This weekend I got down to business to sort all this out. \u00a335 had the tracking sorted (after the usual – tedious – discussions about them not being able to guarantee their work unless I bought new tyres). For \u00a3274 I had new discs, pads, front N\/S caliper and a propshaft donut delivered from C3BMW<\/a> (after my usual – tedious – stupidity saw me state my old address on the delivery note).<\/p>\n Here’s the haul:<\/p>\n Looking good at this point! I set to work – in the rain.<\/p>\n Old brakes:<\/p>\n Shiny new brakes!<\/p>\n All the brake work went perfectly (as far as I can tell). I even remembered to undo the disc retention screw before<\/em> removing the caliper, so with a little help from an assistant on the brake pedal it was easy. I had forgotten to order a pad wear sensor, but a quick blast in the M5 (in the rain!) soon saw one gathered from ECP for \u00a310 (over-priced, but worth it for the M5 wet road journey).<\/p>\n So I moved my attention to the worn prop shaft donut.<\/p>\n Six nuts and bolts. Easy. Except of course, that it wasn’t easy at all. Getting access was quite easy – belly panels off, exhaust down etc. But two of the bolts just weren’t interested in coming out of the end of the prop shaft. And, to make matters worse, the prop shaft just wasn’t coming out of the differential, so I couldn’t remove it from the car. Ben Smith was kind enough to pop over and confirm such on both counts.<\/p>\n That marked the end of Saturday. On Sunday morning, bright and fresh, I tried a number of things. I went to Halfords and bought a three legged puller. Fail. I even tried a vice:<\/p>\n Fail. I got angry and took the angle grinder in. The first bolt soon yielded, and I was jubilant:<\/p>\n Sadly, the second bolt was significantly more stubborn. I chopped both ends off, and drilled a 6mm hole through it (12mm bolts). I was planning on eventually drilling the whole thing out, but by this point it was 4pm on Sunday, and frankly, I was utterly exhausted. There was nothing else for it – I had to make an SOS call. I called A Barden.<\/p>\n Bit unfair of me to resurrect that photo really. On both Alex and of course dear reader, you. Alex offered, extremely kindly, to pop over first thing in the morning to sort it out. From Wales. What a darling.<\/p>\n So at 8am this morning, Alex arrived to find the driveway looking like this – proper pikey.<\/p>\n Alex took my advice and tried to shift the bolt in situ. Then, when I’d left him alone and gone to work, he decided to stop messing around, removed the prop shaft from the diff, and twatted (technical term) the bolt out. He has cleaned up the prop shaft, sorted the connection to the diff, fitted the new donut (loosely, with the four remaining bolts) and left things looking, well, just like the photo above.<\/p>\n Hero.<\/p>\n I have now ordered a complete set of 6 nuts and bolts from BMW which I can collect on Wednesday. Then, I shall attempt to rebuild things in the dark. What luck!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I had the 330d serviced by Vines of Guildford BMW earlier this month. I was pleased with the \u00a399 cost of the oil service, but less pleased with the advisory notices: Front N\/S tyre worn on outer edge Front N\/S brake caliper seized Prop shaft coupling worn This weekend I got down to business to […] Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mukerji.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1536"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mukerji.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mukerji.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mukerji.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mukerji.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1536"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.mukerji.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1552,"href":"https:\/\/www.mukerji.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1536\/revisions\/1552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mukerji.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mukerji.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mukerji.co.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Santa's](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mukerji.s3.amazonaws.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/DSC_1774-800x535.jpg?resize=800%2C535&ssl=1\" "\\"Santa's")
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