We FIXED the Blown Head Gasket in my BMW i8 WITHOUT Spending $10,000 at the Dealer

Previously on Sam Crack. Brand new head gasket. This is what is going to solve all our problems. Stephen, how many head gaskets have you done before? I have done like three. Three head gaskets? Okay, unlike BMWs, right? What do you mean no? It's three Hondas. What do you mean no? On what? It's only Hondas. On Hondas? Stephen secured the frame back in the car and up it went back on the lift, this time with the engine mounted in place. The main concern after having an engine completely torn apart is if and how well it runs. With everything in place and ready to fire, we rolled the cameras and prepared for our i8's first start. And over the next couple hours, we looked for blown fuses, broken connectors, we just couldn't find a single physical issue. We're closer than ever and we won't stop at anything until this car is back on the road. Mark. Stupid Sam, that's what he gets for buying the same car as me. I should buy another car. Let's take the i8. Engine oil. Vehicle check. Brake fluid. What the heck? The hell is this? Aw, Sam. It's Black History Month. The whole month. You should be ashamed of yourself. Hey guys, I'm Sam Crack and this BMW i8 project has been all about taking risks. Now, I never intended on stealing an entire drivetrain from my old friend's car, but I doubt Rich never intended on stealing his friend's wife during a simple exploitation experiment at the Olive Garden. Risks always have their consequences. In the case of Rich, nobody in their right mind will ever let him within a few feet of their family. This one personally shook me as Rich has been a guest in my house and was even there for me during the birth of my firstborn. In my case, well, this was a tricky one. It's never the right thing to steal, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Local law enforcement were informed about the theft, but luckily Rich's state senator has no concept of reality, even when pressed about it on national television. But in reality, risk is what can pay off big during our BMW engine rebuild, or cost us a ton of time and money in the process, and risk is something many repair shops will not assume. That's not just a dealer who won't sell a head gasket job on my car, but a ton of other repair shops follow this same logic and consider anything short of an entire engine replacement too much of a liability. And I understand the reasoning here. There's definitely a greater risk. It's just so strange that BMW makes a thicker replacement head gasket for this engine specifically for this purpose and, well, again, the dealer won't use it. The risk here extends past the owner of the car and onto the shop doing the work, and that's why I'm so grateful to be working with Eurocharged in Orlando. Through my own diagnosis and diagnosis at their shop, we both felt confident about repairing this engine instead of replacing it. I assumed the liability, ordered up the parts, and we rebuilt the engine with a repaired cylinder head and a factory shimmed head gasket, the two main components costing about $250 total as opposed to a $10,000 replacement engine. While Steven, our BMW dealer trained tech from Eurocharged made this all look simple, no extensive car repair goes without its issues, which we'll discover in just a moment. We're moments away from starting things up for the first time after having everything reassembled. You guys remember this procedure here? I'm going to start the vacuum up. We've got to do both systems this time. This is for the hybrid battery system, and then this is the main one that we struggled with before. Since Steven had to pull the battery out of place when the engine came down, a lot of the coolant hoses had to come apart, so we lost all the coolant in this car. Let's cross our fingers this time and hope that this works. A lot of people have claimed the vacuum procedure on the i8 is a difficult one that needs to be performed multiple times for it to be effective, and now we're very hopeful to test this claim out in the real world once our engine comes back to life. With fresh oil, coolant, and several days invested, we were more than anxious to fire the i8 up and confident that its problems would disappear like the stepmom nightmare I had last night. Sorry, Sam. Stepmom's wallet is closed. All my money will be going to Uncle Rich because he knows how to finish a job. The car flashed several high voltage warnings on the dash, and a quick scan of the code showed the same thing. High voltage in this car refers to the hybrid system. The easiest explanation here is that when we took everything apart, we just left something unplugged. Now, we went over every single orange wire in sight and hours later had found nothing. It was frustrating and almost torturous to leave, but with little time left in the day, it had to be done. Now, this seemingly happens all the time when you're working on car projects. You get so close to the end goal, but you get stuck on one of the last steps, and it feels totally counterproductive to stop what you're doing, but it's one of the most important things you could do. You just need to take a break. I