I'm going to break up this next update into several posts. It took about 3 weeks to complete because the deeper I went, the more things I wanted to repair.
This all started because I had a bad coil, knew I had a turbo coolant pipe leak, was worried about common cooling system failures, and felt like I should replace the drive belt. I think I ended up placing 3 orders through FCP, 2 orders through Rock Auto, and went to the dealership once or twice. What an ordeal.
You can see the leaky/gooey turbo oil drain line and corrosion where the drain line connects to the turbo. The drive belt looked fine, but why not replace it and the pullies? The upper radiator hose was starting to look chocolatey and so was the merge on the radiator. This is a clear indication that a hose is about to fail and should be replaced.
I had a bad coil on cylinder 1 (103k miles), so I figured the rest would die pretty soon. I decided to start with something easy and clean, so I got to replacing the coils and plugs. Take all the covers off, then remove the strut brace, then remove the cowl cover. You can do this job without taking the stuff off, but it takes 15 minutes to remove everything and I figured I would fight with not having clearance for way longer than 15 minutes. Plus, this gave me the chance to look over everything. I had a little oil weeping into the spark plug wells, but not enough to need to change the VC gasket and VC right away.
I'm not going to push this car hard (bm3 Stage 2 will be enough), so I decided to stick with the OEM recommendations. I switched from the OEM Bosch plugs to the NGK (NGK-97506-1), which are supposed to be a direct replacement. All the gaps were right around 0.030" out of the box. I also switched from the stock Delphi coils to the new BMW recommendation of Eldor (ELD-R3516S00100) coils. Everything went in perfectly. It took about 2 weeks to finish all the work, but I cleared the misfire codes and the car ran flawless. I'm very happy about this.
