The Bentley Dealer wanted $5,000 to Fix this Common Failure! We did it for $50 in Minutes...

This bargain basement Bentley Benta was listed as-is at a wholesale auction where it was marked with an inoperable air suspension, a problem that sounded scary enough to justify a pretty steep discount on what would normally be a six-figure luxury SUV , but what caused

this

suspension to change? The sinking ended up being so silly that it almost made no sense. The moment I took a look at the underside of the car, I saw its ride height sensors hanging off and a small broken bolt on either side. In a full 20

minutes

, I bought

this

car. At the ramps, we placed each bolt and were back sliding down the road.

There was only one problem: the air conditioning was very hot, which was very noticeable, especially in a black-on-black Bentley in South Florida after hooking up a set of HVAC gauges and doing a quick test. In the diagnosis we had the symptoms of a faulty air compressor that is located right at the bottom of this engine. It's easy to get your hands on. We even took the belt off pretty quickly, but quickly discovered that there are bolts holding this part to the engine. in places we couldn't really get to unless we started ripping the entire front end off.

You see, to repair most of the parts on the front of this Bentley, you have to completely dismantle it, a job that, according to the shop manual, requires an engine lift and 8 hours of labor to complete, and if You might well think that this is a problem associated only with high-end exotic cars, it has actually become very

common

on many of the newer European cars as more power and more accessories are packed into smaller vehicles. packages, they have to make the most of the available space by stuffing everything into a front assembly, that's why on this Audi V6, in order to do something to the front of the engine, we had to remove the wheel arch liners and then we had to throw. the front bumper and its front frame and center support components forward, giving you a generous couple of inches to get the job done.

Now it may not seem like much, but I have learned time and time again that every inch counts, especially when you are in a tight space and to complete this job I read and re-read the Bentley workshop manual to make sure I could definitely remove and replace this air conditioning compressor without getting stuck on the road and what I discovered is that this Bentley is very similar to what we just described, all of its coolers are mounted as one in a set and this set must come out of the car, which again requires the wheels, liners and coolant to be drained as the radiator hose is not long enough. to stay attached to the car and then remove the front bumper, but here we have a big difference, while most cars have a front bumper that goes around the entire front of the car and wraps around its body, this Bentley only has a small bumper lower.

An important part of its front bodywork are these huge front fenders that retain each side headlight, in addition to the front center support, the front fenders must also be removed and to get to the fenders you have to lower part of the Rockers, this job really seems too intense just to replace a single front accessory. I even considered just bite the bullet and pay to have it done at the

dealer

ship, but with a quote of over $5,000 between labor and parts price, I returned our Bentley under a nice shady tree. My attention was diverted by a very intriguing email and the subject line said local singles looking oh this is the wrong one, the subject line said Bentley Air Conditioning Compressor Advice and the email said Hi Sam, I just saw your video in the Bentley without air conditioning.

I was a VW Audi mechanic for 10 years and during this time I replaced many compressors that were actually just faulty refrigerant control valves. Now I haven't done a compressor on a Benta so I don't know what the axle is like, but you might be. able to take out the RCV without removing the compressor at all if you have to remove the compressor to get access to the RCV then it is most likely best to replace the entire compressor as it is a very big job but the RCV will probably fix the 80% VW Audi compressors in my experience anyway hope this helps and this is from Ryan at rkx Tech and he sent me a link to his site which sells various coolant control valves and they all seem to cost around 50 bucks , so after changing one After a few emails with Ryan, I learned that although there is a high

failure

rate with these valves, the

dealer

does not consider them a serviceable item, which means they don't sell them, they just want you to bought a brand new compressor and with so many different styles of these valves there is no real parts catalog where you can just plug in your Mak year and model to find the right one.

He said in some cases the same compressors will use different valves to suit different applications, so it's a bit complicated. part to trace now, if we go back and look at when we had this Bentley on the lift, we can clearly see where there is a little electrical connector that goes to what has to be the coolant control valve. Our hub here really couldn't be better. So if all it takes is to take this thing out and replace it with a new one, it shouldn't be much more difficult than simply inflating the tires, which today is as simple as it gets with the Fantic powerful.

