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Back on the road - eventually. Suspension pump motor swap and suspension bleeding.	Please Register to enjoy additional Member Benefits

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onthecut United Kingdom

Fri Jan 06 2023, 12:59pm

Joined: Sep 20 2016

Member No: #2793

Location: West Mids

Having taken pot luck on an auction pump assembly from a C5, it duly turned up next day. Swapping the motor proved reasonably simple. With a thin, sharp blade, cut through the silcone (?) bead that holds the power feed socket assy to the motor body. Undo the two bolts that secure the motor end plate and evenly prise the cover off. Note -- one minor difference between my original motor and the replacement was the presence of a third, tiny retaining screw on the backplate, buried under the silicone. Carefully withdraw the brush carrier plate and socket.
Withdraw the motor outer case (there is a magnetic pull on this).
Undo and remove the three screws that secure the motor to the pump body. Just by the lower screw lug there is a small oblong slot in the pump body; this allows access for a screwdriver or similar to stop the pump coupling rotating. With the wedging tool in place, grasp the armature and turn anti-clockwise. the nose of the motor shaft screws out from the pump coupling. Not at all tight on either motor.

To use the time honoured phrase -- reassembly is the reverse of dismantling. (Well pleased with my 'new' motor -- no nasties; cleaned up literally like new, inside).

I then reassembled the whole lot on to the car and topped up with new fluid. I naively assumed that as I was using the original pump / ecu assembly and nothing else had happened to he car meanwhile, it would just come back to life. Fat chance !
Gratifyingly, the new motor came to life a treat. No noise; no blown fuse -- but that was it -- it ran and ran and ran. Not a hint of the thing actually pumping up.Time to look at the instructions.

There is a requirement to apply a half bar pressure to the reservoir -- the manual says to use a radiator pressure testing kit. As I don't have one, I found an old brake master cylinder cap that was the right thread and put a tiny hole in to allow the needle inflator from a bike tyre pump to go through. . PTFE'd the thread and the needle as it went through the cap. Next, fire up the Lexia. Suspension set to low. In Lexia, go to diagnostics, Global Test. When it's gone through the list, select 'Varaible Damping' I couldn't initially see the bleed option on my version -- it was within one of the other choices -- something like after sales action.

Pressurise the tank, hit the go button and within a couple of seconds, it says it's bled.Typical of cloned Lexia, it then wouldn't move on. I repeated the whole thing a couple of times and in the end, by way of pressing anything on the keyboard that poduced some action, it suddenly went to the next screen and finally, movement !.

It's then a case of taking it to full height, back down to low, leaving it 40 seconds with the ignition off and apparently, that's it. I noticed that as it was doing the global test, it had indicated a fault in the suspension section. Checked that out --- it had noted that communication had been lost with the ecu -- so the sneaky thing knew it had been unplugged.

Main lesson ? If the motor is blowing the 40A fuse, getting noisy or smoking -- do it sooner rather than too late, like me. You might save it.

Mike.


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