For your dining and dancing pleasure....



Cheers,

Charlie

 

Looking forward to giving this a watch. Thanks for sharing!

 

Excellent find. I have shared this to a number of Facebook groups I am in, and a MINI mechanic who appreciated it greatly. Now I see why the valve cover job is $2500 at the dealer. A lot of stuff comes off. Don't see people here/elsewhere saying it leaks so knock on wood mine won't. Thanks again for this excellent find!!

 

Curious isn't it. Much carbon on the pistons, but not in the intake valves. I greatly enjoyed my b38, and now have a b48 at 130k miles, looking for 200k.

Cheers,

Charlie

 

From what I read here and there 200k is do-able. Friend has 160k on a B48 that was tuned at about 120k (Bitronic), still runs great.

 

Great teardown video. He said it's from a 2019 model year car, so assuming it's from a U.S. car, I believe it's actually a B36 and not a B38, but I don't think there are many differences between them.

 

Good catches!

 

Fascinating to watch this vid.

A good while ago I spent time working on a 4-cyl Hyundai GDI -- in a 2015 Accent -- that had carboning issues we expect with a GDI (which to be clear, the BMW B3x / B4x / B5x seem to handle far better) -- intake valve carboning, fuel injector tip carboning, piston carboning (top and presumably rings). The engine had over 140K miles on it and I ended up doing both creative soak of the intake valves and of the pistons (not even knowing what a "piston soak" was at the time) using Berryman's B-12.

Looking at the B38 teardown vid, the carboning at the rings was on par with what I saw on that Hyundai's intake valves and piston tops. Never took the engine out of the car but suspect the rings were just as bad. The B-12 did such an amazing job cleaning up the intake valves and piston tops that I decided to soak the injector tips in the B-12. The chemical turned the carbon buildup to fine soot that rinsed clean off (no power spray/etc. needed).

So back to the YouTube of the B38 teardown and the really bad coking on those piston rings, I wonder if a piston soak with B-12 or similarly powerful product is a good idea on a B series engine of higher miles, or known lightly-driven condition, or-or-or you get the idea, has a place in long-term maintenance.

My one caveat: I noted in this post featuring another B series teardown YouTube that there is a coating on the cylinder walls of the B3x/B4x/B5x engines, and I don't know whether the B-12 would strip or start to strip that clean. If that's the case, such a chemical could set you needing to more serious thought about what to do to compensate -- ideas such as Liqui Moly CeraTec + other friction modifying strategies at specific maintenance intervals come to mind, to mitigate the loss of that coating.

Of course, given the detail supplied with that video, B-12 or no B-12 you may end up with loss of some of that coating and an issue anyway.

I'm spitballing here, but you get the idea. In a high-mileage context all of this starts to matter a lot.

Thoughts?