Nice results although not cleaning the intake ports means that the airflow will still be restricted. Also you should really consider doing flaps delete, its a straight up upgrade. Also might want to look into EGR delete, it's a little more complicated but 100% worth it. My m57 feels like a totally different engine after that.
the best thing for cleaning a plastic manifold is to leave it submerged in egr cleaner or a mix of caustic soda(pottasium hydroxide) and ethanol (99%alcohol) over night no scrubbing needed afterewards caution dont clean an aluminium manifold this way because caustic soda disolves aluminium
I explain this in the video, but basically: The car has 500.000km and the swirl flaps, apart from having lots on carbon build up on them, are fine. But why? Well, in my case is because they've been disconnected at the actuator level. The little vacuum hose that goes from the control valve to the swirl flap actuator is cracked, so the swirl flaps never move, they stay in the OPEN position all the time. In this position, they experience minimum drag from the intake air, so the risk of any of them getting loose and entering into the combustion chamber is minimal. Apart from that, my car has not been remapped. So the levels of boost are stock or even below stock. And on top of that, as I mention in the video, the little screws the hold the swirl flaps are riveted from the back. I tried unscrewing one of them and I had to apply A LOT of force in order to get it out, deforming the back of the screw in the process. So with all that said, I'm pretty confident the flaps are not going to cause any issues whatsoever. And even if something does go wrong, the one that's going to fail will be the one I tried to unscrew.
Thanks for pointing this out. Yes, the engine mounts are gone, but the weird circular motion you see on video is actually due a phenomenon called "aliasing", because the camera is sampling the video at 30fps. In real life, the engine shaking is more violent and it oscillates at a higher frequency.
The vibration you heard from the interior is, in part, because of the worn out engine mounts, and also because of trim pieces of the interior that got loose over time. BMW made these cars to be very reciclable by using some kind of glue to put a lot of stuff together. This car spent 20+ years living in the hot and sunny Spain, so the glue got so dry that it stopped glueing. As a result, the door pockets for example, get loose and start resonating with the low frequency vibrations that come from the engine at idle (which is, once more, exaggerated by having collapsed engine mounts). But, when you cruise at normal speeds, with the engine sitting at 2200 rpm - you hear nothing. I kinda go into this in a video I made called 'it's not just a "rattle"'.
