Even when you think you've covered all your bases, there's never a guarantee. Just last week I was driving the coupe after just having installed a new set of headers (euro set) and had gotten maybe around 20 miles back home from my point of install (parents garage as my apartment doesn't allow us to work on our vehicles). The following day I booted the car up to go wash it and run some errands, the car was still cold and I was about three miles from home nothing out of the usual. You can feel one of the cylinders begin to misfire and then all the sudden, poof, big cloud of white smoke. Naturally you think, "well there's gone my head gasket." After putting some serious hours into cleaning up the new headers and the installation I figured I'd better leave this one to a local shop here that I've used several times in the past. Had her towed up the road and they started tearing her apart.
After a few days I thought it's a little odd they haven't called me, they were really slow on getting me the quote for the car, regardless of the fact they'd have to be putting together an estimate to have the head go off to a shop and everything else looked over. Seemed pretty standard practice with some delays, but after two days having approved them to go ahead and start working on it I still hadn't heard back from them again. I give them a call a little ways into it and they say they've put about two gallons of fluid into the reservoir and that nothing had held, resulting in it flooding into the oil pan/cylinders somewhere. Pretty common symptoms for a head gasket. I don't hear back from them for a while after this. I give them another ring and they begin to tell me that they had pulled everything off and that they hadn't sent anything out and off to the machine shop. He then explains to me that there are some cracks in the block and maybe the piston head. He starts to go on about trying to find a replacement engine for the zed.
Unannounced I went over there the following day (yesterday) to see the damage at hand and looked through everything.
Here's the link to the photo album of what I took.
Some of the photos in the album:
You can see debris in the cylinder
Cracks in the cylinder wall and also the cylinder head at the bottom left.
I couldn't believe that this would have happened. Across four different forums I found two cases of the actual block having cracked or failing. It still has my mind blown that this has happened. I wondered what BMW would say so I went out to one of their representatives and spoke for a while. A gentlemen who had quite a few years in service, ever since the S54 was released as an engine. He noted that the only time that something like this would have happened is if the engine had overheated. I wondered if it could have been from the shop at some other time, as they're the same folks who had opened up my engine before. They didn't talk much about how they had done my rod bearings around six months before.
I do not track this car, it is daily driven. Occasionally once every other month I get it out on a spirited drive, but even then it's allowed a lot of time to cool down with a drive home and isn't ever run to a point of concern. I've never seen this car over heat and it's never had any issues over the road before this sudden and abrupt issue. There was one PO before me and the car came to me pretty well stock, even after the inspection II and the rod bearings all seemed well. Oil analysis never reported anything crazy, found that I needed to do my rod bearings. Lead was always a little high but seems to be within reason for everything else. I have the blackstone reports if anyone would ever like to see them.
Can you think of anything that would have caused this outside of heat?
Should I be looking at a whole new engine or attempting to rebuild the original?
Will an E46 S54 even run with our ECU (I know there are some significant differences)?
Should I be looking at the shop for malpractice?
I'm devastated with how everything has turned out, and although I have some savings, I think it's fair to say I can't churn out a new S54 nor one with decent mileage used. It also doesn't help that our company went through a round of lay offs the same week she went into the shop.
Thanks to all who have read this, I may be on my way out of the Z world for a while.