Thanks Zee and John. I will get into it this weekend when the temperatures reach the balmy 30's. One good thing about zero and sub zero temps and the accompanying wind chills is that the 30's seem to be almost a summer walk in the park. Btw, is a new keyway hard to locate and/or expensive? Somewhere in the archives there was mention of this part costing around $100.00 from a dealer... I hope this is bs.


Dan

Yup. I did mine in over a Memorial or Labor Day Weekend (can't remember which)

Nobody was open of course.

Wife needed the car.

So, I just drilled out the remains with a bit of similar size, found a screw of similar diameter, eyeballed the length of the former key (how much is sticks out) and used my cut-off wheel to remove the screw head.

Good now for over a year.

Mine was caused by an oversight of mine. I forgot to tighten the crank pully bolt after installing a timing belt and I bumped the starter to check the belt alignment ( I believe you need to turn things a couple of revs to assure you have the belt on correctly)
--
1989 740Ti 1986 240DL 1984 244GL

If the key has been sheared it is because the bolt retaining the harmonic balancer to the crankshaft was loose. The recent replacement of the timing belt lead to more suspicions about that bolt not being tight enough.