which consists of the head unit's Ethernet MAC address, the Bluetooth MAC address and part of the unit's serial number but in hex format. The serial number and Bluetooth MAC were easy to get but the Ethernet MAC was nowhere to be found.

I ended up having to connect my laptop to the car with a BMW OBD ENET cable which connects to a laptop via Ethernet then run a DHCP server on the laptop wait to see what leases were offered. It gave two out so I looked up the MAC addresses and identified the head unit's MAC so password was sorted.

Then actually running the app that handles the drive unlocking was even more effort but eventually I got that working, I got the security removed from the drive, all the files copied off to another HD and then I unlocked the newly built drive and copied the files back to it. All works perfectly now

Seems a lot of effort but BMW would've charged an insane amount and a replacement NBT unit from ebay would still have cost me around £200 then I would've needed an emulator or FSC codes to activate the navigation again which would be about £30 and it would still have had a 5-7 year old hard drive in it anyway. This way I got it sorted out with my only costs being £15 for a drive and a good bit of effort on my part. Also my car has the same head unit, so at least I know how to replace the drive on that if/when it dies which I'm sure it will eventually.

Great effort. I bet the cold beer at the end of it went down a treat!

 

[Jonny ///M]

Yeah that's some job! I'd rather be physically working on a car than dealing with the mental gymnastics of what you've managed.

 

[Armageus]

I had to buy a replacement 2.5" SATA drive and pop it into a PC then boot it from a QNX boot CD. I then had to create 4 QNX partitions which was effort in itself because you can't just specify the size in MB/GB, but you have to specify it in cylinders so I had to calculate and use trial and error to get the partitions to be the appropriate sizes since the old drive was 200GB and the new one is 500GB.

Would it not have been better to use a sata SSD?

 

[Phemo]

Would it not have been better to use a sata SSD?

Yeah, I don't really like the idea of having a mechanical drive in the head unit but apparently there are no SSDs that work in the NBT head unit. The problem is supposedly to do with the head unit expecting to see the drive temperature on a specific SMART attribute that seemingly no SSDs make use of so the head unit will shut down because it can't see the temperature. Wonder if some kind of SATA to SD card adapter would support it, it'd still be quick enough for what it needs to do, hmm...