The Project Pad

Wow, I'm dumb. For some reason, I couldn't find this while actually working on it: http://aam-europe.contitech.de/pages/pi ... elID=CT926

I'll try it out this weekend.

If you are confident on your parts and work for the:

- Oil pan gasket
- Oil pump gasket
- Crank seal

I would 100% at this point buy a stock OEM cog,tensioner and T-Belt. This could be something as simple as a cover scraping, but until you pull it apart to look you are just guessing.

Have you taken the belts off of the powersteering and a/c to make sure it is indeed coming from the T belt area? If you answered that earlier then ignore this hah.

themagellan wrote:If you are confident on your parts and work for the:

- Oil pan gasket
- Oil pump gasket
- Crank seal

I would 100% at this point buy a stock OEM cog,tensioner and T-Belt. This could be something as simple as a cover scraping, but until you pull it apart to look you are just guessing.

Have you taken the belts off of the powersteering and a/c to make sure it is indeed coming from the T belt area? If you answered that earlier then ignore this hah.

That is my advice as well.

Will do. Thanks to all who've helped out so far! Hopefully I can thaw the car and get this diagnosed this weekend.

Awesome shot!

You have more snow in Tennessee than we do in Edmonton! LOL!

^Haha, that's crazy! We get about one good snow a year, and it took some serious willpower not to go play with the car!

Aktapod wrote:^Haha, that's crazy! We get about one good snow a year, and it took some serious willpower not to go play with the car!

We have about 10-12" on the ground here in Northern KY. I am always hesitant to take out the 200 due to other drivers. The other night though I couldn't resist and did some nice power drifts in an un-cleared 10" deep of snow parking lot. Blizzaks do wonders!

It's amazing! We never get snow in the south, so now that we did, everything just... shut down. The public schools haven't been open for the last two weeks!

I bet those Blizzaks are great! I had some fun in the snow, but I had to play it safe on worn all-seasons.

To any who were following or helping with my problem, I have the car back on the road!

Unfortunately, my computer's hard drive crapped out on me, so I'll divulge the juicy details when I can get off mobile and grab the pics off my backup. Lots of small updates to come.

Dammit, you tease!

Haha, well it's really only teasing if people want to see it.

BUT HERE WE ARE!! I didn't get a chance to backup my recent pics, so I guess my snow-hooning shots are lost forever. Oh well. I had the entire mall parking lot to myself, and it was a ton of fun! Even with my nearly bald all-seasons, I had more than enough room to play without worrying about curbs or lampposts.

Wait. Rewind a second. Wasn't there a massive oil leak and a mysteriously noisy repair? Ah, yes.


Since it was fairly dry, I'm now 97% sure the crank seal wasn't actually bad. I probably just didn't fully tighten the back timing cover bolts when I did the cams - the bolts I've now learned help hold the oil pump to the block. I don't like doing things twice and I had the parts, so I went ahead with the replacement, anyways.



Wooooowwwww, the thing was stubborn. After a weeklong fight with it, trying several different tools and methods, and mutilating the seal beyond recognition, I gave up. The simple seal job ended with me dropping the subframe and resealing the whole lower end. With the oil pump out, I finally pulled the crank seal out with vice grips, and it took a surprising amount of force. It was fused in there.



Upon reassembly, the car ran and there was a noise and blah blah blah, the whole previous page. Despite the (possibly only) snow we had, I had to confine the car to the garage.



Two things: the noise ended up being entirely unrelated to the timing issues I had. It was simply the back timing cover *barely* touching the cam pulley. I guess the heat is what caused it to come up only after running the car a while. It took about 15 seconds to fix.

Next, I tried my absolute best to get the cams in time with the billet cog installed, but I gave up, inspected the old for cracks, and reinstalled it. Everything lined up on the first go. The car has now logged 300 trouble-free miles with no discernible leaks! So now I can finally get started on working on the interior!







So that's that! I need to sort out the minor fitment issues with the rear UrS seats. I think they look great with the grey, but if I could get ahold of a black interior to contrast more... Mmmmmm.

Also, I am aware that the later B5 wheel won't be so plug-and-play, but I just think they look so much better that it'll be worth the effort. I'll be using the tiptronic wheel for airbag testing, since I'll have to modify the wiring a bit, and I want to be sure.

Oh! And the K04 job on the S4 was a success! It's properly quick, so it'll now be getting some massive 6-pot Cayenne calipers (K24 for size). Also, I just got some UFO uprights, sooooo..... free brakes.



Thanks for reading!

Well, I definitely want to see it, and I know everyone else does too! Restoration projects are just as much fun to read about as anything else. I love seeing the transformation from junkyard candidate to clean daily driver. The S4 seats look great although I agree they'd look better with a black interior. Gray and beige don't really compliment each other that well.

I'm not sure how I feel about the B5 wheel, but anything is certainly better than the stock 200 one. I just prefer something less rounded for the t44. The S2/euro urS4 wheels are the best looking in my opinion, but they don't have airbags so... I fully approve of the airbag wheel instead! It's a worth trade-off.

Here's the one in mine.



