[X5MBeast]

My wife wanted a suv (4Runner to be specific), but I had no intention on buying an suv for the next year or two. One day I happen to be browsing online and found an X5M for a good price. Showed my wife saw a picture of it and actually liked it. Next thing you know I’m messaging the owner to get more details. Fast forward a couple of days and we had two plane tickets to get this X5M.

It had 127.5k with no warranty. Only mod was m colors on the grills and rear badge was blacked out.



We drove it from NH to SC and everything went pretty smoothly on the 18 hour drive back home. Avg: 15-16 mpg on the way back. Definitely had some good runs into the triple digits. Worst part of the trip was driving through DC/VA at night. Traffic flow was bumper to bumper at 90 mph and everyone is changing lanes every 5
seconds.



We made an appointment at my local dealership to have the oil changed and look the car over.

Tech came back with:

Oil Leaks (Valve Cover, Oil pan, PVC hoses and Filtered Ducts)
Powers steering fluid was foaming
Feathering on the RFT’s
Control arms were causing some creaking noise

I was going to have rod bearings done just to make sure the engine was good to go for another 100k, but no one at my dealer wanted to do that job. Rod bearing job also was more money than I wanted to spend. I did an oil analysis and everything came back good.

My dealer had a two week wait for appointment so started ordering parts and making a game plan for what repairs I wanted to tackle while my wife drove the SUV in the mean time. Fast forward a couple of days and I had a velos tune on the way with some of the parts needed for the repairs. Then I got misfires on cylinder 7 while making a grocery run while my wife was at home one night. Changed the coil on cylinder 7 and everything was good again.

The next day I went back to the dealership with new game plan.

Labor hours for
Coils and plugs
Valve cover gaskets
Oil pan gaskets
Power steering pump
Vacuum pump
PVC hoses
Totaled 45-50 hours of work

I also wanted to add:
high flow cats to reduce engine bay heat
transmission solenoids
front strut mounts
trans case fluid

That totaled around 70 hours of labor.

After talking with the shop foreman we settled on doing a valve seal job that way engine was easy to access. I could add downpipes, front and rear suspension work without racking up as many labor hours.

Labor drop back down to around 61-62 hours.

.

Two weeks passed and I brought the X5M to the dealer to start on the maintenance and upgrades. Long story short I ran into some issues with the shop being extremely backed up with customer work and no one was going to starting working on my wife’s X5M for almost two months (unknown to me at the time).

I started my own project in the mean time. Replacing the headlight plastic lens.
This was the biggest pita job I had every done and upgrading the projector glass to a clear glass lense.

Unfortunately this both plastic lenses covers has seen better days. I really wanted the Led was Adaptive headlights, but they were too expensive even at employee cost. Here was the new lenses before I put lamin-x on




This was right after I finished installing the Laminx. The haze and bubbles cleared up a day or two later.



This is how yellow the clear coat was both the passenger and driver side headlight.
I tried a headlight buffing kit from Walmart. Let’s just say didn’t work well. The white spot in the top right corner was my test spot. That took 1 hour and all the sand paper in the kit.



Next I cut the plastic cover off the headlight that took two nights of working after hours.

A better solution for anyone who might want to attempt removing the plastic headlight lense cover is to heat the headlight in the oven and used a bent screwdriver to separate the headlight lense from the housing. Another night was spent scraping peraseal out of the headlight channel. Finally on the forth night I able to swap the projector lense.

Before



After: See the clarity and focus


I went to install the new lense and discovered it didn’t fit. The X5M shares headlight with the X6 and X6M. I order two new plastic lenses from California and finished the lead light one week later.



Another important note is to order the projector lense after measuring the projector glass lens. The stock lens is 27mm. I ordered a 23mm clear lens based on what I read from the internet.


The result of incorrect size lense was this.


The next day I found a good deal on some of LED Adaptive Headlight and picked them up. These are getting installed next week:

If anyone is looking for the retrofit cable you can actually order them at the dealership. It took about 10-13 days to arrive on rush order from Germany.