I'm afraid I've been a bit slack in typing up this service, I actually did it way back in June 2012, nevertheless, still important to talk about it.

I'd done 10k miles since the last service - 124k Mile Full Service - and I wanted to keep the services nice and regular. Since the car had well over 100k miles on the clock and I had no intention of getting rid any time soon this seemed like a sensible figure.

I purchased the parts from three different places eurocarparts.com, opieoils.co.uk and Costco.

As far as I could tell from the car service history, no-one had ever replaced the transmission oil, so I wanted to make sure I swapped that out this time. I headed over to opieoils and asked one of their members of staff for support on choosing the correct one for the 330d manual 5 speed box, they suggested Fuchs Titan Sintofluid SAE 75W-80.

I got all the filters from eurocarparts.com, using a 25% discount from being a member over at bimmerforums.co.uk. I went for all brand name parts to hopefully ensure quality.

Finally I got the oil from Costco as usual, they seem to be consistently £10 per tub cheaper than anywhere else for Castrol Edge.

The full list of parts then;

  • Castrol Edge 5W-40 A3/B4 Fully Synthetic Oil
  • Fuchs Titan Sintofluid SAE 75W-80 Transmission Oil
  • Hengst Oil Filter E15H D59
  • Bosch Air Filter
  • Bosch Cabin Filter

So a quick snap of the time and mileage on the OBC before I started for the records.



As I hadn't changed the gearbox oil before on the 330d, I decided that should be the first job on the list. To get at the gearbox you need to remove a few under-car panels and heat shields.


With the gearbox now accessible, it needed to be drained of the old oil. To do this you need to remove the drain plug and filler plug. (Circled in the image below).


Now, as you can't get any liquid higher than the filler plug you can't use gravity to fill it, so using a bit of Blue Peter magic, here is a oil pump my Dad fashioned earlier. It's basically an empty Shampoo bottle with a pump action top and a length of tube cable tied to it.


Using the Shampoo bottle, the gearbox was refilled with oil, until it overflowed from the filler plug aperture.


Transmission out of the way, I could get on with the rest of the service. First out was the cabin filter (to gain access to the air filter).

The cabin filter was surprisingly dirty actually, some of the troughs filled with leaves and other road debris. It's worth pointing out the obvious here though, the old filter was never white, it was grey to begin with.



As usual the air filter was very dirty and ready to be replaced. The intake on the E46 seems to allow quite a large amount of debris to get up and into the air filter compared to a few other cars I have worked on. Contrary to the cabin filter, the old air filter was actually white, so you can see how dirty that has gotten.


Finally the oil and oil filter were replaced, as with the air filter, the oil filter was looking particularly clogged up.


As always servicing the car improved the engine smoothness, which is always welcome. As for changing the gearbox oil, I can confirm that it did indeed make a noticeable difference to gear change ease and cold start characteristics, so well worth it in my opinion.