Back in the country after a few days away on business, driving around Ireland in what must be the slowest BMW know to man.

That being the 316D with it's
mighty
114bhp, which is less than half what my 1er has and weighs around 100kg more

Anyway, back to matters in hand.

.

.

I've got sick of trying to ID the thread size and ultimately the thread adapter I need for the sandwich plate so have stuck the original one back in and will tackle it later.

I do now have a plug to go in the head, thanks to Nick, so that's one half of the job sorted at least

Nick suggested I should cheap the clearances before swapping the oil etc, so I picked myself up one of those tools I should have got ages ago but haven't needed to.

.

feeler gauges.

All clearances were checked with the exhaust side all having a 0.2mm gap, which is spot on.

The intake side were slightly low, being a mix of 0.13

- 0.20, so Nick kindly popped around today and swapped the shims for slightly larger ones and everything is pretty much spot on.

Thanks again, Nick

I used the the need to take the cam covers off as an opportunity to do a job I've long been wanting to do, respraying them.

Here's the before:





Oil, cams and other gubbins.





Temporary cover, learning lessons from the past.

.

.

.





Here's what I had to work with.





Degreased and scrubbed.





Prepped for surgery.





A few coats of Hammerite Smooth and some baking on the radiator later, they're done.

Not perfect but they didn't need to be.

If I'd wanted perfect I'd have had them powdercoated, this car's not really about that though.





Back on, fired up and leak tested.





Obviously a test drive was needed, in the rain.

.

.

Light ish rain at a
healthy
speed comes pretty damn keen!





All in all it's another little job done and another step closer to where it needs to be.

Next up is to swap the oil and filter then book in for a re-tune, trying to put some miles on it before hand.

After that it's alignment and corner weighting, then it's pretty much ready for Blyton at the end of March
