My experience of DIY Rod bearings (WPC and OEM bolts)

Good evening guys, just got my car back on the road this evening. Dylan335i and I knocked out my rod bearings this weekend. Also did valve cover gaskets and spark plugs while we were in there. The car has 66k miles on it. No rod knock, or any other symptoms. It was done as a precautionary measure for the future FI plans.

Overall, went extremely well. Probably 18 hours of actual work (lunchbreaks and screwing around not included) but we took our time. Made sure we were both extremely comfortable with how things were coming off, and getting put back together. There were no corners cut, and I made sure the rod bolts were torqued exactly to my OCD brain before closing the motor back up.

I decided to go with WPC bearings, with oem bolts. After some extensive research, i decided against ARP...which Dylan hated me for...but we learned a lot in the process! The OEM bolts were a royal pain in the ass. I'll be the first to say it... The torquing procedure is brutally monotonous and repetitive.

For anyone who is looking, the OEM bolt procedure is:

Tighten each bolt to 6NM, tighten to 20NM, tighten to 130 degrees - Remove, clean and reoil bolts. Repeat two more times. We did it rod by rod, as we found it to be the easiest way to keep track of our movements. This may not seem difficult, but when you are doing 11 steps per bolt (176 total movements) it gets ridiculous. If i had to do it again, I would recommend going ARP bolts due to the fact of they are simply torque and go. They are about 4x the price, but when we both almost went braindead going through the OEM bolt steps.

Results:
Cylinders 1-8 left to right

Top 1-4

Top 5-8

Bottom 1-4

Bottom 5-8

I was extremely happy with the wear of these bearings. I think they could have gone another 65k no problem, and they look great. Cylinder #7 looks to have the worst of the wear, but none of them were alarming. Some even had no wear. Hopefully more of you guys will start to see better patterns after pulling your bearings!

If anyone has any questions about the procedure, I will be more than happy to answer to the best of my ability.

-Edit: need to give more credit to Dylan here as we did it as his house. He has done the bearings before and was a wealth of knowledge. Knew exactly what to do. Definitely could not do it without him and Carlito!

Nice work! Those are indeed some of the better looking ones around here. After seeing the condition of the OEMs are you still happy with going WPC vs staying OEM vs waiting for the updated design?

They look good

great looking bearings in my opinion for your mileage! very cool that you were able to do this on your own with a friend!

Good job!

Funny how desensitized we are to rod bearing wear. In any other engine, this would be considered significantly abnormal wear. I don't think i've ever seen a rod bearing thread with what is generally considered normal wear.

Well done mate and thanks for sharing.

1love wrote

Nice work! Those are indeed some of the better looking ones around here. After seeing the condition of the OEMs are you still happy with going WPC vs staying OEM vs waiting for the updated design?

Yes, I am happy with going WPC as the guys around here have had good experiences with them. All they are is a stock bearing with a treatment that increases clearance a bit. Bolts...I may have gone ARP a second time around, but it was a good experience to learn about angle torque and how stretch bolts work.

As far as the updated design, I know Kawa and RG are putting some serious R&D into these, but neither myself or Dylan wanted to be the first to try them out, nor willing to wait until potentially october to buy them. I'll probably do the bearings again in 60-70k miles, and hopefully by then there will be some feedback on the new bearings.

With the way my bearings looked, I think I'll be good with the WPC for quite some time. I double triple checked everything on the install, and it went pretty well.

FNG wrote

Good job!

Funny how desensitized we are to rod bearing wear. In any other engine, this would be considered significantly abnormal wear. I don't think i've ever seen a rod bearing thread with what is generally considered normal wear.

- Second sentence...Bingo. Do we know what a normal wear bearing looks like?

I know I don't. I'm tempted to take apart my wife's jeep (Simple pan drop as the whole subframe does not have to come out lol) and change out the bearings just because I want to see what the difference in wear would be on another vehicle where the bearings are a non issue. Would be an interesting test.

Both Dylan and my bearings were in pretty decent shape, his being a little worse but not much at 88k miles. He did the DIY a few months ago and helped me through this process. Pretty amazing what has to be done to the car. Actually driving it after the front end has been completely disassembled is an experience in and of itself.

Great job on DIY'ing it!

Just wondering what your driving habits like for your car prior to this work?

It's a pleasure to see good looking bearings even after 66K miles in the Florida hot climate .
Thanks man for sharing .

Thanks for sharing!

Those bearings do look good. Thanks for sharing. Do you mind sharing with us how you drive/maintain your car and your oil change interval?

JDM_CL9 wrote

Great job on DIY'ing it!