Score on the brakes, and love the door sills too. I probably need to re-apply mine. I did a half-assed job at it when I did mine because I didn't want to make it really hard to get off if I wanted to change them later. I think I used silicone and it didn't work out so well. How are you going to apply them?

Are you rebuilding the interior switches? I did that to mine. It's really nice to have them all light up again.

2nd on wanting get to.see restoration. I love crazy high power but also very nice time capsules are.great too!

You could.dye the seats the color you want.

Wow that S2 wheel looks amazing... but I have to accept the tragic fact that the car might be involved in an accident someday. I'd rather not compromise safety for better looks. That said, the thicker wheel and 3-spoke design will be a vast improvement over stock! I like the thinner profile of the airbag section on the late B5 vs. early B5/UrS6, as well as the multiple small dots on the airbag.

And yes! All lights and switches are in the process of being reconditioned, with as many of them running LED's as possible. I'm also working on adding individual rear seat heater controls. The stock 200 seats would need thermistors retrofitted, but I can just skip that, now that I have the UrS seats.

I thought about dyeing the seats, but I want to figure out what direction I want to take the interior, first. I always thought the all-platinum interior was a bit... drab, so I've recently decided to move away from that. Especially with silver paint, the whole thing car just 50 shades of grey.

Wait, no. Scratch that.

Would definitely like to see the progress as the lighting upgrades progress.

Nice work, and agree about the platinum to black seats.

Aktapod wrote:Wow that S2 wheel looks amazing... but I have to accept the tragic fact that the car might be involved in an accident someday. I'd rather not compromise safety for better looks. That said, the thicker wheel and 3-spoke design will be a vast improvement over stock! I like the thinner profile of the airbag section on the late B5 vs. early B5/UrS6, as well as the multiple small dots on the airbag.

And yes! All lights and switches are in the process of being reconditioned, with as many of them running LED's as possible. I'm also working on adding individual rear seat heater controls. The stock 200 seats would need thermistors retrofitted, but I can just skip that, now that I have the UrS seats.

I thought about dyeing the seats, but I want to figure out what direction I want to take the interior, first. I always thought the all-platinum interior was a bit... drab, so I've recently decided to move away from that. Especially with silver paint, the whole thing car just 50 shades of grey.

Wait, no. Scratch that.

I totally agree, airbags for the win. I personally think you should use the tip wheel and use the tip controls to control boost or something like that

Interesting on the rear seat heating. I always wondered how they worked. Do they come on when you turn the front ones on? It would make much more sense to have controls for it.

There's a dial below the rear heater vents, IIRC.

What? No way, how did I not know that?

Because our 200's didn't get them!

In stock form, each seat has a pressure switch that closes a heating circuit if someone is sitting in it. Every passenger heating element is powered in parallel by the passenger seat heater relay. Essentially, there's a control 0-6 for the driver's side and a universal 0-6 for any occupied passenger seat. The supplied power is regulated entirely based on a single thermistor in the front passenger seat.

I picked up the rear control switches from the same V8 I got the door sills off of. Currently disassembled, but you can see the 200 vs. the UrS/V8 rear panel.

Ah, now I know! Glad you figured that out, because it was a total mystery to me lol. I only found out it even had heated rears after a friend told me it was nice and warm back there one day when we were ridin' FO DEEP

^Mit launching, ja?? I had to roast my buddy's rear end without telling him to confirm.

Today, after a local Cars & Coffee, I took the 200 on a 190-mile charity run with a bunch of friends from school. Of course, this was "not a race," so I just worked on maintaining "speed limit" behind my friend's E36 M3.

As nature intended, of course, my Bavarian-driving friends and I engage in lots of friendly trash-talking, so I hope I thoroughly disappointed him when he looked in the rear-view and saw the four-ringed land barge still on his tail! In fact, the 200 was performing flawlessly, and my co-driver told me "Wow! This thing's a lot faster than I thought!"

The route was supposed to take us through the infamous Tail of the Dragon, which, for those who don't know, is an incredible stretch of road here in my backyard. It's 11 miles long, with 318 beautifully cambered turns and hills. I was really looking forward to taking the 200 for the first time, and I can only hope I already proved her worth to the Bimmer drivers, because I am never going to live down when the cam position sensor crapped before we even got there.

Oh no! haha see if you had VEMS, you could have run it without the hall sensor You've very lucky to have tail of the dragon so close by!

VEMS donations graciously accepted! My mistake was turning off the car before I checked what was throwing the CEL and limiting boost. The instant I pulled it, I realized it probably wouldn't start up again. Oops.

I hitched a ride in my buddy's E92 and came back for the car early this morning. Some shots from yesterday:




And a HUGE thanks goes out to Rich @ European Auto Garage for generously coming out and helping with what would have otherwise been a very expensive tow.


All in all, it was super fun! I'm not upset at all - neither expensive nor catastrophic, and it was bound to happen eventually. I'm ordering the hall effect sensor, CPS and engine speed sensor to avoid anything similar happening in the near future.

Nice to have friends with trucks and trailers! Glad you still had a good time