M3/4 radiator cleaning
Discussion
Thought I’d post up a couple of pics. It is definitely worth doing this as the car has a pretty bad crap trap between the bottom horizontal mounted oil cooler and the vertically mounted rad.
I popped the bumper off so I could investigate which was very easy. There are a handful of 8mm headed screws either side in the wheel arch to remove the plastic guards and then a couple of longer ones each side to secure the ends of the bumper. You then take out the torx screws on the top in the engine bay and another line of 8mm ones underneath. Then just unclip the front park sensors at the drivers side at the front.
No more than 20 minutes tops but anyway, after I had done that I realised that you can take the trim off the bottom with some 8mm bolts and a couple of torx and then unscrew the horizontal oil cooler. You could do this in about 10 mins.
Anyway, my car has only done 2000 miles but a fair old bit of crud came out of it and interestingly it was all pushed up in that bottom bit. No doubt that over time you’ll be facing cooler replacements if you don’t build this in to maintenance. (And I cant see “FSH” helping on that
)
Few pics - hope it helps
Edited to add - those pics don’t do it justice - when I dropped the bottom cooler most of the stuff fell out on to the garage floor. It was significant even after such a low mileage.
I popped the bumper off so I could investigate which was very easy. There are a handful of 8mm headed screws either side in the wheel arch to remove the plastic guards and then a couple of longer ones each side to secure the ends of the bumper. You then take out the torx screws on the top in the engine bay and another line of 8mm ones underneath. Then just unclip the front park sensors at the drivers side at the front.
No more than 20 minutes tops but anyway, after I had done that I realised that you can take the trim off the bottom with some 8mm bolts and a couple of torx and then unscrew the horizontal oil cooler. You could do this in about 10 mins.
Anyway, my car has only done 2000 miles but a fair old bit of crud came out of it and interestingly it was all pushed up in that bottom bit. No doubt that over time you’ll be facing cooler replacements if you don’t build this in to maintenance. (And I cant see “FSH” helping on that
)Few pics - hope it helps
Edited to add - those pics don’t do it justice - when I dropped the bottom cooler most of the stuff fell out on to the garage floor. It was significant even after such a low mileage.
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