Cheap and mostly cheerful BMW i3

[IainWhy]

I will update on the Mclaren in a bit but thought some of this may be useful into the public domain.

So, in brief, we have had this for a few years, its basically my wifes car. Her previous car was a fiat 500 abarth, this was a fantastic car but with two growing teenagers, a dog and occasionally me it was a cramped affair. it was also starting to get a little leggy.

Being that the reality is that she just drives whatever is supplied my default state is something turns up on the drive and she either likes it or doesnt, if its a thumbs down then its lifespan is very limited.

Living where we do i was "electrically curious", I felt I had a decent understanding of the physics of it and i understood the efficiency opportunity, however, i didn't want to spend a load of money on something that could be poorly received, alse i would sooner spend money on pointless things like the Mclaren.
and
I settled fairly quickly on a bmw i3 as it was small, but bigger than the abarth and (consider this was a few years back) comparatively cheap.

A mooch on ebay turned up a can that had problems, mainly that the Rex, was not Rexing, the engine would run very briefly and then shut off and throw a red drivetrain error and misfire codes, the car had had a larger screen fitted, been lowered and had some spacers and some uprated speakers

I had a chat with the seller who was a master mechanic and had owned the car for a long time but had ultimately lost interest in it, he concurred that most probably the rex would need to come out as probably the timing chain had stretched. I was ok with this (i had never driven or worked on one but ignorance is bliss)

We agreed on £3600 for the car as it stood and i went down with my long suffering mate and collected it with a trailer.

It had had a life, the interior was a bit minging but it moved about on its own and had an mot.

I got it back to my mates and cleaned the living st out of the inside, then we dragged it a bit closer to the Liverpool ferry port before kicking me out of the trailer and tlling me to ps off.

So i pissed off with 40 miles of range and a broken range extender in my first EV drive

it was fine



Having got it back i cleaning the living st out of it and gave it a hard polishing, taking the external condition from poor, to ok






Having sanitised it it was just driven about for a while using just the battery, in all honesty this was fine, it s (and is) doing about 70 miles on a charge in summer, 60ish in winter and the reality is for local duties your rarely doing more than 40 miles in a sitting on a day to day basis.

Nero gave the car a provisional thumbs up on the basis it was nt constantly coming up with drivetrain faults.

I figured i may as well get after it.

Long story short, i pulled the top off the engine and it looked absolutely mint inside, having eventually rotated it the timing marks on the sprockets looked ok, and the chain didnt actually seem slack, soooooo.

I decided to give the cam timing block a wiggle big block on the (end of the cam)



And found it was loose, that would be the misfire issue then....

Problem was i had no idea where it should be, and it needed to be absolutely correct, not kind of correct. The engine is a 2 cylinder 650cc scooter motor, so i went hunting for pictures of scooter camshafts and eventually got lucky with one that was at a usable angle to calculate the position relative to another fixed point, the lobe.

so i mapped this into fusion360 and then scaled the measurements from the image back onto the timing gear.



I now had a good idea where it should be, but i needed to remove it and stop it flapping about.

Removing it was not too bad, manifolds off etc etc cover off, cam ladder off and i could then tilt the cams upwards and drive it off with a spanner and hammer.



however the reluctor ring was some sort of insanely hard and very heavy sintered material. It laughed off all efforts to drill it



We eventually got into it with a carbide milling bit but it was a pain. i have some really nice taps that i managed to use to cut a thread in it, but one of them has never been the same after the experience, and to add insult to injury the bd thing cracked while tapping it.

Being sintered it was full of old engine oil making it unweldable or so i initially thought, however a caveman solution came to mind, set it on fire and burn the oil out!



You can see the old dirty engine oil running out of it as it burns.

With that sage over i managed to tig it and get a grub screw in the fking thing



With that done i scribed in an alignment line so i could align it with the cam lobs and smacked it onto the end of the camshaft, and locktited the grubscrew in



With it all back together and all the engine codes cleared, it ran like a top, all be it it sounds like a bloke on a scooter is following you about but otherwise mint.

Its now covered 20k miles with no rex issues since the repair (and subsequent service)

Next up (when i can be arsed)
Air con pump failure
Traction battery failure
Bit of the roof falls off
and engine mounts

Oooh the excitement

[macron]

fking good effort to fix that!!!!

[E-numbers]

Excited!

Interesting to hear the rest when you can be bothered.

[tgr]

That is top level commitment!

Great little cars, would love one but have no home charging

[Mad Maximus]

That’s some top tinkering, always liked these. What’s your background if you don’t mind me asking?

[Hoofy]

Bloody hell. Good work.

[POIDH]

I really like these cars.
I wish BMW and others would look at these, or Honda e, and see the market potential for a small, light EV with a nice interior...