smart_451_rear_bodywork_removal_and_engine_cradle_lowering¶

3 excerpts.

Excerpt¶

youtube.com/pb_garage/smart_451_rear_bodywork_removal_and_engine_cradle_lowering · p. 1 · Applies to: 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, #1, ebike

you welcome to project build in today's episode we're looking at removing the rear bodywork of the smart car to give us better access to the to the engine and to those components and then we're gonna look at dropping the rear subframe so that we can get to the top of the motor more easily now the first thing that I'm doing here is removing the fender liner on the passenger side of the car the right-hand side in North America and that's gonna give me access to look at some of the components first of all and then to start dropping that subframe so let's get into it here's a good view if you want to familiarize yourself with a smart car a little bit one really important components your secondary air injection pump right here and what I mean by important is just important to know where it is and how to remove it because chances are that is gonna fail while you own your smart car if it hasn't been replaced already so that's where that pump is you just take that liner out ideally if you have the the extended bolts to be able to lower that subframe you can get at it a lot easier to replace that other things we want to notice here is just you can see the alternators in behind here what I'll do is I'll take this there's a little mud guard here that we can take off and we'll be able to see the serpentine belt and that whole assembly a little bit better but for now just to know where that pump is and the nut on the top of your shock here so that when I go to change that shock out I can get that nut off the reason I've got the guard off right now is I want to hit all these things with penetrating Lube and get them hopefully ready to be loosened off if I need to take them off [Music] [Music] pretty straightforward getting this little plastic shield off you just have these two little plastic plugs that go up into the subframe you can pull the heads of those out a little bit and then the whole assembly should just come right out of the subframe you can get rid of that piece for now a little bit easier to see what's going on now that we have that cover off we can see our crank pulley right here in the middle just by our oil filter we've got our serpentine belt tensioner up here and we need a special tool to get that out of the way so we can slip that belt off and get the alternator off and then there's a second belt on the cars that are equipped with air conditioning there's a secondary belt there that runs the AC compressor over here at the front of the motor and yeah we'll be able to get into there luckily I have the bolts to drop this whole subframe down so that's going to make working on that alternator a lot easier with all the work to do on the car brakes suspension having to pull that alternator out I want to have a good look at that serpentine belt system because the tensioner might need to be replaced and with everything I need to do and getting the the body work off as well I figured rather than picking away at little pieces at a time I should just get right into it drop that subframe in the back so I can get really good access to the motor and pull all this bodywork off so I can kind of get in and have a better look at that a little bit of crash damage that was at the front make sure that everything's okay there and also I need to get the rear bodywork off so I can get at this taillight and give it a good clean out with the mouse nests in there so with that in mind I'm just gonna launch right into it and pull the body work out I've already started a little bit by pulling the side skirts off and the reason I did that is because just where I'm lifting the car right now to keep it off the ground was leaning on the on the skirts a little bit so I had to mess around with my jacking a little bit there get the side skirts off because they need to come off in order to take the front and rear bodywork off I put my jocks back under it I've got the belly pan just sort of partially detached and hanging down and now I should be good to go take off all that body work and get that subframe out [Music] so that was my first time taking apart

Excerpt¶

youtube.com/pb_garage/smart_451_rear_bodywork_removal_and_engine_cradle_lowering · p. 2 · Applies to: 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, #1, ebike

