[Don89]

Evening all,

I'm about to buy a 2009 330d e92 m sport on Sunday, and I happened to have come across a few horror stories online detailing how their timing chain has snapped & they've ended up needing either an engine rebuild or a completely new engine. From what I understand, the N47 is more notorious for the timing chain fault, however I was wondering if anyone had any info on whether it should be changed on a N57 or not. The 330d I'm going to buy has 111k miles on it, and full service history up to 100k miles, with the remaining 11k miles servicing done by the previous owner.

It is to my understanding that frequent oil changes every 8000-10000 miles would help prevent any timing chain issues, but I was wondering whether it is essential when the car is past 100k miles or not. It seems quite a pricey change, around £1000 so I believe, of course because you need to remove the engine to do so.

Should I get it replaced after buying the car? Or should I wait until some "symptoms" show themselves, like a rattle noise towards the top rear of the engine bay.

The car does have a couple of modifications: a stage 1 remap, and the dpf has been removed.

Cheers guys

[Yozh]

Doesn’t a 2009 E92 330d come with an M57 motor and not an N57. In both cases a motor does not need to be removed to do a timing chain job even if doing it properly with oil pan removal. N57 needs transmission removal for the job. Whichever motor you get oil changes should be be done at 10k km / 6k mi frequency with quality oils.

[Don89]

Originally Posted by Yozh

Doesn’t a 2009 E92 330d come with an M57 motor and not an N57. In both cases a motor does not need to be removed to do a timing chain job even if doing it properly with oil pan removal. N57 needs transmission removal for the job. Whichever motor you get oil changes should be be done at 10k km / 6k mi frequency with quality oils.

Cheers for the reply mate. In 2008 they swapped from the m57 to the n57. Sadly I don’t think I have the tools required to change it myself, and also probably wouldn’t trust myself, there’s a fairly revered bmw specialist near me so I could ask him to have a look once I’ve bought the car?

Well, according to the previous owner the oil was done every 10k miles up to 60k, then after that it was done slightly more frequently.

Think I’ll be safe? I was scanning this forum for people with timing chain issues and tbh they seemed few and far between.

[Yozh]

Europeans say that N57 chains should be done at 200k km mark. I trust them as there is a good bit of experience with diesels there

[Postrach]

If the oil have been changed ~10k-15k km and automatic transmission it should do more then 200k+ km. There are few n57 with stage1 300k km with out changing it.

Mostly there are no sounds or any symptoms something is going wrong and will broke.

~200-250k could be good to replace

[TSpecial]

I had engine failure with my N57 at 112K miles.timing chain..the warning sign is a bad bearing sound from the engine.

[Billyh1997]

https://youtube.com/shorts/vObH2gzHC_U?feature=share

TSpecial

Does this sound how yours did?