There Ain't no Party Like a BMW Party
I showed up too early to get drunk and too late to be fashionable.
I wasn't lying when I said everything worked on the X5. The key word there is worked. I enjoyed a day of flawless operation from my white stallion before everything went south. In fact, my laundry list of repairs is now longer than my laundry list of actual laundry, and my washer's been broken for three weeks.
Yet I remain unfazed. I have the resolve and determination to power through this. This is my sixth, no, ninth; whatever, I'm confused now. Regardless, I've owned a lot of broken BMWs. The key with these things is to keep pushing...forever. See, it never ends. There is no light at the end of the blue and white propellery tunnel.
Let me be more concise: the key here is to address issues early and often, because unlike with a Toyota, they will never go away on their own.
Violence of Action
The first and most obvious attack on my wallet and sanity happened the morning after I bought the car. I hopped in with excitement, turned the key, and sat there admiring my acquisition. Not unlike every other morning, it was chilly, and so I decided to fire up a little heat. By the time I got to the highway, I'd be nice and toasty. I was going to have a great day!
I increased the fan speed only to be met with silence. Clearly this car's dual-zone digital climate control do-dads were too complicated for a simpleton such as myself. So, I sat there, sure that I had the settings wrong and began pushing buttons. Top vent, bottom vent, the button that looks like a pair of glasses with a weird shape in the middle--still nothing. "Okay you Bastard," I went for the nuclear option: max A/C.
But she wasn't having it. This was the biggest type of fuck you the car could've given me. In fact, I'd have been less offended had the motor spun a bearing on the drive home from the seller's house. But it was what it was, and I was determined to solve it. The first and most likely culprit was the blower-motor resistor. On BMWs of this vintage, these are known to die more often than Vietnam-era Lieutenants.
I could have ordered one online and only paid 40 dollars. But this was a battle of motivation, and I knew that the longer I waited, the more likely I was to get overrun. So instead, I drove straight to Autozone, bent over, and took it right up the behind. All's well that ends well, I thought. At least, if I knew that the resistor had shit the bed, I could still order the cheaper one and return the gold-plated Duralast piece.
But phase one of the campaign went from bad to worse. The resistor fixed nothing. Moreover, upon closer inspection I noticed some melted plastic around the grounding pin coming off of the blower motor plug. It was times like these when men earned valorous medals on the battlefield of shitty old cars.
We Will Overwhelm the Enemy With Deception Until Everyone's Confused - Me
I got in the car and headed right back to Fort Knox. "Give me all the gold!" I yelled. The man behind the counter looked confused, and again asked me what I needed. After some negotiation, I walked out of the store with a shiny new blower motor. My wife was coming back into town the next morning, which meant that I had a single evening to handle this situation lest it get forgotten about forever.
Now, I've removed a few dashes in my time, but never on an X5, and never in one night. Sure, for a pro, the book time is probably a few hours on a job like this. But I'm not a pro, and I wasn't even sure if I had all of the tools I needed. I jumped right in.
And this is where I resign myself to a bunch of shitty phone pictures to explain how it went:
So there, as you can see, it got done. It was actually quite boring in the best of ways. I did my best not to break things, and so all's well that ends well, kinda.
I was on a roll, and wasn't to be fucked with. The coolant reservoir was covered in, uh, coolant, so I inspected the cap only to find that the Duralast cap that was on there had a cracked seal. So naturally, I replaced it with another (probably it's fourth or fifth) Duralast cap. See, there's just a circle of life with these things, and one must accept it to have any shot at successfully playing the game.
Then a headlight went out. Who was the jackass who blabbered on about auto-leveling HIDs? Oh yea, this idiot. Whatever, it wasn't something that a set of Chinese bulbs couldn't fix. In fact, it was an opportunity to make an improvement. The stock 4300K Xenons looked like garbage. To get respect in these streets, you gotta look cool without trying too hard. I opted for some 35W 6000K bulbs, which did just the trick.
All in all, the truck is still extremely broken. The good news is I'm soon to be eBay Buck rich, so there's something. Anyway, I set aside a grand to get this thing in top-notch shape, and I have yet to make a dent in that. The cost of owning one of these isn't measured in green dollars, but in grease dollars, and I have plenty of those...as long as I stay away from Fort Knox for a while.
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