1999 BMW 328i (E46) – Plastic Coolant Hose Replacements Part 1

Hey Guys,

today we’re back on the BMW 328i, this time getting started on the removal of the intake manifold in order to access the plastic coolant hoses of which one had sprung a leak during the previous video on this car. We had changed the other hoses in late March 2021, just before the third wave lockdown in Ontario had begun, and since we lacked the necessary parts (Fuel Injector O-rings and an Intake Manifold Gasket) we couldn’t immediately move on to this as we had to get the parts ordered in first. Then the shutdown happened, along with my exam season at University, which meant the car then sat there for about a month in a half until early May 2021 until we felt we could move forward with the job with proper safety protocols in place, hence the masks and social distancing as much as possible that was implemented for what ended up being a two day shoot and what appears to be 5-6 videos, depending on how I decided to edit the footage starting from the actual pipe replacements onwards.

Anyway, this isn’t a very fun job to do… There’s about a million things connected to this manifold and none of it seems to be very organized. I should note here once again that we removed the splash guard and the engine cover shortly after buying the car (the splash guard was damaged by the previous owner and isn’t of much use to us but we’ll reinstall the engine cover before safetieing the car), but if you’re tackling this project you’ll need to remove them before starting! The other primary thing that needs to be done is to remove the negative cable from the battery, since there is a lot of messing around with various sensor plugs and the starter cable. Otherwise, if you have the Bentley Service Manual for the car, it’s a relatively straightforward process to begin with. The main complications tend to come down to trying to remove things at the back of the engine (as we’ve had trouble with previously) and the usual old-car problems like the air hose connection to the throttle body being stuck on due to 23 years of Aluminum corrosion essentially baking the small pipe on (we were able to remove it once the manifold was off). Finally, the typical E46 issue of everything being in a seemingly dumb place means that nothing is easy to access. I should also point out that my car has a throttle cable, and all M52TU E46’s are like this. The M54 based E46’s (and the S54 M3) have full drive by wire, so there’s no throttle cable to remove.

Also, not shown in the video, but worth mentioning, is that you need to dump the coolant out of the engine as well. This is a bit of a captain obvious like statement, but it’s probably a good idea to do it before making too much headway into the process as it’s possible you’ll forget once you get the manifold off. Anyways, Part 2 will get into the more complicated bits of the manifold removal, including us finding out that there’s stuff we need to remove that’s not even mentioned in the manual, so stay tuned!