However, you just added 17 PSI to this 21-inch SUV tire and in just over a minute it is six times faster than traditional portable inflators and with a 255,000 ml battery you can do it again and again and with three USB outputs Works as a portable on-the-go power pack. I've used fantastic tire inflators over the past few years, but the X9 Ultra is a game changer for me because of what you see here between my truck and trailer, including the spares. There are 10 tires here. and every time I go to the auction to pick up a car that has been sitting for a while, you will always find some flat tires with its higher battery capacity and pump power, not only is it much faster to inflate a car that I don't have to worry about the inflator running out of power and since it's super portable, it comes with me when I'm traveling.

I went and left an Amazon link in the description box for the X9 Ultra and you can get it right now. a double discount when you clip the coupon on the Amazon page and then use my code during checkout that will give you a total of $70 off ftic X9 Ultra, but it will only be for the next few days, so quickly hit that link in the description and save. $70 on the fantastic the front of this car. but we're going to try to attack this valve right here and luckily it's probably in one of the best locations to get the most access so basically we just need to disconnect this electrical connector here and then there's a little clip that holds it on. place where we might have to get in from behind this bar here or if I use the right angle tool maybe we'll just get it there, but otherwise there's a chance we can pull this out, replace it and get our air conditioner back without having to remove it. . the whole front end, although our axle is pretty good here, the snap ring pliers are too big to pull this clip so I just used an angled pick and it popped out now this valve is pressed in and I couldn't get it out. with just my finger, so a little pry with the screwdriver released it and then it slid out of place, so in about 10

minutes

, including the time it took to put the bender on the ramps, we got this valve off the AC compressor .

I'll be honest, I'm pretty skeptical that simply replacing this is going to bring our air conditioner back to cold, but I sent a photo to Ryan at rkx, he sent the appropriate one and said this looks good, I mean, there's no way to really know. If this is failing just by looking at it, but he said that when a compressor has a serious problem and fails internally, there will be metal-to-metal contact, almost like an engine failing, and there'll be glitter everywhere so we can do a quick bench test and send power to this to see if it clicks on and off;

Otherwise this is just one of those solutions that is like a gamble, you spend 50 bucks on it and wait for it. it works and it will really pay off if it works well, so I have a couple of test leads connected to our test battery here, I'm just going to hold one terminal and here's the other one, let's listen, you can definitely hear a click, it's very quiet I don't know if it's supposed to be that weak, but something in there is at least trying to move. I did a little more searching and the auto repair mechanics here on YouTube have a great video on how to test drive one of these. valves with a balloon, so we have an inflated balloon here and they tell you to just place it over the valve to the part where you see the screens.

Well, the balloon is sealed pretty well around one of the O-rings. That's good here, but what's not good is that this valve in the rusty position with no power should be open, so we should hear air coming out of these screens right here, as I understand it, when you send the 12 volts to it, which will. Listen right now, you can hear it trying to click shut, you can even see a little arc there if you look, but it's not doing anything, so maybe this valve really failed. I'm not sure how accurate or scientific this test is because the balloon is probably not putting as much pressure as an AC system would on the valve here, but you can see that the balloon is clearly not deflating, you can hear it it's not deflating and well no power is being sent to it so in theory this valve failed and failed in the closed position now just a couple of days later our replacement valve showed up and with the test results Not only was he eager to test the valve, he was sure it would fix our air conditioning. issues for literally 1% of the dealer's original quote in just a few minutes and as it came out it was pretty easy again, but a quick note: the valve needs to be pressed firmly into place and the snap ring needs to be secured against the groove If No, it will come out of place once you load the AC system due to pressure.

