How To Remove / Swap An N52 Engine From A BMW E90 E92 In Your Driveway [Part 1]

[0:00]So that actually didn't take that long.

[0:23]So welcome back to another episode of build and drive. Today is the day that we are taking this BMW N52 engine out and we're putting the rebuild motor in. Now, if you're just joining us today, um you may be Googling this problem, but I have a 2005 this is a EU spec 2005 BMW 325i N52 B25 engine and it is burning oil not at 1 liter per thousand, but 3 liters per thousand kilometers. So that's 1 liter every 300 km. If you guys are burning a lot of oil, it can be one of three things. Number one, it's your CCV valve or crank case ventilation, PCV valve, whatever you want to call this CCV valve. Um it's back there underneath my intake because I have the magnesium valve cover. If you have the black top one, yours is built into the back, it's a bit easier to do. Normally that goes bad, it sucks up oil through from the oil pan and puts it into the intake and you burn it. Second thing, valve stem seals. If you start up your car on a nice cold day and you see a giant puff of smoke um go out the back, normally some of your valve stem seals are all of them, probably all of them are going. If your car is older than 10 years, probably all of them are gone already. But then the third thing, and this is where it's challenging to diagnosis sometimes, but actually it's not that hard. It is the uh piston rings. So the piston rings will go bad. Eventually you'll start to get some um engine hesitation, you'll get misfires on startup and when you pull the plugs, you'll notice that five out of six are good, but that one cylinder will be bad and uh your spark plug will be totally and utterly um garbage. Here's a good example of one. I pulled out this spark plug. Uh it was pretty new pretty much new. It only had maybe 5,000 km on it. And as you can see, it's totally coated, totally caked with burnt uh oil. You can't it's hard to scrape that off. You really have to kind of grind it off. So, yeah, you'll be going through spark plugs like to there's no tomorrow. So what can you do to remedy the problem? Well, a lot of people, they take it to a shop and they just get the valve stem seals done, and there is a technique uh for doing that while the head and the engine in the car. But normally what ends up happening is it's one of the piston rings. So, or a few piston rings. So that costs a lot more, and that's when people just tend to junk junk these cars because the repair isn't worth isn't worth as much as the car. However, if you're skilled, you could rebuild an engine, and uh that's what we've done here. We have a freshly rebuilt N52 uh the valve cover's just right there, just cleaning it off. We have a freshly built N52, bearings were still okay in this engine, so I left them. New rings, new valve stem seals, did a valve job on it. New head gasket, new oil pan gasket, new valve cover gasket, all that stuff. Um and if you are interested in that, you can follow uh my build playlist below. And I hope some, you know, if any of the information that you find is helpful, just give the video a thumbs up. I appreciate that, it does help the channel. So first order of business is we're going to unhook the battery, of course. We're going to take off this cowling. We're going to tape up the intakes. We're going to take out the air cleaner. And we're going to start to take off this entire front clip. So that's step one. Now, if you're starting this from scratch, you want to take your car to a shop and actually get the freon or the AC unit completely discharged. I've already done that. That that's already all all taken care of. So most of the time they'll do that even for free, or if you pay and say, hey, look, can you discharge this? I'll pay you up front and then I'll make an appointment to come and and recharge it. That's also a possibility. Um then you pay once and you go back twice. Um so yeah, then we're going to take off the front clip, radiator, fans, unhook all this piping, pretty much the whole front end. And then we're going to take off the intake, throttle body. We're going to drain the power steering. And then we're going to get under the car and unhook the transmission. Um sorry, unhook the drive shaft, unhook the shifter. And yeah. And then we're going to undo the motor mounts. They're on either side over here. Undo the transmission mount. And we're going to yank this sucker out, plop it down here. And we're going to, uh, then swap over all my accessories onto that motor. My alternator, my AC unit. I'm going to use a different power steering pump because this one's whining. And yeah, so that is the plan of action. I'll probably have to do it in a few videos. So don't forget to subscribe. But I'm getting a little nervous here. I haven't done something like this in maybe like 15 years, so, you know, bolts break, things go wrong, and I have 3 days to do this. I don't think I can do it in 3 days, but we'll make it happen. Oh, and I forgot. We're going to take the harness, connect the harness from here. This is a underneath here there's a it's not necessarily a fuse box, but it's kind of like a junction box where all the all the cables and stuff um run from here. We're going to unhook all that and just put it on top of the engine, and we're going to pull everything out with the harness, with all the stuff. Makes it easier and then we'll swap it over onto the other engine. Hope you guys enjoy the video. Come along for the ride. I'll try and talk here and there about what's going on, challenges I'm having, how to overcome them. If you have any questions, just put them down in the comments. I do read the comments, guys. Anyway, guys, let's get started.

