This is a posting about car that has little info published. I hope it helps someone else. Feel free to add your info that it may in turn accomplish the same goal.

We recently did a timing chain repair on this jewel and all the intakes except 2 were in some state of bend! Also to note was a tremendous amount of carbon- more carbon than valve it seemed. We installed new OE valves and hand lapped them in. Ours ran well for about 15-20 mins and went into bad idle poor run mode that would not clear up. It ran okay at 2200 rpms but really was nasty all-together. Like most any shop we started looking for what we did wrong. The car came in with the crankcase 2.25 qts low. The oil filter came out in multiple pieces as if it had been there a while. After playing with the available data with a Verus and a Maxisys we only found helpful the P1497 code for downstream air intake measurement. Smoke tests, valve cover\pcv tests, you name it we did it. The problem was the variable cam timing solenoid was stopped up with bits and pieces of something UFO like. Schmutz I think it's called. Anyway we cleaned the passage, pumped 30 psi of oil pressure through the Vanos solenoid hole with the solenoid out while rocking the intake cam back and forth. We cleaned and lubricated the solenoid and this has fixed our running problems. I'm assuming that this was keeping our valves open since the oil could not exit the apply route. Note: there was never a Vanos code set.

I would love to start a Mini and BMW section to share and post data. Does anyone else see the need for this?

Douglas Powell
Owner/Technician
Autoworks Of Valdese, Inc
Valdese, North Carolina, USA