95 BMW 525i e34 engine ticking

[joejoe652]

I had an ahh haa moment today that I feel I must get online so people could find it with Google seach. I own a 1995 BMW 525i. The car has been ticking for 5 years and I couldn’t locate it. It clearly sounded like a lifter tick. Kind of like someone was tapping a screw driver somewhere under the hood. The ticking increased as the RPMs increased. I thought maybe it was low oil pressure, maybe a lifter, ect… It went away from time to time especially if I put the car in neutral and brought the RPMs up to about 4000. After 5 years I finally fixed it by accident! I serviced my transmission! Go figure. I decided to change my transmission fluid and filter. I added three quarts of Dex111 started the car and ran it for a couple of minutes in neutral like the manual said, then preceded to add fluid until full. (How to do that is another story) well, the car was ticking like always tick tick tick tick. When I started to add the fifth quart the tick went away and never returned. Who would have quest those symptoms to be low transmission fluid? It must have something to do with a pump starving for oil or something. Strange, I hope this helps someone out there. Good luck, Joe
By the way, the transmission is GM that year if your car was imported to the US. Also, the transmission takes more than 3.2 quarts as suggested by the manual. I confirmed that with the dealer. If you don’t know how to add transmission fluid to your BMW, Google there’s lots of posts on how to.