530i Vacuum Retard

[wkohler]

Hi! I've done a bunch of work to the 530i and have had occasion to drive it some - mostly back and forth to the exhaust shop to slowly fix all of the leaks in the system. Anyway, one issue I have been having is that the car runs okay when cold - but once it warms up, it will die when coming to a stop, which can get pretty tedious if say, you're trying to get out of a tight parking lot, or in slow traffic moving through downtown on your way home. One nice thing about this car is that it barely has to be moving to get it going again using the clutch, but I only figured that out by accident.

Anyway, it got particularly annoying so I started thinking about what could affect it and I started thinking about how the distributor has vacuum retard. I pulled off the main street and popped the hood. I had a couple of capped vacuum ports left over from the EGR stuff, so I took the vacuum line off of the vacuum regulator on the distributor and just ran it back to one of the unused ports on the manifold, then put the cap on the vacuum regulator. It's like a totally different car now. The revs don't drop as quickly when coming to a stop, but it is much easier to manage.

Problem for me though, is it seems like a bit of a kludge, so what I'd like to figure out is what the best thing to do to fix this particular issue is. I know that it was more an emissions thing than anything else, but I'd like to get the thoughts of people that might actually have some experience with this.

Thanks!

[Falkenberg]

I also am informed that it is an emissions related thing.
On my carb 528, the retard line only matters as long as there is no advance vacuum on the other line. This is the case only on idle. If I disconnect the retard then, idle goes up due to a more advances spark.

In fact, idle rpm goes up so much that I can't manage to get down idle rpm to something decent with the retard being disconnected. So that is why I have to keep it.

But I guess something else is wrong in your set-up, causing the dying - i am sure BMW did not ship the car with this inconvenience.