Category Archives: BMW

Everything to do with my BMW’s.

Got a pressure washer.

I picked up a Portland 1750 psi pressure washer from Harbor Freight recently. I was having all kinds of issue with getting the mud off the wheels on my 2013 BMW X5 E70 to keep them from being out of balance.

Here is a video I made of it.

 

Another trip up the driveway with snow

I figured since I added a “good” day in the previous post of my driveway I would show what a bad day via snow was like 🙂

 

One of these trips I actually cracked the windshield on when a tree had fallen onto the driveway and I didn’t notice it was facing me in place of being across the driveway.

 

Got a new riding buddy :)

My daughter and granddaughter bought me a cute gift to ride in the X5 with me.

 

For those that don’t know my forum avatar that I use is this :

So its a pretty good match I’d say 🙂 Now I just need to get a BMW roundel for him to hold like my avatar has !

 

Bought another BMW X5…

I bought a 2013 BMW X5 E70 xdrive35i Turbo. It was supposed to be for my wife. Kind of a his and hers X5 thing.

Well it turned out it had a recall on the airbag with no replacement airbag available. The wife was not happy to say the least.

So we swapped and I gave her my 2005 X5 E53 3.0 so she is happy to have an X5 that doesn’t have a claymore for an airbag 🙂

I ended up with the 2013. I’ve owned enough BMW’s with airbag issues that it really doesn’t bother me that much. So far I like the 2013 well enough. It has taken some getting used to but its growing on me. Here’s what it looks like.

Crowz’s 2013 BMW X5

Seems were converting over almost exclusively to BMW’s these days. I’m shopping for a 2014 to 2016 BMW Z4 for the wife now. The reason for the narrow search range has to do with features she wants. It has to be a metal roof convertible so that narrowed it down a good bit. She also wants the electronics package as its called which has navigation and all the other bells and whistles. It has to have heated seats which also gets your a heated steering wheel which all of our BMW’s have now. I upgraded the ones that didn’t have it from the factory recently.

The plan was to order a new Z4 and do the European delivery of it. So we could have a cool vacation in Europe driving the car there and then they would ship it back to the states after we left. The problem is they don’t make the Z4 right now and the 2019 BMW Z4 is a ragtop so that’s a no go for us.

We still want to do a euro delivery one day so we may buy one more BMW of some kind after the Z4 just to do that.

That’s about it for now. Nothing much else going on.

 

X5 Updates

Well I can say now that I have owned my X5 for a few months that I flat out love it. Fun to drive, reliable and handles my driveway with ease. I have even had it in a few spots the passenger front tire and the drivers rear tire were off the ground at the same time. With most vehicles that would be instant stuck city. The X5 paused for about 1 or 2 seconds deciding how to handle it and just went on like it was nothing. Love it.

I also joined a site called Xoutpost at http://xoutpost.com

Great community there. If you have an x series bmw I highly recommend it. Get the premium account too. Its not but $30 a year I think and well worth it to support the site.

 

Bought a BMW X5

I had been wanting something that drove like a BMW and could get up my driveway. I own several BMW’s already but they all are a pain to get up the driveway when it rains. I started looking for an X5 over 6 months ago and finally bought one.

So far I like it. Drives like a dream just needs some TLC to get it to where I’m happy with it.

The air conditioner worked great but took up to a hour to actually come on. This was very annoying to say the least. I had never dealt with a variable displacement air conditioner compressor before. All the normal compressors I had worked on either worked or didn’t. When the compressor type used on my X5 went “bad” it caused the a/c to have to be on for a long time before it actually started cooling. Once it did it would blow 38 degrees out the vents so it worked great but took forever to kick in. I replaced the compressor yesterday after first trying to change the valve in the old compressor. The new compressor seems to be working good. I will know for sure later today when I crank the X5. If it starts cooling instantly then it is fixed.

Next project will be the headlights. The X5 has adaptive headlights. Its pretty wild watching them in action. Most modern vehicles with xenon/hid headlights have auto leveling, which these also have. But the cool part of the adaptive headlights has to do with them being able to turn left and right not just up and down for leveling. When you turn into a curve the headlights actually turn to point to where your going.

The problem with the headlights on my X5 is there are horribly dim. It has the worst amount of light output of anything I have ever owned. The headlights lens are frosted bad and I have a kit coming Friday to try and polish the haze out. That should restore some of the light output. But I’m afraid the actual bowls the bulbs sit in have lost the reflective coating and that is why they are so dim. The lens that covers the bowls make it difficult to know for sure if that is the problem and the headlights are sealed so I can’t take them apart to see if that is the problem either.

Well more later.