I’m looking for technical help or recommendations on: __
I’m so annoyed with myself… I’ve just topped up my engine oil and dropped the cap from the oil container into the area near the air filter indicated on the picture. I was initially able to see it but as as I tried to get a pair of needle nose pliers to it its dropped out of sight.
I’d hoped it might have dropped all the way through the engine bay but unfortunately it hasn’t.
Do I now have to start taking things apart or do you think it will be ok working itself out with gravity?
I’ve removed the fixings on the under tray where it attaches to the front bumper and had a look / fish around but there’s nothing there. As the under tray is quite light / flexible I’ve given it a bang here and there but can’t hear anything rattling around but not removed it completely.
Unfortunately I’ve only had the car a few months so haven’t got myself kitted out with a jack & axle stands yet. Is it that time already???
It might be sat under the air box on the plastic tray where the ecu is. Remove the air box top half and undo the fixings that hold the bottom half. Pull up and hopefully it’s under there
Worth taking the air box for better accessibility, taking the air box out should be a easy job given you have the wrenches or spanners with you. You can get one set from Halfords for 20 quid, they are very handy. Also, I must recommend getting Jacks and axle stands, they make your life easier
Thanks for all the replies. I’m off work on Wednesday so I’ll take the filter box out. As mentioned, even if its not hiding under there removing it should give me better access to other areas.
Yeah the airbox takes only 2 minutes to take out. 1 if you bother to open your eyes. I think all you need is a 10mm and a crosshead. The ECU is under there in a neat little chastity cage and it’s probably stuck in front of that so I wouldn’t be worried at all about it damaging anything. Although, if you do what I do during an oil change, which is stick those little googly eyes to the lid on the bottle, draw on a mouth and also stick little cloth arms and legs on to it, then have conversations with it and project a personality onto the small, inanimate piece of round plastic, which develops into a deep and profound relationship in a very short space of time, you’d feel bad about leaving your dear friend alone for days in not only solitary confinement but also sensory deprivation. In which case you’d get poor Barry out of there post haste. Or don’t.
Using my trusty Haynes manual I managed to get to it (that’s where PCM came from).
Initially I did want to just leave it but the fear of the cap working it’s way into something that could cause some serious damage would have eaten away at me.
I’m not overly technical but I’m happy I got my hands dirty and ultimately solved the problem I caused without the need to run up any excessive bills. Plus, some of the “fear” of working on the car has gone so winner, winner!
Well, I can’t fault you as you did the right thing, good job! But, personally, I would consider it a practical impossibility that that lid would actually be able to cause any damage, unless the bottle it was supposed to be on got knocked over.
For future reference, you can get quite useful flexible grabby tool things for reasonable prices, although I suppose in your case you had no visual, so still would have needed to disassemble things.
May I ask how you went about taking the ECU out? When I changed my ECU I unbolted it and then bent the chastity cage until I could unplug the ECU, only other way I could see to do it was with cutting and drilling, which I didn’t want to do! Also, This plastic tray thing underneath, which in an earlier post you thought might be a cooling duct, I don’t recall seeing anything like that in mine and I’m really having trouble picturing the bloody thing, did you find out what it was?
Having removed the air filter I removed the 4 nuts that secured the PCM, undid the white clip that attached the hose to the PCM and gently pulled the 3 clips out that secured the bundles of cables to the PCM.
This allowed me to lift the PCM off it’s fixings (as shown in the second picture). The third picture shows part of what they call the cooling duct (that’s where it fixes to the front of the engine bay near(ish) the bonnet catch).
The cooling duct (black plastic tray) sits on the same 4 fixings that the PCM sits on so it was just a case of “persuading” it off. To be honest I felt as though something was going to break at this point but I was so far in I just carried on.
Apologies if we’re talking about different things (ECU / PCM), im just going of what it says in the Haynes manual.
Note: I only carried out steps 4 - 6 from the manual.
I think I got there more by good luck than good judgement but at least I got there!
