Replacing the heater

A five-ten minutes wait at a McDrive and the engine overheated (due to a bad viscous clutch). 'Ding!' from the OnBoard Computer and a 'Coolant Temperature' message on the display. I shut down the engine at once and waited maybe 15 minutes before I restarted and drove home.

Unfortunately, soon after that incident, the car began to smell like coolant and the rear air ducts between the two front seats began to spurt out fluid all over the rear seat!

Checking with the guys on my favorite BMW-board confirmed my worst fear: something inside, maybe even the heater core, was gone! 7-10 hours of work at the BMW service center was what I was told to expect. At about $100 an hour, I decided to take on the job myself.

On Monday October 4, 1999, I began removing things. Friday, Oct. 8, after 14 hours of hard work and some waiting for parts, the heater core was fixed and the car was running again.

I took a lot of pictures while dismantling my car, and most of them are available on the next few pages. I chose to do the scans in 75 dpi, so the pages shouldn't take forever to load. If you are about to replace the heater core (radiator) on your car too, perhaps you will find them useful.

Update: On November 22. 1999, while driving my car in the cold, cold winter time, I cranked up the heater and blower to full. Normally, I just have the settings on 22 Celsius and let the thermostat do the work, but that day I needed the heat here and now . Well, no problems for a few minutes, but then the drivers side of the windscreen suddenly became foggy, and a familiar smell began to spread: coolant! No way! Not again! Must be me that's paranoid! But after a few minutes there was no doubt: Something was terribly wrong.

When I replaced the heater in October, I noticed a hairline fracture on one of the black plastic tubes that leads the coolant into the radiator. When I ordered the radiator, I therefore also ordered a new set of tubes. Unfortunately, BMW Denmark didn't have these tubes in stock, and apparently BMW Germany wasn't able to deliver within a reasonable amount of time. Chances was that the 13 years old tubes would last a year or two more, so I decided to reuse them. Bad choice!

By now the tubes that I ordered when replacing the radiator had reached BMW Denmark, so I bought them about 1.5 months late. On Nov. 25 I picked up the parts at BMW and was ready to tear my car apart again. But this time I knew how everything looked inside, and since the winter was here already, I was desperate to take shortcuts wherever I could. The result was a staggering 10 hours of saved labor!
How did I do that?

1. By removing the rubber hoses that's leading the coolant through the firewall into the car interior and removing the filler cap, thereby only letting out the fluid that HAD to come out, about 2 liters.
2. By leaving everything under the steering wheel in place except two screws that must be removed to get to the lower center dash.
3. And here comes the big thing: I did NOT remove the dashboard! Removing the top interior of the glove box, along with the lower center dash, gave room enough to undo the 7 bolts that holds a supporting iron frame that's in the way. A bit hard to explain, but check out the photos on the Quick Fix pages.

All in all, it didn't leave me much room, but when it's freezing and you've seen it all before, you just want to get it over with. 3.5 hour after I removed the first part, the car was in one piece again and ready to go.