Restarting a freshly rebuilt motor after one year

Bmachine

Bmachine

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A little while ago there was a thread about restarting a car a carburetor car after five months.

Top three restart tips after long period sitting

I was just reunited with my cars, my household, California. Regarding the E9, what are the top three steps to restart a Webber carb E9 after 5 months of no use? Other than recharging the battery, of course.
e9coupe.com e9coupe.com

This is a similar situation but with an injected car after one year hiatus. I took out the heater core of my car before I sent it to the paint shop a year ago. I am now putting it back together and a new heater core has been installed. I am nearly ready to get the motor fired up again for the first time in 12 months. This is freshly rebuilt M30 B35 with standard Motronic 1.3. It has a mild cam and 10.5 pistons. The AGM batteries have been kept in good shape. After re-reading the thread above I have a few questions:

- It has approximately half a fuel tank in there. No special treatment was added before I parked it since I had no idea it would take so long. Should I drain this fuel completely and just refill it with fresh fuel? Or should I just go ahead and give it a try to see what happens first?

- Someone suggested spraying some oil on the top of the motor. I imagine that means spraying it through the oil filler cap . Is that necessary?

- Being that this is a fuel injected car, are there any other precautions that need to be taken?

Thank you very much
 
Bo, I've never done anything special when starting cars that have been sitting for a longer while/years.
The e9 always sits for half a year in the garage, I start it just as I always do. Can't imagine it would be a big difference between 6 and 12 months.
The fuel should be okay, at least the stuff we get out of the pump over here is still good after a year, I've never used any special treatment for the fuel.

If you want, you can unscrew the spark plugs (and maybe disconnect fuel pump) and run the starter for a while to prime the oil system.

My 2 cents.
 
Gransin said:
If you want, you can unscrew the spark plugs (and maybe disconnect fuel pump) and run the starter for a while to prime the oil system.
Click to expand...
This. Oil is the most important part of the start up. If you take the plugs out you could spray a little oil in the cylinders. I would guess that the fuel is okay and you could probably smell it if it were bad already.
 
Pull the fuse for the fuel pump, and coil wire and you can pull the plugs if you want to be uber safe and crank it a couple times until the oil light goes off. As a rule, I just run Star-tron through a system when the car sits for any time. It's incredibly cheap and easy insurance. My 2 cents
 
tferrer said:
Pull the fuse for the fuel pump, and coil wire and you can pull the plugs if you want to be uber safe and crank it a couple times until the oil light goes off. As a rule, I just run Star-tron through a system when the car sits for any time. It's incredibly cheap and easy insurance. My 2 cents
Click to expand...
What is Star-tron?
 
That video highlights a concern that I have with my CSI, it starts almost instantly and goes up to approx 2,000 rpm straight away.
Any views on how to crank it for a few seconds without it starting, to prime the engine oil, and then to keep the revs a bit lower for the first 10 - 15 seconds?
I’m not up for disconnecting the coil every time.
 
Bmacine, in your instance I would, disconnect the coil, crank it two or three times for 15 seconds each, to pump oil around, then reattach coil and just start it.
I would use the fuel that is in it.
 
Cornishman said:
Bmacine, in your instance I would, disconnect the coil, crank it two or three times for 15 seconds each, to pump oil around, then reattach coil and just start it.
I would use the fuel that is in it.
Click to expand...
That is what I do.

As far as an easier way, how about installing a switch on your fuel pump wire inside the cabin?
 
To button up this thread I did successfully restart the engine last week. Here I what I did.

- Drained the gas tank and put fresh gas in it
- Drained the remaining coolant (i had rebuilt the heater core) and replaced it with Peak blue coolant “for European vehicles”.
- squirted fresh oil on the cam and valve train
- disconnected the coil and cranked it until I got good oil pressure

All went well. The motor felt a bit lumpy, as if I had an intermittent misfire but I was just happy that it came back alive without any issues.
 
Kinda risky.

I always pull plugs, squirt marvel mystery oil, hand crank the motor to see if frozen, then start
 
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