Thanks man! Mine was similar but much worse as you saw. I didn't know e46 had these issues. Probably not as common as with e39.
I refreshed belts and pulleys over the weekend.
I went with Ruville parts which had INA engraved on them.
Water Pump / Alternator / Power Steering Belt - 11281710045 x2
AC Compressor Belt - 531076010 x1
And Continental belts.
Fairly easy and quick job to do. Drove the car onto the ramps, removed the fan clutch and underbody panel and that gives you enough space to work with.
All 3 pulleys were shot and spinning freely, but surprisingly didn't make that much noise.
AC belt was replaced at some point and was still good, while the serpentine had cracks.
Glad to have done this. The parts are not expensive and it's good maintenance.
And now the upcoming major update.
I decided to replace the clutch. When I test drove the car in Italy it wasn't that bad and felt like an old original clutch.
Now that I've been driving it more, I can feel that it's showing symptoms of a failing clutch.
For example, the clutch pedal is very stiff and catches I would say kinda high.
If I'm not careful with the gear changes and my foot isn't entirely off the clutch, it will slip. If it's leaned just a bit on top of the clutch pedal, it will start to slip.
When I push it hard and just go through the gears, it will never slip and I can probably get a lot more miles out of this clutch, but it's not very enjoyable to drive and since this is probably the original clutch it makes sense to change it before it gets worse and I burn the flywheel completely. Hopefully, I can get away without replacing the flywheel this time, but I won't know that until the transmission is out.
So I made a pretty decent parts list for this job which I will post later down the road. There is a lot of useful information on the board regarding this topic which helped a lot.
Unfortunately, this isn't something I can do myself on the floor of my garage and I found what appears to be a very good shop that will do the work for me.
They are not far from me and they specialize in M models from this era. I paid them a visit last week and had a nice chat with them. They are also BMW enthusiast who daily drive E36 M3, E46 M3 and X5 M. I was told that they do everything by the book and won't rush the job which is important to me.
They were actually working on another E39 M5 that day. '02 Le Mans blue M5 with 100k miles that was getting around $7.000 worth of work. New guides, vanos, bearings... Kinda scary to hear and see this. His opinion is that this example was seriously neglected and was just nasty when they opened it up.
My M5 should go under the knife on Wednesday so stay tuned.
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