BX16V.com Forum

I did a quick search and didn't come up with much, feel free to redirect me.

Has anyone taken the radiator out whilst leaving the intake manifold on? or is there an accepted best way to do it? Also any tips would be welcome

The car is a 1989 Australian market Ph2 16 Valve with aircon as seen in the projects forum.

I've broken the head off of the plastic drain screw at the bottom of the radiator and it's quite stuck. I've tried easy outs:

with no luck.
So if you have any suggestions on what I could do about this that would also be appreciated.

I've got a parts car with a relatively new radiator so if I can't get the rest of the drain screw out of the I can use spare radiator.

Thanks in advance!

leave the screw in and pull a hose off to drain?

If you want to remove it thenremoving rad is easy, just loosen all hose clips, unplug the fan wiring, and remove the row of 10mm headed bolts that hold the black plastic top cover in place - its the one with the bonet stay holding clip moulded in and has the air intake pipe as part of it.
lift off the plastic and wiggle the bits out of the gap.

when refitting put lots of grease on the bolts a they can be very corrode din our climate as they aget all the road gunge thrown at them!!

ollie

Cheers Ollie,

So the intake doesn't have to come off? That's great, just what I was hoping for.

Problem with the drain screw is that it sheered off before it went all the way back in, so it leaks; must have been about to go before I started tightening it up.

Definitely will grease up what I can, the car lived the first part of it's life on Queenslands Sunshine Coast near the sea, so I'm finding a bit of surface rust here and there, and treating it as I go.

Any other suggestions on what to do about removing the screw are welcome.
I believe the plastic screw has a sort of T piece on the end to stop it from falling all the way out when you're draining the coolant. Would it be too bad if this remained in the radiator after (if) I did get the screw out? It's not on the water pump side of the rad so I don't see how it could go anywhere bad and get stuck.

My dad ended up getting the screw out in it's entirety so he's saved me the job of removing the radiator. We've replaced the screw with a metal bolt and kept the original O-ring.

The bolt is M10, 1mm thread pitch, and about 20mm long.

Here's a photo of the original plastic screw and the off cut from the metal bolt we bought and cut to size. The new drain bolt works well, just have to be very careful not to over-tighten it as the part of the radiator it threads into appears to be plastic.

I never even knew there was a drain plug

Just always yanked the bottom hose off

Citroen supply an allen headed bolt to replace the plastic ones - I managed to sheer one trying to bleed the system when warm stupid bloody design!