A Nice Surprise
Up to this point I haven’t done any maintenance to Charlotte’s F30 335 besides oil changes and tire rotations. It has been a great car so far. Having just clicked just over 50,000 miles I decided to tackle some preventive maintenance. For reference it is a 2015 BMW 335i x-drive which has the N55 engine and the ZF 8HP70 automatic transmission. I decided against transmission or differential fluid changes for now. I may do them later if she keeps the car long enough. I also passed on flushing out the coolant because it takes a $pecial kind and supposedly the electric water pump is a ticking time bomb which will require flushing when it fails anyway so I’ll give it a couple more years to fail before giving in and flushing the fluid anyway.
On the list was an oil change, spark plugs, ignition coils, serpentine belt, air filter, cabin air filter, a fog light housing (cracked), and brakes. Given my experience with her E46 M3 I expected working on a BMW two generations newer to be even more difficult than I found the E46 to be but to my surprise that was not the case at all! Charlotte took care of replacing the fog light just as she did on the E46, while I got started in the engine bay.
The first pleasant surprise was how easy it is to replace the serpentine belt. On the E46, you have to remove a the intake tubing, a mechanical fan and the fan shroud. But on the 335 only the intake pipe needed to come out to gain access.
Replacing the spark plugs seemed daunting at first but once I learned what needed to be removed and how to remove it it went fairly quick. The plugs and wires themselves went about the same as the S54 in the M3 but overall the job felt a lot easier on the 335.
I found out first hand how quickly I was able to get the engine bay torn apart again when we discovered a misfire on cylinder 5 after starting the car to test out the tune up. Seems I didn’t have the coil plugged all the way in and was a simple fix even though it happened on the cylinder that required the most tear down to get to!
With the wheels off giving us a better view at the brakes we decided we needed to replace the brake rotors in addition to the pads, so the brake job will be done once the parts come in.
