How to Replace Steering Wheel 1997-2006 BMW 325Xi

What's up guys? I'm Andy from 1A Auto. In this video I'm gonna show you how to replace the steering wheel on this 2001 BMW 325xi. If you need parts for your vehicle, click the link in the description, head over to 1aauto.Com. With the trunk open over on the right side or the passenger side, there should be a cover that goes right here. This vehicle doesn't have one, but you're going to want to remove that cover. Battery is located right here. First thing I'm gonna do is take a 10 millimeter socket and ratchet, loosen up this nut for the negative terminal. That's loose. Slide off the cable, slide it out of the way. So you want to make sure you disconnect the battery before you take the airbag off, because you don't want the airbag system seeing that the airbag's out, you'll get an airbag light.

So what we're going to do is after disconnecting the battery, just put the key in the ignition, turn the wheel to the side like this. Disconnect the key. Then I'm going to take a Torx driver. Now this is actually really difficult. There's two holes, there's one hole on the bottom, one hole on the top. Now you need the driver because you need the length. Otherwise a socket's probably not going to fit back there, but then this driver actually has a hole right here, so what you can do is, to get some leverage, you can put another pocket screwdriver or something in the hole, and then break this screw free.

Generally it's very difficult to at least get that screw broken free. And you can do the same on this side. If you don't have enough room here, what you can do is, you can telescope the wheel out, bring it down. Let's see if you have more room, we have more room. Try to break this free. That's right. And that's really on there pretty good. So loosen that up. And that's loose. Take the key, turn the wheel back to straight. Take the key out. I can just grab this airbag. You can disconnect it over here. Connector right here. Disconnect it right there. And then disconnect this connector. This goes to the switches.

When you have the airbag out of the vehicle and you want to place it down, make sure you always place it with the bag part facing up. You don't want it to explode this way if it exploded by accident. Now I'm going to take a 16 millimeter socket and a ratchet and I'm going to hold the steering wheel while I do this. Loosen up the nut. I mean the bolt. You can use a longer ratchet or a breaker bar to loosen this. All right, there we go.

Once it breaks free, it's easy, so be careful. Yeah, you probably don't want to have the ratchet going this way towards the windshield because it'll loosen up on you quick. So loosen up on this. Once it's almost loose, all right, take that out. What I like to do is just put this on a couple threads. Then just grab the steering wheel. Loosen that up. Sometimes if the steering wheel's stuck, you're going to need a steering wheel puller but this one's not too bad. Take that out. Take the steering wheel out. Now it is marked where the steering wheel will go. It's keyed, so but be careful when you go to put it back on. Just take it, put it on the same way you took it off.

Take the steering wheel. Remember we want to align this line up for the base of the column right there. Might have to wiggle this a little bit, so if you look at it right now, I could put the steering wheel on like that, but that's actually wrong. What I have to do is, slide it up and just move it over one tooth. Wiggle that, so make sure you set that right there, and we can take the bolt, install the bolt. All right with that all the way down, now I'm going to take a 16 millimeter socket extension and a torque wrench. I'm going to torque this to 45 foot pounds, and remember, hold the steering wheel. You don't really want to use all of the force on the steering lock to do this, so you might need a helper to help hold the steering wheel while you do this.

That's not too bad. Now take the airbag. We want to connect these connectors. This one goes right here, just line it up. It is slotted, and then same with this one. That's going to go right there. Just line that up in position, just like that. I'm going to take the key, just rotate the steering wheel. Take the T25 driver, you can wiggle the air bag to see if you got that started, and tighten that up pretty snug. That's good. Same with the top one. If you have trouble getting this one in, you can twist the steering wheel back the other way, it's a little bit easier to tighten it from underneath here, and tighten that one snug. You're good. You're all set to hook the battery up. You can take the negative side, connect the negative side, take the same 10 millimeter socket and ratchet, tighten it up. That's good. At this point, if you had that cover, you're going to want to put the cover back where it goes.

Thanks for watching. Visit 1aauto.com for quality auto parts shipped to your door, the place for DIY auto repair, and if you enjoyed this video, please click the subscribe button.