The wear pattern was often near the ends of the bearing, which suggests some ovalization of the bearings, mostly likely due to over-torquing of the factory rod bolts when they were replaced on that factory recall.īe sure to check the big end rod bearings as well, since as we learned with our S54 they actually showed much more severe wear and this is apparently typically the case with these engines. We dropped the oil pan, removed the rod bearing caps and inspected the “small end” bearings, all of which showed wear right through the coating into the softer metal beneath it. As we could see from the service records on our car, it did indeed receive new rod bearings when the odometer read 50,000 km, but some 250,000 km later how would they look? We had the engine out as part of a larger overhaul including a VANOS system rebuild and a general cleanup of the engine and engine bay, so if we were ever going to check the rod bearings now was the time. That’s because the S54 M3 engine is plagued by rod bearing wear issues, so much so that there was a recall from BMW to replace the bearings on early (’01 to mid ’03 model year) E46 M3s like ours. One of the top jobs on our list was to inspect the rod bearings for wear and replace them if necessary.

If you’ve been following our Drift Car Build-Off video series on our YouTube channel, then you know we bought the cheapest E46 M3 we could find ($4,000 USD), and that meant accepting the fact the 300,000 km chassis and engine were going to need some maintenance before we could reliably pound on the S54 3.2-liter straight-6 engine while learning to drift in it.

E46 m3 specs torque