Hey all~

Shamefully, this is my first post, but I hope I'll still get a good reception. Unfortunately... I have a rather 'noob' question. Its a problem I could probably find an answer somewhere else, but this place always has good info and its a lot easier than searching and searching and s... yeah.

Basically, my car overheated today. Just randomly, while driving, temp flew up, light came on, yadda yadda... I drive a 1994 525i, in great condition (2nd owner) and haven't had any other real problems with it. Well, I got home, and me and my dad looked at it - we've both had extensive experience with working on cars, but not BMW's as much, so I didn't wanna screw anything up without first simply asking. We pretty much narrowed it down to the thermostat- the tricky part is getting at it.

There's four bolts that hold the section on; two we can get at, but the other two look like they need the fan off - this is our main problem. We tried to do this with spanner + breaker bar as per other cars, but weren't 100% on which direction to turn and didn't wanna strip anything so we stopped. Can anyone simply give me some info on how it works, which way to go, if there's a specialty tool we could get for it? Or any other info related to changing a thermostat.

Thanks guys, and keep up the good work~

you can get those bolts without removing the fan. Just remove the fan shroud and find a rachet with the thinnest "head". When I changed my thermostat, I was also thinking about removing the fan, but after trying a few times, I was able to get those bolts