albino09 said:All told an idler failing after 70k miles has nothing to do with the vehicle in question, it's just a maintenance item that would have beaten up any vehicle given the same failed part.
To the idea of upgrading that pulley, I'd argue the plastic part made it 70k miles. It doesn't need any upgrade.
Or it failed the first time the car went on track. Could be either.
Probably mileage, but high rpm use is hard on bearings.
GameboyRMH said:In reply to dnospamplease :
It was the bearing that failed, the plastic pulley was fine. Not all plastic engine-related parts are as worthy of our scorn as plastic radiator end tanks.
So I'm pretty sure what happened was the bearing failed, heated up and started melting its way out of the plastic pulley. Was the failure worse or better because it was a plastic roller and not steel? Tough to say. A failed bearing inside a steel roller would have had a pretty unfortunate failure mode as well. So I guess I'm agreeing here that it didn't fail because plastic, it failed while plastic.
CrustyRedXpress said:Pretty tempting to leave some snark, but good on you guys for finding out how trackable (or not) these things are.
The thing I understand now is why people take this risk. It's an incredible driving experience. Life behind the wheel makes you forget about a lot of perceived issues.
This article jumped out at me as this exact same thing happened to my N55 135i. I had no idea that this failure could and did lead to the engine eating the belt through the crank seal. A very expensive lesson on the ownership of a BMW. Install the crank seal guard!
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