[6:51]So we've got the car safely up on jack stands. Make sure to pull your e-brake, block the wheel, and also I forgot to remind you to leave your doors open, because when you pull the trunk, your auto unlock won't work anymore. So now we're going to take off the tires. I still got my winter tires on. What I like to do is actually stick a tire underneath the car when I'm working on it, on both sides. Um that way, if anything happens, it falls on the tire. Then what you want to do is take off the under under tray protection. I think it's an 8 mm um torx or whatever, 8 mm socket. And you want to take out all these take out the inner fender wells. Uh on either side as well. My brakes still still look brand new. Just good.

[8:41]Don't forget to disconnect your um fog lights. I see that someone has just hardwired those in. So, maybe we'll have to cut them and resolder them. Maybe I can take it out of its bracket. Yeah. These are brake ducts. And this one's just zip-tied in there, because it's damaged.

[9:42]Remove Air Intake Box: Disconnect MAP Sensor & Unscrew Bolts on Box and Tube. You can easily take out the fan assembly by lifting up on the tabs. Unplug Headlight Connector. Disconnect hood latch mechanism (don't close hood until front clip is off). Disconnect fan connector and uncllip it so it's loose. Disconnect coolant temperature sensor (push on the metal tab and pull up on the clip). Drain coolant by unscrewing the plug from the radiator. Don't forget to unscrew the coolant reservoir cap. Drain the oil.

[11:47]Can you guys imagine? This was changed maybe 2,500 km ago. Totally black. That's what burning oil does to your engine. It's terrible.

[12:05]Well, coolant is mostly drained. Just going to put this back on. I think what we're going to do is just start disconnecting stuff. So, let's take these AC lines off. Let's take this hose off that mounts to the radiator, from the few um from the water pump. You just have to pull this out and it should unclip. Be very careful with these, they're very brittle. We're going to do the same thing over here. Take this one out, pull that out. This unclips. And I think I'm going to disconnect the power steering line from right here and on the actual power steering rack, there's one a banjo bolt. I'm going to disconnect that as well. And I think that's all that's holding in these two power steering lines. And then we'll be able to take the whole front clip off as one piece and not have to like disassemble everything. And then it'll be easy, easy to bolt everything back on. I think I'm going to do that. So I think it's an 11 mil. Nope. 12 mm bolt. I replaced this stuff about 2 years ago, so it still looks really clean, which is good. Don't forget to take off the lid. Loosen up the pressure. Yeah, still looks good. Puts the lid back on. LOL. Okay, so while that's draining, I'm going to take the pipes off. So I was able to get this off. I just pulled really hard. The reason why it's on there so well is there is a plastic um would you call this? Bit on the end with the rubber washer to keep it sealed. So just pull really hard on that, and that one was easy. And I figured out that this power steering line can be disconnected. You just take this rubber boot off. And then you press press onto that. Now it's leaking, so I'm going to put something under there. But uh now I don't need to disconnect it from here. I can just pop off those power steering lines really easily. And then undo the AC lines. And the AC lines are empty. And of course, that water pump line uh to the radiator. And this front clip is ready to come off. Oh, and a few bolts under here. So, no matter what I did, I couldn't actually get this pipe off. This pipe right here. So what I did was I took off the pipe from the water pump itself. So, same thing. That one came off super easy. Don't forget to put a bucket on when you take that one out. Mine exploded with water. Okay, so now that everything, oh, the AC lines. I think these come off. Yeah. I think I'll take off these brackets and put them on so that they it goes on a bit easier. This fell out. I don't know where that came from. I don't see one on this side. I think these come off. Yeah. I think these come off. Yeah. Well, guys, there's an N52 engine. So everybody, now that the front clip is off, uh we're going to move on to some other things. There's so much still to do. But, um I think we'll take it in steps. We still need to undo all the wiring, we still need to take this piece off, we need to take the intake off. I think I'm going to also disconnect here and here, this hose. Just take it off. It's just mounted to the frame. Just in case, you know, we we bang it or crack it or break it. So this piece is going to come off right now. Um and put with the other pile of stuff over there. Yeah, so we still have to tackle a few things. We'll after that we're going to have to get under the car and uh undo the drive shaft, undo the shift linkage and undo the transmission mounts. Um and then once we're in here we can hook this thing up, undo the motor mounts. Motor mounts are down there. Can't really see them. One's right there. And this thing should lift out. So, I think I'm going to leave it right here for this video. If you guys have any questions or comments, don't forget to put them in the comment section. And yeah, if you're if this was really helpful, don't forget to drop a like and subscribe if you want to see the outcome of uh this build. Thanks for watching.