like to clear my mind completely of what I've been working on. I'll put on one of my favorite albums and listen to it on my Raycon Everyday E25s. Since they're completely wireless, ultra light, and come with enough tips for a perfect fit, the Everyday E25s I carry and use literally every day. Their battery will last you around six hours of playtime, and with the built-in microphone, you can even use them during a conference call. And after work, I like to use my Raycons to unplug from the daily grind. I'll put on my favorite podcast, put down the phone, and just enjoy. And coming in at about half the price of other boutique brands available on the market, the Everyday E25s make for a tremendous value. So to experience some of the most comfortable, best-sounding wireless earbuds available, go ahead and visit buyraycon.com slash samkrak, or click the link in the description box. When you do, you're going to be treated to an additional 15% off your very own pair. And if for any reason these don't fit your lifestyle, well, Raycon has a 45-day money-back guarantee. Again, that's at buyraycon.com slash samkrak. And I gotta give a huge thanks to Raycon for allowing me to unplug when life calls for it, and for also sponsoring this video. The next morning, Stephen ran across this small black connector on his toolbox. This was the clear culprit. It fits over the high-voltage connector in the rear and completes a circuit. The high-voltage warnings disappeared, and the car fired to life. But things didn't sound quite right. Stephen, are we ready to crank this thing over? This is official. Okay, Stephen, a couple things. First of all, it hasn't had fuel. Man, fingers crossed. Yeah. Fingers crossed. Does it sound bad? Well, okay. Something we haven't told everybody is that there is no... The muffler's right there. Okay. Did it rev well? We didn't rev it. Okay. It's got fresh oil. It's got everything cooling. But that is the first time it's run since it's all been apart. What do you think? It sounded... It did sound... Yeah, it sounded terrible, to be honest. No, no. It was misfiring, for sure. Yes. Something was going on. And that's weird, because without the spark plug, it didn't do that. Stephen took out all the coil packs, right? He's about to try to test fire it. Everything is disconnected. This car should technically not turn on. Technically. All right, all right. Is that what they consider a ghost cam? No, it doesn't sound like anything's hitting anything. No, it just sounds like it's running rough. Okay. It sounds like a car out of time. Now, don't be like me. Don't let excuses cloud your brain. Sure, the exhaust is off, but that doesn't mean the car should sound like this. Stephen, it's smoking like crazy. There's no way, even though it's having the engine apart, it is smoking like crazy. Yeah. What does it smell like? We got to find out where that's coming from. It's coming out of the intake box? Well, it's from the intake. But it's getting worse, the smoke. It's getting heavier and heavier. I keep talking about how good the i8 initially ran. Then we took the entire engine apart, and now it's running poorly. What mistake did we make? A car will never just break itself while being worked on, yet I've seen a ton of people, including myself, create new problems instead of hunting down the existing ones. Good thing we had two heads at work here. Stephen was convinced something was wrong on the fuel side of things, and he was definitely on to something. Although, the valvetronic codes combined with the sound of the engine gave me Land Rover flashbacks. No, it doesn't sound like anything's hitting anything. No, it just sounds like it's running rough. It sounds like a car out of time. There was one other major sign here. I've never once seen smoke coming out of an air intake pipe. Ever. Only logical explanation here is that the intake valve is open when combustion is occurring, and that has to travel somewhere. We broke out the compression tester, and what do you know? On cylinder number one, we were at zero. Now, I know this seems alarming, but before this engine was ever started, it was cranked over by hand to make sure there was no binding or contact, and timing was even checked a few times using dealer tools for this specific engine. So what actually went wrong here? Now, if you've ever timed an engine, you know that one of the first steps is to make sure that cylinder one is on top dead center. And to assure you're exactly in the right place, all these modern timing toolkits come with a pin which locks the flywheel so the engine can't move as you're timing things. But to our error, we were looking at the engine dead on, and we counted it in the wrong order. We counted it like this. One, two, and three. Cylinder order always begins with one closest to the crank pulley. We were reading things in reverse. It's really one, two, and then three. So does it have to be on top dead on cylinder one? That's what it is. Cylinder one. Yeah. Okay. And so this one's really close. Yep. Cool. We're timed, man. You confident in this? You confident? You know what happens if it's out of time? You have a bad time. Yeah. So how did the locking pin still