Neglected the thread for a bit and I've done some work on the car, some small upgrades along with a few other maintence items that needed doing.
First thing first, sorting out the seatbelts. I'm used to my seatbelts being black. These came with beige which tie in with the beige dakota leather. It really isn't my cup of tea and they got heavily discoloured. They are fairly straight forward to replace only requiring the B pillar trim to be unclipped and the rear parcel to be removed to access the bolts to undo the Torx bolts.
Before:
After:
Next up was the first of many oil changes with old filter housing removed and fresh oil. The N62 needs 8 litres of oil:
The oil filter is located under the car and has a screw plug in the centre when removed releases the rest of the oil that is contained in the oil filter. Unfortunately, the numpty who last done the oil change had stripped the screw plug. Thankfully they didn't round off the oil filter housing.
I've sourced a new oil filter housing with a new screw plug so will be installed on the next oil service.
While the front end was up, there was two things to address. Firstly, my power steering reservoir has been sweating since the car was purchased. I wasn't concerned over it as it was a sweat but needed to be changed as it had failed. These also come with a built in non replaceable filter. Second was this high pitched white noise that would come up whenever you turned the steering wheel. The sound had been coming from back of the firewall of the engine bay when you were sat in the car and I had always thought it was the DISA motor. Upon opening the bay it came from the rack.
I had thought the worst and assumed maybe the rack was needing replacing but thought lets try a cheap fix first before going down that route. I had remembered the previous owner mentioning it had a new power steering pump fitted during his relatively short ownership. I then thought maybe it wasn't bled properly.
So I pulled off the mainline hose and before the fluid came out was a lot of trapped air escaping from the pipe. I also noted the fluid was red which is ATF and from what I have read, the E60 uses CHF green fluid. I got rid of it via turning the steering wheel lock to lock to push all the old fluid out:
Old tank which was the original from factory:
New tank which is a Lemforder item and is also the OEM one that they supply to BMW with the roundel sanded away:
Installed and fresh fluid dropped in:
After properly bleeding it, I found the high pitched white noise from turning the steering wheel had completely gone and was nice and quiet as it should be.