CeeP

Hi folks,

Thanks to this thread (and the droopy bottom one), I pulled the wheel liner on our '06 and found the cracks in the compressor hose that had been mentioned here. I took it to the dealer and mentioned the intermittent errors we had seen on the iDrive a few months past and asked them to take a look. I also told them that I had pulled the wheel liner to take a look and noticed the cracked hose (always a bit risky with dealers in the SF Bay Area as they all seem to take any opportunity to blame the customer to deny warranty claims).



To my surprise (and maybe because the economy is so bad they need to take warranty claims more seriously to make up for the money they're no longer making on the sales side of the house), they said the rear suspension wasn't working to spec anymore and replaced the entire compressor assembly. Tonight, I pulled the wheel liner again to see what they did, and it looks like there's a new braided hose to replace the old, plain rubber design.



It seems that a lot of the problem could be prevented if a gap in the plastic undertray were plugged up - the hose is right behind here, and it would seem a lot of debris could be kept out with an extension of the undertray. I may try covering this hole up with something...some tape and another piece of plastic?



Edit - noticed someone mentioned the braided hose above. Oh well, now everyone knows what it looks like. I didn't check to see if the compressor was now behind a foam block. Maybe tomorrow night .

hondik

Hi, thanks for the input. It is really valuable information.

pef

[topic="0"]
Hi my suspension failed as well and my car. The car was 1 year out of warranty but after 2 weeks of discussion with dealership and bmw they finally agreed to pay for the ?600 pump and I had to pay for the fitting ?275 so not too bad..... they also fixed the broken wires to the tailgate (another common falt that effects all cars eventually) for free! it is worth perservering as they originally said i had to pay for everything.[/topic]

chim

Hi

i had on my 525d touring a msg on the i drive "level control failure "its a logo of a car with both signs up and down after 1 day it went of and yesterday it came agien. today there is nothing wrong and the car never looked like it went down.

does eny one knows what to do ???
going to the dealer its ok but they just whant 100euro for inspecting the car so better not.

thanks Chim

vesil

Thanks for all good info in this thread and especially for CeeP about good pictures.

I changed the hose today. The original was already quite delicate at compressor end and I broke it when took it away. Normal reinforced rubber hose with 7mm inner diameter suits fine. One meter hose with couple hose clamps cost me seven Euro. The whole project took about one hour but I also cleaned everything under wheel liner and plastic cover. The car is now much lighter - There was quite much wet sand.

This is really recommended project if you don't want spend one thousand Euro to new compressor.

Patrick E61

I was also shocked by this when I had my rear bumper off. I would guess that we removed about 1.5kg of wet material.

I may attempt the hose replacement with your recommended 7 Euro fix.

Stonehenge

New owner of an E61 535d MSport registered 03/06 but built 06/05. I had a look at the hose in question by pulling off the inner arch liner and the rear cover (easy). The hose was original and the compressor had the foam surround. The hose was split in 3 places! and the foam all OK. There was a little crud in the undertray but not much. It wasn't dirt or water that caused the failure but just the age and complete uselessness of the hose in question. This is a very cheap hose waiting to fail! BMW should really recall the car for this. Good news is that I don't think any crud made it into the pump itself.

Anyway, I replaced the hose with one off an old Zefal cycle track pump that has a slightly smaller bore and is reinforced also! I also routed carefully and made sure that it doesn't rub against sharp edges etc. The car pumped up well and there were no leaks. I will wait a month before I will remove the cover and make sure all is OK.

Thanks for all the info on this!

Henry's Dad

Just had the dreaded compressor failure on our 04/2005 525d. Have been getting the warning on the Idrive on an irregular basis for a couple of weeks but have decided to bite the bullet and get it sorted. Managed to get my local garage to sort it (nearest BMW stealer is nearly an hour away!) so am now just waiting to find out the final cost. Was quoted around 550 euros for the parts so hopefully will manage to save a bit of money not having to pay the high dealer hourly rates for what seems like a fairly straight forward job.

Not that impressed really, can't believe that BMW haven't done some kind of recall to replace the hose at an earlier stage.

Will post up the total cost when I get the bill.

Happy days, Idrive says I need new front brake pads now!

Chris

higher

Does anyone have detailed instructions, plus pics on how to access the hose / compressor and repair.

This would be a good post for the DIY section as plenty of poeple (including myself) want to check this useless component

bigbadbull

Any one got the part number of the new BMW hose assembly?

May do a bit of preventive maintenance one the Wagon comes in.