Engine Drivetrain 1st Gen Cooper S Most liked posts in thread: Blimey's 120k service

As promised, here are a few pics. If you're looking for more details on how to do this, see agranger's excellent writeup on "Supercharger Oil Service", and khuevo's on "Thermostat and Housing Installation" in the Library How-To area. Note that if you're doing the thermostat at the same time as the rest of this stuff, you do NOT have to pull the air filter housing and ECU. There's plenty of clearance to change the thermostat and housing with the rest of the stuff off the car.

Holy Carp... what have I gotten myself into?!?! Does anyone know what to do with all this stuff?


Getting started - bumper cover and bumper bar off, and pulled the intercooler and old AC condenser. NOTE: if you're ever going to "open" the AC system, ALWAYS have the system evacuated first by a shop with an AC machine. I did.


Old condenser (bottom) and a much newer one.


Groundhogs can have a LOT of mass... this is after I straightened it out a good bit a while back.


After swinging the radiator out of the way, it's apparent that we've had some stuff going on for a long time.... it's been about 80k miles since the front was off the car like this. Lots of coolant stalactites and oily grunge from the leaky crank sensor.


Starting to get more stuff off - plastic SC intake duct, throttle body, and intake hose removed.


Supercharger, water pump, alternator and compressor removed, and started the clean-up.


Side-by-side of two superchargers. Note where you can see the edges of the lobes through the two small upper ports. Old one (on right) has teflon coating and a good bit of alloy ground away through contact with the case. These both feel the same to turn them by hand, and you don't hear any contact when doing that. But the car is definitely quieter with the new SC on it.


Hard to see in these pics, but here's the view into the intake ports. If you look closely, you can see that the edges of the lobes of the old SC (top) are ground down all the way to the end of the lobes. New one (bottom) looks "new".



Dropped the oil pan - first time I've ever done this part myself. Easy once everything else is off. Make sure you have a breaker bar handy, as the transmission side bolts were VERY tight.


The view up Blimey's kilt. You can see his man-bits way up there if you squint.


Starting to bolt things back on. Note Ben's advice in Aaron's how to, about installing the supercharger and waterpump. I'll describe it a little differently. Bolt the new WP to the SC. Lube the new o-ring in the WP flange, and bolt this onto the engine block. Leave these bolts loose enough that the flange can slide around. Lube up the new o-ring on the WP and insert into the flange as you reposition the whole SC/WP assembly, insert SC bolts. Tighten SC bolts. Then tighten the two flange bolts (accessed with a socket extension around the WP LAST. This will ensure that everything lines up and the o-rings seal properly.


Done with the hard stuff. Everything else was cake.

 

Lunch break.
Just pulled the SC and waterpump. Looks like either the pump or one or both o-rings have been leaking for a while. Lots of coolant stalactites on the front of the engine. Crank sensor o-ring has also been oozing oil for a while. Lots of cleanup to do.

Spent the first two hours just getting the stock pulley off my new supercharger. Sucker wouldn't budge using traditional pulling techniques. Eventually had to resort to cutting it off. Pain in the butt, but done.

SC had relatively clean oil in it, was a little lower than spec on each end. Drained and refilled with new oil to Eaton specs. Found this (checkout the table about halfway down the page) - Eaton factory M45 oil fill specs.
FAQ for Superchargers

 

Done!
(well, mostly, anyway)

All good. Discovered that one of the bolts on the auto tranny pan is obscured by the subframe, and wasn't into jacking the engine today, so that gasket and strainer will wait a while. Did a partial drain/fill of fluid anyway. Still need to do the fuel filter sometime when I get to it. That's easy.

Need to get my header on still - maybe tomorrow, if I'm able to move.
And will get my AC recharged on Tuesday and see how that runs.

Only thing I forgot was that I had unplugged the throttle body for clearance while attaching the intake hose, and forgot to plug that in. I think that makes three times I've done that. Otherwise, no issues, no codes, every fastener found a home, and all is well.

I found about half my lost boost - now making a little over 15psi max, up from a little over 14psi max. But still short of the 16psi+ it once made. Hmmmm.

Really happy, though. Not a bad experience at all. This was about twice as far into disassembly as I had gotten previously, and learned A TON about where all the various vacuum lines and stuff go... it's a lot less mysterious now.

I'll post some pics tomorrow.

Big thanks to Aaron and Keith (agranger and khuevo) for their how-tos, which were a huge help.

 

I've been running it for probably 60k miles or more. A friend who got me started on it has run it in everything including racing engines for many years with great results.
YMMV

 

Rehydration break.

My old SC has definitely seen hard times. Gears and oil look good, after 120k hard miles. So I really do think it comes down to whether you get a SC with good seals... or not. Mine are good.

That said, it's apparent that the bearing is worn on the water pump end. Teflon is completely worn off the edges of the lobes where they have been contacting the case for the last inch or so. This is visible when viewing through the inlet. Teflon is also partially worn off a longer lobe area visible through the outlet. Still turns smoothly by hand, feels about the same as the new one... but I suspect this is part of my missing boost... we'll see when it's all back together. I'll post pics later.

My water pump was weeping copiously from the weep hole. Dan Zipkin told me long ago (actually when this pump was installed, about 85k miles ago) that these are designed to seep "a little" around the seal, and there's a small reservoir built into the body of the pump to capture the seepage. As long as they seep very slowly, the coolant evaps before it ever makes it out of the reservoir through the weep hole at the top. When they start seeping more, it will start spilling out the weep hole and you know it's time for a new WP.

In my case, it looks like this was probably a LONG time ago. lol

 

Tired now.

Finished oil pan gasket, valve cover gasket and thermostat.
Will start with tranny gasket and strainer and fluid in the AM (easy)
Then will be in reassembly mode. Got the mess cleaned up today, so hopefully will go pretty quick.

 

Since you brought it up, I'll talk about that.

My old SC had 120k miles on it. My car is harder driven than most, but has only seen a few track days, and has an automatic, so it never exceeds 6250 RPM even with a tune. The oil in my SC looked almost like new, gears looked like new, and oil level was only a little below factory specs. My SC eventually wore out a bearing, unrelated to the oil fill.

I strongly considered the Recharger. I know some folks who have tuned cars with manual transmissions and higher redlines, and who do lots of track days, have seen cooked oil in the SC snout. If my car had those characteristics, I think the Recharger would be worthwhile to do scheduled oil changes.

Most of the actual SC failures I've seen were either the result of bearing failure (like mine) or oil depletion due to seal failure. Oil changes do nothing to predict or prevent bearing failure, and would have to be done very frequently to catch a seal problem before the oil was gone and the gears damaged. And, if there were a seal failure, the SC would need to be removed to be rebuilt or replaced anyway. In my case, I don't think it really has much practical value. Either my new SC will last 100k miles, or it won't. The Recharger wouldn't likely impact that materially, on my car. Again, there are other cases where I do think it has value.

 

So, since the original refresh, I've also added a new upstream oxygen sensor (NTK OEM style) and that seems to have really smoothed out cold start and idle behavior. I was under the impression that O2 sensors either work or they don't. But I'm starting to believe that when they get "tired", the car may not be throwing codes constantly, but replacement can make a significant difference. I have an O2 sim, so the downstream sensor doesn't matter as long as the heater circuit in it still works...

 

Updated the second post above with pics and a tip or two.