Help trouble-shooting codes on recently purchased E46.

[cornerbalanced]

Can you confirm the roller bearing was seized?

Will have to confirm with my mechanic—but I believe that’s the case. Oddly enough I didn’t hear anything, and I’m super paranoid when it comes to any weird noises—I could’ve simply overlooked the noise however.

On my new unit I ended up keeping the NOS oil pump disc and got a beefier VANOS hub instead…hopefully won’t have to encounter this issue again.

[sapote]

As an update:

After further diagnosis, timing for the car is completely normal while driving. As soon as the car idles though, timing slowly, yet progressively falls out of wack. The longer the car idles, the worse the timing is (misfires, car bounces in idle, and eventually stalls after some time of just idling). As soon as you drive the car, timing is fine, and the cycle resets. Will idle fine for a couple seconds, but timing slowly falls out of order.

In hindsight this is the telltail of low vanos pressure at idle due to the sticky pistons pump. How many miles it was driven until the piston head was filed off compeletely?

[sapote]

Here is the root cause in your case, I think: the brand new Beisan disk/pistons with the sticky pistons and tight clearance finally heated up and seized in the disk holes. The seized pistons placed high pressure on the bearing inner race, and finally caused the bearing to seize. The rest is history. People should inspect these new disk/pistons carefully before install, or better yet keep using the stock old disk and have it redrill the two smaller driven holes instead of new disk.

Here is another case that is much worst than you, and if I were the owner (Andy) there is no need to worry about the rest of the engine (he rebuilt the engine) with containminated oil -- the engine filter should do its job to filter the particales down to microns. All he needs to do is replacing the vanos, the damaged chain and sprockets.

https://forums.m3cutters.co.uk/threads/worst-vanos-failure-ever.247895/page-6

[cornerbalanced]

Here is the root cause in your case, I think: the brand new Beisan disk/pistons with the sticky pistons and tight clearance finally heated up and seized in the disk holes. The seized pistons placed high pressure on the bearing inner race, and finally caused the bearing to seize. The rest is history. People should inspect these new disk/pistons carefully before install, or better yet keep using the stock old disk and have it redrill the two smaller driven holes instead of new disk.

Here is another case that is much worst than you, and if I were the owner (Andy) there is no need to worry about the rest of the engine (he rebuilt the engine) with containminated oil -- the engine filter should do its job to filter the particales down to microns. All he needs to do is replacing the vanos, the damaged chain and sprockets.

https://forums.m3cutters.co.uk/threa....247895/page-6

Amazing info. Really appreciate it.

Hm. I got the SES light pertaining to the timing codes the night I purchased the car. As there were no obvious drivability issue, and the codes were intermittent, I elected to drive the car ~600mi home the next day. In hindsight my VANOS issue started before this drive, or even before I purchased the car.

I would say I drove the car roughly ~700mi maximum before having the old unit completely removed. We put a handful of miles first troubleshooting the TPS sensors.

[sapote]

I don’t know how bad it affects drivability’ with a low oil pressure vanos, but in your case, the roller bearing probably seized up in the last 50 miles or so.

[sapote]

Here’s the interesting: both you and Andy had no broken exhaust hub driving tabs which rotated the heavy load seized pump! This proves that the broken tabs is due to hammering and not weak material and structural.