I hope you guys can help me out. I have a 94 540i, stock with about 220,000 miles. I do all my own maintenance and haven't had too many engine problems with this car. It was my wife's, but about two years ago we bought her an X3 and gave the 540i to our 17 year old son.


Anyway, the car started running poorly a few weeks back, it would stall at idle, it used more fuel than usual and ran pretty rough. I did some simple diagnostics and found a pretty bad vacuum leak at the the diaphragm on the rear plate of the intake manifold. I ordered a new plate and gaskets and began work to replace it last night. Everything went pretty smoothly. I've taken the intake manifold off several times, trying to fix coolant leaks, so the job was familiar. I replaced the plate and gasket, and the gasket at the throttle plate to intake for good measure.


I got everything back together this morning without any problems, but i'm not able to get it started. It fires but immediately stalls. I checked everything over as well as could, but didn't find any problems. I put a vacuum gauge on it and see almost zero vacuum during cranking. I'm not sure how much I should see during cranking. When it does fire the vacuum only goes to about 5 in/hg.


What do you think I should look at next? Am at bit of a loss. How much vacuum should I see during cranking? Am I on the wrong track looking for a vacuum leak? There is fuel, but could it be a timing issue? Is it possible to mess up timing? Could it be the harness for the crank sensor? Could it fire at all if the crank sensor wiring was bad?


Thanks in advance.


Dan