On my 2014 clubman, the question that I have is - On the bolts holding the trans. pan on, all are hex heads except one, that is a torx head, which is under the subframe ( I quess that 's what it's called)
Now, if I can remove the torx head bolt without removing anything or jacking up anything up, can I get the trans. pan down (around the filter) Will it clear?
My plan is to drill through the one hole on the subframe which is directly under the torx bolt to give me room to remove the bolt straight down . Will it work ? ....LJ

 

Well, I quess nobody's tried it. I'm surprised no one has said that the crossmember would break if I drill through it. or nobody cares...John

 

If the hole is in the middle of the member, it shouldn't weaken it significantly. If you are drilling into an edge or a weld, that would be a different story. I would drill the hole too, btw.

 

I definetely would care if I were to buy the car. And it would be a deal breaker for me.

And yet it would lower the breaking point of the subframe when under load. I wouldn't want to be the one to find out by how much or if that breaking point is reached when going through a fast corner and hitting a pothole with the car loaded.

Car manufacturerers go to great lengths to compute structural strength, integrity and potential weight savings for all chassis parts (and even items like the steering wheel). They employ thousands of specialised engineers for this task (in Germany there is a term for them: "Berechnungsingenieur", i.e. "computation's engineer"). If drilling a hole through a subframe would leave it with enough strength for all envisaged use cases, I would imagine that the material to be removed would have come up as dispensable in those computations.

What I'm basically saying is that without access to the data, set benchmarks and specialised knowledge, how can one speculate on whether drilling a hole will weaken it significantly enough?

 

I recently changed my auto trans filter and fluid on my R56 S N18 motor. What I did to get that pesky torx bolt out was to remove the lower engine mount and then take a 4x4 block of wood and ledge it under the motor to move the whole engine and trans up about an inch or two. That gave me enough clearance to take a torx bit out of one of my torx sockets and insert it into a 1/8" end wrench which is just small enough to get in the bolt and above the subframe. I was almost ready to do what you did but talked myself out of it.

 

All Right!, Now we got a discussion.

Laying under the car looking up at that torx screw-bolt , I kept thinking , why did they put the one torx over the hardest place to get to and hex bolts on the rest ? And why did they punch a 5/8" hole on the underside of the crossmember-pipe ,without a hole on the top side? Maybe that would be too easy for me to remove the pan.

Now George has a good point about the engineering aspect. If BMW wanted a hole there , BMW would have put one there.

And Minidogger's just about got me to drill it. My experiences with semi truck frames is you can drill the sides but not the flanges. But this is basically a round pipe.

Brian, thanks but I'm not ready to give up yet.

What I'd really like to know is if I drill the hole and remove the torx . can I get the pan off without jacking up the motor for clearance?

I do appreciate the reply's and any more ideas are more than welcome...john

 

I'm pretty sure the pan would clear everything for removal without the engine raised but I removed mine when the engine was still up an inch or two. Removing the bottom engine mount takes about two minutes (2 bolts) so don't rule that out to make life easier.

 

Hi Brian, Did you put the block under the oil pan? And did you replace that torx bolt with a hex head?....john

 

I put the 4x4 under the engine block between the oil and trans pans towards the back of the motor, this gave me an inch or two rise after the bottom motor mount was out, I put back the same bolt as I figured I’d never be doing this again.