fit? For some reason, there are two notches in the flywheel, as well as the main single notch that locks the pin with cylinder one in top dead center. You can see exactly what I'm talking about through the eye of our test long scope camera. Luckily, this engine is super easy to retime, even with it installed. We popped off the valve cover and with the car lifted slightly off the ground, got the correct cylinder one in top dead, our pin locked in place, and we reinstalled everything. Steven, if this messes up, there's a guy with the B38 engine down the street for like 800 bucks. Don't worry. It's out of a mini. We'll just have to swap the crank. We'll have to swap the pistons. We'll have to swap the whole head. I'll have to buy another head gasket from Germany. Don't worry though. We'll get it. Well, there's a lot less room to work while the engine is installed in the i8. The timing job can still simply be performed, and it only took us about 30 minutes total. Finally, once these were back in the right place, things sounded perfect. In my opinion, the engine is idling way quieter than it did when I initially got the car, and it sounds amazing, but we're not out of the woods quite yet. The real test comes right now. Remember the computer bleed procedure? We ran this test multiple times before, and the engine never lasted but a few minutes without overheating. This time, the car went the full 20 minutes, and it was clear that things were working well. The coolant temperatures would rise and fall right back down, and they never even exceeded 91 degrees Celsius during this test. Before our fix, the car would rise to near 120 degrees Celsius in just a few minutes. This is the fastest car you've ever been in, Stephen, isn't it? All right, so there it is. 78, 77. They see it's dropping. Amazing. I see you guys get the car back running. It's running. It's not overheating. That's a good thing. So now when you get another one of these, you know where to bring it. To the tech, Stephen. That's right. Yeah, it's a good BMW tech. He is the best. The best. It's dropping. Oh, yeah, baby. AC's nice, too. Yeah, look. Oh, wow, man. That's it. That's beautiful. The power was there, and the problems were gone. Well, most of them. In over 30 minutes of drive and idle time, the temperatures barely left the double digits. Stephen, this will whip your 135 so hard. This car has been on this lift for, what, over a month now. Yeah. The first day it's on the ground on all four wheels and tires. It is fixed. Thanks to this guy right here. Stephen, you're the man. Thank you. Thank you so much. There are a lot of you guys doubting us down in the comment section, but the other main question was, how much is this going to cost us? Just labor alone. Stephen, what are we looking at? A little bit over $5,000. Okay, so right around five grand. You have to figure a bunch of different things here. Remember, just an engine replacement, just the part itself at the dealership is $10,000. That's not including any of the labor. And think about it. The laboring includes basically a lot of the stuff we already did, right? Yeah. Dropping the engine. And so a lot of the stuff we did would have had to been done anyway. And I think, personally, you tell me what you think. I think this is basically a similar job to an engine R&R, which is remove and replace. We know. No, no, it's not. It's way more. Which one? The engine replacement. So you think an engine replacement is actually more labor than what we did here? Yeah. The part that I would think would be hard is actually pulling the engine out of the cradle itself. And then you've got to swap everything. And remember, we were able to leave pretty much all of our accessories, except for the water pump. We had a replacement when we replaced it. But there's a lot of dismantling and reassembling on a new engine. And, oh, a transmission. Yeah. Okay. All we did was take the cylinder head off and the timing of the cylinder head. Yep. That's it. So all in all, $5,000 in labor. I spent right under $1,000 for all the parts, oils, coolants, everything like that. So we're looking at a price of around $6,000 to repair this car. But again, this was the key to our fix here. So Steven, I can't thank you guys enough. If you have a European car, especially a problematic one, you need to come check out EuroCharge in Orlando. I'm going to leave all the information of them down in the description box below. They're also hiring right now if you're into European cars. So that's a wrap here on the mechanical repairs. What are you going to do with mine next? You know, that's a really great question. One I haven't thought much about. This car proved to be one of the most mechanically difficult we've ever dealt with. And it's wonderful that it can now just be driven and enjoyed. But this i8, without its faults, just doesn't feel right. And the truth is, even mechanically sorted, this car has more to its story. And whether I'm the one to relay that story, well, we'll just have to find out together. I'm done with this one. What do you want me to do with this? Take that piece of **** back to the auction. No problem, boss. Nobody going to know a thing about it.