right this conversion only really applies to automatic petrol cars or diesel and is very easy to do, i carried this out on my 2003 330ci and it took around a hour to do and i wasn't rushing about! its all plug and play with no messing with wiring or coding etc needed!
the purpose of this conversion is to remove the mechanical fan (engine driven) and the electric aux fan in front of the radiator, and replace them with the single electric fan used on manual cars.
the only part you need is the OEM manual fan, i got mine from a bmw breakers off a 330ci which had covered under 60k for £40!
Btw my car has been already converted from automatic to 6-spd manual gearbox just to note!
So......
firstly you need to remove the air box intake feed which is held down with 3 push-in plastic clips,
after that you need to loosen off the fan cowling which is held on with a t25 screw (located at the top near A/C pipes), and a plastic push-in clip on the opposite side near the radiator cap, there is also 2 plugs which need un-plugging, 1 larger plug powering the front aux fan and a smaller plug connected to the module mounted to the shroud.
the cowling is now ready to remove, so using the correct size spanner and locking tool you can free/remove the mechanical fan and slide the cowling out, you will noticed a huge gap now which in future will allow easy access to work on belts/water pump etc etc if needed!
the new manual spec electric fan just slides in the exact same place as old fan cowling came out of and is held in place by the same 2 fittings (1x t25 screw and 1x plastic clip), once in place you just plug the fan in, the fan is powered by the same plug which was connected to the aux fan, also remember to plug the module in (this is needed for the A/C as its a sensor).
the next step is to remove the front bumper and plastic cowling then remove the aux fan which is held down by 4x 13mm nuts, once its off refit cowling and bumper and your ready to test everything.
the electric fan is variable speed and will also run when A/C is activated exactly the same as manual spec cars, i ran my car up to temp and using the OBC function 7 (engine coolant temp) monitored everything, without the A/C running mine held at around 90'c and when it creeped past this the fan started up, on a road test in both heavy traffic and motorway runs i've had no issues at all with coolant temps with it never going past 92'c. Its very quiet now as theres no noisy mechanical fan running
as i said earlier my car has already been converted from a automatic to manual last year so i don't run the additional gearbox cooler anymore so i cannot comment on how much difference it will have on the temps, i have done a little extra research on e46fanatics and it seems its quite a popular swap on there automatics and a few run these is much higher temps then we see here in the UK.
will post pictures up later on once i've sorted them.