Just wondering what your driving habits like for your car prior to this work?

e92zero wrote

Those bearings do look good. Thanks for sharing. Do you mind sharing with us how you drive/maintain your car and your oil change interval?

No problem. I actually bought the car about a month ago with 65k miles. It appears to me from my research/receipts given to me that the car got oil changes every 15k. I am the third owner, and I don't think the last owner really knew about the warm up period via our conversations.

He bought it with 38k miles on it, and the first owner I believe was in Connecticut. Based the history given to me from the vin pulled at my local BMW dealer, I think it was done every 15k. Could be wrong, I didn't really know the history, which is why i changed the bearings out so quickly.

Some guys are doing the 15000 mile oil change at the dealer (esp. with the free service period of four years), and doing the extra oil changes outside of the dealer, so they are not visible on the BMW records. This makes it hard to tell the whole story. But it seems likely that a lot of owners would only do the factory recommended services, unless they are gearheads and actually get into things like mods and upgraded maintenance.

Beemdog wrote

Some guys are doing the 15000 mile oil change at the dealer (esp. with the free service period of four years), and doing the extra oil changes outside of the dealer, so they are not visible on the BMW records. This makes it hard to tell the whole story. But it seems likely that a lot of owners would only do the factory recommended services, unless they are gearheads and actually get into things like mods and upgraded maintenance.

This is true. I have no knowledge of the original owner. I did however get to know the second owner a little bit, and he seemed like he takes care of his things, but by all means not a gear head. I'm pretty sure he was doing oil changes in 15k intervals.

Any chance you taped the whole remove/install and were planning on doing a howto video on youtube (wishful thinking)??

Awesome job btw.

javarithms wrote

Any chance you taped the whole remove/install and were planning on doing a howto video on youtube (wishful thinking)??

Awesome job btw.

Haha, you'd be scrolling through a whole lot of BSing! We had three of us there and it was definitely a fun while we worked.

But no, I don't have any how to videos coming...I do have it fresh on my mind and can answer any questions!

OP
Any pointers you can provide on the valve cover gaskets? Was it as easy as the online manual makes it out to be or were there things that needed to be moved out of the way etc.?

BzsBimmer wrote

OP
Any pointers you can provide on the valve cover gaskets? Was it as easy as the online manual makes it out to be or were there things that needed to be moved out of the way etc.?

They were a pain actually, getting them lined up right without the gasket falling out was very tedious.

You need to remove the plenum, intake (drivers side) fuel injector plugs, coil pack plugs, coil packs, coolant reservoir (pass side only). After they are all removed, tie wrap all the wires up as far as you can to give you adequate enough clearance to clear the camshaft.

I actually goofed on my drivers side and am leaking a bit of oil. I need to pull this stuff and reinstall the gasket on my drivers side. Both sides should be around a 3 hour job. Pretty straightforward, but can be a tedious job if you aren't patient.

alxmlr789 wrote

They were a pain actually, getting them lined up right without the gasket falling out was very tedious.

You need to remove the plenum, intake (drivers side) fuel injector plugs, coil pack plugs, coil packs, coolant reservoir (pass side only). After they are all removed, tie wrap all the wires up as far as you can to give you adequate enough clearance to clear the camshaft.

I actually goofed on my drivers side and am leaking a bit of oil. I need to pull this stuff and reinstall the gasket on my drivers side. Both sides should be around a 3 hour job. Pretty straightforward, but can be a tedious job if you aren't patient.

Thanks for that. I'll add that to my valve cover thread.
Did you use OEM gaskets? I know I had that problem with my Merc using Victor Reinz gaskets.

Did you use the sealer on the gaskets as the BMW instructions state?

BzsBimmer wrote

Thanks for that. I'll add that to my valve cover thread.
Did you use OEM gaskets? I know I had that problem with my Merc using Victor Reinz gaskets.

Did you use the sealer on the gaskets as the BMW instructions state?

Yep used OEM gaskets. Do you perhaps have the instructions from BMW?

alxmlr789 wrote

Yep used OEM gaskets. Do you perhaps have the instructions from BMW?

http://www.m3post.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1140757

Drei Bond 1209

Move Over wrote

They were a pain actually, getting them lined up right without the gasket falling out was very tedious.

You need to remove the plenum, intake (drivers side) fuel injector plugs, coil pack plugs, coil packs, coolant reservoir (pass side only). After they are all removed, tie wrap all the wires up as far as you can to give you adequate enough clearance to clear the camshaft.

I actually goofed on my drivers side and am leaking a bit of oil. I need to pull this stuff and reinstall the gasket on my drivers side. Both sides should be around a 3 hour job. Pretty straightforward, but can be a tedious job if you aren't patient.

So if you had to do it again would you do it yourself or pay someone?