the rear bodywork on a 451 which I've had a number of for 51 so I guess that says good things about how often I had to get in and do this kind of a service to them but I did get hung up on a couple of things trying to get these body panels off because I'm used to working on the 450s the previous generation of smart car and in that case everything kind of unbolts me and take that whole rear end off as like one piece and this one you kind of have to separate it or at least I thought it was a lot easier or that's what I ended up doing I don't know if it's easier or not I separated each panel so the the center and each side I was taking off like one piece at a time and one thing I got hung up on a little bit was trying to get the leading edge of the panel off because I didn't realize that these are just sort of a fit would like to press into a hole kind of a fit on these so I I had the panel here and I had the whole back end of it loose because I took the hardware out and I'm trying to figure out you know how to get that leading edge off I was having a peek in because I have the fender liner out of this side and I could see this piece of plastic here and I thought maybe it was just like needed to go forward or needed to go backwards in order to slot into like a little holder but it's these little tabs that just sort of pop in and pop out once I figured that out and got my hand in at the leading edge here and kind of pop them out work my way back then it came apart a little bit better now you know obviously it's a learning experience it didn't quite go as smoothly as I would have liked but I got everything off and now I have a much much easier access to everything and then it's going to be even more once I drop that subframe I'll show you guys the bolts that I have in just a minute I've got I've got like extended subframe bolts that you can buy there they're a factory part number so you can go into a Mercedes dealership or a smart dealership and order the bolts and they allow you to bring that that whole subframe down basically you support the motor and support everything put the longer bolts in and then slowly let everything so my next step now I think is going to be to do that but I did want to show you a couple of things just set that out of the way so first of all if we have a look in here I don't know if you guys can see down in that hole but there's a body plug in the bottom of the hole here where there's a wiring harness coming through oh I guess it's further forward you can see it from inside here I know this is a bad angle but right here by the secondary air injection pump there's this body plug here and it wasn't into its hole so it was the whole inside of the body's just exposed to the elements here and that's where that mouse would have gotten in to make its nest in the tail light so at least that's figured out I can put that body plug back in its proper location and then here very easy to say see that that like rear crash bar is just annihilated here's my flex pipe that I'm gonna have to cut out and well this one's obviously been replaced once before but we're gonna do another quick job on that one my heat shield here looks like it needs some help but otherwise that all things don't look too bad back here I took the skin off the tailgate here not because I had to but because it had that backup camera hooked up and I just wanted to get all that wiring out and have a look and I also want to replace the the license plate lights because and these ones actually still worked which is surprising but these fail quite often I have some LEDs to replace that with so I'm gonna be doing that so right now I have my longer bolts here for dropping that subframe there's two bolts here at the back to it at the front there on either side and I've got too long and too short of these bolts for replacing you can see the the difference in length there and basically the two short ones go in the into the front locations the two longer ones go in the rear locations now some people what they do too and drop the motor if you don't have these bolts is you can take the the rear bolts which are longer put them in the front locations and then support the rear with like a jack stand or something but if you want to go to your Mercedes or smart dealer and try to get these bolts I do have a part number here I don't know how easily it's you're gonna see that but if you're interested in that part number you can hopefully freeze-frame that and read that part number off and go get that from your Mercedes or smart dealer did I mention too that if you're thinking about working on these smart cars you're gonna need a set of these external torques --is so this is a an e

Excerpt¶

youtube.com/pb_garage/smart_451_rear_bodywork_removal_and_engine_cradle_lowering · p. 3 · Applies to: 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, #1, ebike

20 I think 80 18 actually and that's the one for those subframe bolts so you got that external torques on there and that's what you're going to need for a lot of the stuff on this car so you want to be a smart owner that works on your own car think about getting a set of torques and a set of eat orcs because you're going to need them [Music] so I'm about ready to drop that subframe now I'm gonna go real slow on that jac and hopefully we're not going to be doing any testing of the tensile strength of our wiring harness or any connections like that we'll be able to just drop this thing nice and smooth and not mess anything up okay so right as soon as I started to drop this down if I realized I hadn't taken the fender liner off on this side and there's a little plug here into that subframe and because this thing's held up here it's gonna keep yourself frame from going down and if memory serves I think there might be something else in here like the air intake pipe I got a watch for as well so I'm gonna pop this off take this fender liner off and see what's up so here's my intake hose over here I'm just gonna disconnect this things loose I don't know if that's supposed to be loose no I think that's supposed to be mounted to the body but I can probably just pull that guy off with a little encouragement [Music] so something else I just remembered which is going to be very difficult to see but I'm gonna try is up here on the left hand side of the car right by the frame rail you can see where my my flex hoses here for the rear brakes got these flexible hoses and these are the lines for the wheel speed sensors I'll kind of come on to the that rear suspension tube here but they're all attached to the frame up here with this little plastic block just up in here and there's an eight millimeter I think head bolt here that we can undo and that'll give me a little bit more freedom with that okay so when I said eight millimeter obviously what I meant was ten millimeter but now that I've undone that I've got a lot more movement possible on these brake lines and wheel speed sensors because as you can see I've got a long way for the subframe to keep coming down before it sits on the end of that bolt there but this will allow everything to flex and hopefully not break anything on the way down you can already see like I'm getting a lot more room and I'm only about half way down on this side so I'll have lots of easy access to the top of the motor once everything is undone over here on this side looks like everything's still loose enough that I can keep coming down the rest of the way [Music] ok so now we've got the whole subframe down on its bolts there I didn't hear anything spontaneously disassembling itself so that's a good thing so just before we go any further I want to show at the front of the subframe here you can see like we've got the AC compressor here the alternator is up here and we've got like our AC lines and rad hoses but over here we've got part of the ebrake handle assembly and it goes with the subframe here but you got to make sure when we put this subframe back up that that lines up with that hole and goes into it now I've got this the ebrake down so not engaged right now and when that goes back up into the hole everything should be fine but I should have mentioned that before I got going that you want to make sure that your ebrake is down so the ebrake isn't applied before you drop this subframe so as you can see here lots of room on the top of the motor easy to get at everything normally I wouldn't go as far as dropping the subframe but I just figured since I had so much work to do on the car that it would be a lot easier for me to just drop it and have easy access to all the stuff makes changing the spark plugs really easy gives me real good access to the air filter obviously the alternator because that's something that needs to change that serpentine belts easy to get at secondary air injection pump right here easy access to the top of the shocks so I can undo those and swap those shocks out so for it for this particular case you know dropping the subframe I think is a big advantage you