All posts by Terry Pitts

Terry is a retired school teacher, retired Army Reservist, and retired civilian Department of the Army Civilian working about half the time as a pilot and flight instructor. He has been flying since age 19, adding gliders in 2011. He's been an FAA certificated flight instructor since 2013.
Cars

Don’t lose your license

THE GUY I BOUGHT the car from removed the license plate. I drove home w/o one. I was passed at one point by a police car, so it’s clearly not a big thing. Unfortunately, the guy kept the screws that hold the plate in place. I stopped at a car parts place on the way to register the car a couple days later. The screws were the wrong size. I stopped at a different place. Google to the rescue.

The frame has come loose on the left side. It could easily fall off.

A few days later I went through the car wash. The license plate was half off the car! Closing the lift gate or going through a car wash was enough to cause the left half of the plate holder to fall free. This became the first repair.

New part from BMW, torx screws from the license plate, the torx driver, and a phillips head screwdriver. All you need.

This was a five-minute job including washing the part of the lift gate covered by the license plate. The license plate is attached to a frame with four screws. The frame is attached to the lift gate with two screws that go into plastic plugs. The left most plug was worn/damaged enough not to stay snapped into the sheet metal. Perhaps this has been a problem for BMW, the new part is a big chunkier than the old one. I reinstalled the frame and reattached the license plate. Now it’s time to hit the carwash!

New part on the left, old on the right – called a plug-in nut.

The part is called a “plug-in nut” and has BMW part number 51188242693.

Cars

Filter out the mess

FILTERS ARE important to the car. There is an engine air filter in the intake and a cabin air filter (“Pollen filter” in Europe) to keep it nice inside. Both filters are really easy to get to. Today I replaced both with the car at 103,750 miles. I’ll do the same in a year! These German filters came from eEurope parts.

Filters
An engine air filter above with the cabin air filter below.

Other filters include the fuel filter and oil filter. They will be covered in future maintenance pages.