Hi all What does everyone think about premium diesel (shell v power etc). Is there any actual evidence of their benefit other than the pump cache? I've always thought they were a waste of money until I saw an old 5th gear episode on premium petrels where there was actually a difference between premi...

No visible damage but the ball joint was completely slack.

So I ordered some upper control arms for the rear and fitted them today.  Bit of a pain to fit but fairly straightforward. Interestingly this has solved the negative camber problem that I originally posted about. To clarify this, the X now has a slight amount of negative camber, as BMW intended.  It...

I'd be keen to know if this has solved the problem. I guess time will tell.

I definately don't want to pay BMW rates for 3 hours labour but equally it sounds beyond my skills. Think it'll be booked into an Indy for investigation.

I read an excellent post with pics about replacing this part and it appears the air filter has to come off to replace it. Given the car is due for insp 2 shortly I thought i'd request it done during this and hopefully negate the additional labour charges. I'll be doing the clean out job myself, load...

Going through all the little jobs on the car and remembered another one - the random oil leak. This was a pain to track down but manged to get it up on a ramp in a hire a ramp and bay place in Acton, very useful. Turns out there's a slow but constant drip of oil coming from the lower part of the int...

Just wrote a long post and then accidentally closed the Internet window - balls. Here goes again; My X has noticeable negative camber at the rear. This is causing the inner edges of the tyre to wear out much quicker to the point where they're at the limit on the inside with loads left on the outside...

Er........ Anyway, back to my how to ruin your gearbox post.

Back in the day I used to ride highly strung 2 stroke motorbikes. When you have to slip the clutch to 8,000 rpm to get the thing to move you can lose your mechanical sympathy pretty quickly. Mind you, they went pop fairly regularly.

Wow. Might not be doing that again.

Mine are just as slow. At some stage I intend to extend them fully, wash them throughly, dry then use furniture polish or similar to reduce friction. I understand this is a relatively common complaint on the E53. I've read about removing the pillar covering the seatbelt mechanism to check they're no...

So after a rubbish day at work I came home to be greeted with this on my previously unmarked X5;



Brilliant.

I made my day better by punching myself in the face.

Recommendations for bodyshops in SW London anyone?

It turns out if you put it in sport when stationary, use your left foot on the brake and build up the revs, when you take your foot off the brake it's goes like a rocket. Whilst this is unlikely to be good for the car, anyone got any idea about exactly how bad this is for it?

That's the reason why I looked at this in the first place. When using the dash mounted button my boot wouldn't release cleanly and the motor kept going. After lots of guesswork I'm fairly sure pre facelift cars have none fitted as standard and facelift have one to the left. Given how easily mine cam...

So...... it turns out I do have an eject box fitted, it's just older than time itself; http://www.ecstuning.com/Search/84216933415/ES201047/ The new cradles require an updated eject box to be fitted; http://www.ecstuning.com/Search/84216933415/ES1305445/ It's all rather a lot of money for something ...

Did some digging on this. The consensus appears to be that a single bump stop on the left was installed for facelifts only. This would fit with what I found as my left torx bolt was already sticking out slightly to accommodate the rubber lip of the bump stop whilst the right one was screwed all the ...