Don't worry about how I know all this. Just use a screwdriver and hammer to tap it into its socket to keep everything secure. I took out the We vacuumed our air conditioning system for a good while and made sure it held up after about an hour or so. In the event that the valve wasn't quite right or we did something wrong, the system would probably lose its vacuum, so it's good to take your time during this part to make sure you don't end up losing any refrigerant. Now the moment of truth has arrived. I connected a bottle of coolant to the gauges and started trying to charge, but no matter what I could.

I couldn't get the car to take an adequate amount of refrigerant, the gauges were similar to before and showed the same numbers on the high and low side and after several tries I thought our compressor was well shot, definitely worth a try and At least we tried, but this time I was really serious about removing the front end of the Bentley, so I took out the hoist, but since I'm a procrastinator, I knew there was one last thing I had to do before breaking the front end. of this. Bentley went out and that was ordering the A/C compressor so it would at least be on its way to me when I had everything taken apart.

I just put it back in place and was on my way, so I logged in and found something I didn't have. I hadn't seen it before when I first bought this car several weeks ago and it was that a company here in Florida is selling a remanufactured air conditioning compressor for the Bentley Benta. I was planning on going to the Porsche dealer because this car is basically a Cayenne. and I bought one from them for about $1,500 uh, but this remanufactured one was only $400 on top of the huge cost savings. I was wondering if they are remanufacturing Bentley BGA air conditioning compressors, what exactly is going wrong inside them, so I called the company and a human answered and they sent me.

Take me to your mechanic shop, so not only are they remanufacturing these parts, but they are also repairing the cars, so when the technician answered and I mentioned Bentley Benta, he said, "Okay, bring us the car, you know, we've already done apair of them." It's a really big job, the whole front has to come off. Don't remind me, but I'm about 5 hours away from the store, so it wasn't realistic to travel there, but I told him it would probably you'll end up buying your ac compressor. I'm just curious what's going wrong inside since you're rebuilding them and it goes fine, it's the valve in a second, he said it kept going too, but that still means you have to remove the whole part. front of the car anyway that made me realize we have a man made problem here more than anything else now if you've ever bought an auto part chances are you've bought a remanufactured one it's probably pretty high, especially when it comes to accessories.

I've seen a lot of remanufactured power steering pumps, alternators, and of course AC compressors, and it got me thinking about what this rebuild or remanufacturing process really entails to do these things. like new, take your power steering pump for example, many times what fails inside are seals, maybe one or two bearings and sometimes your pulley gets old and worn out at the front so they remove these seals, put in a new bearing and of course they put in a new pulley, painted it a solid color and here you go, you have a remanufactured power steering pump when it comes to alternators from what I understand the voltage regulators inside of these They fail a lot, so they open them and put a new voltage on them. regulator, they clean them, they close them, they paint them silver, then there's your remanufactured alternator, but if you've ever seen the inside of an AC compressor, it's almost as if the inside of your engine has cylinders, pistons, and lots of small, intricate parts, and when your AC compressor fails internally, you will have metal on. metal contact and you will see chips everywhere, as if your engine blew up and 9 times out of 10, when your engine blows up, it is much more efficient to look for a new engine or use a replacement engine than to rebuild the one you already have.

Applying this logic to AC compressors, well there are really only a few serviceable items on these things, on the clutch style ones you can have a failed clutch, you could put a new pulley back on them and of course on the that we have these coolant controls. Valves have been known to fail and it's obviously easy to fix so to give myself the best chance of success this time I ran out and got a new set of rental AC gauges, plugged everything back in and repeated the process and it's really amazing what you will get. Notice that when you have a new beginning, well, everything reacted the same at the beginning.

I noticed that the coolant can barely changes temperature when you recharge the A/C system. These things get really cold so I played with the valve above and discovered the problem instantly now I know this is a stupid mistake but the last time I did a full recharge of an air conditioning system was a while ago just before Before they added valves to all these cans, I used to drill a hole in the top of the old cans and then the coolant would flow freely, but a few years ago they added valves to all these coolant cans and these valves require a new style adapter, they are cheap and easy to get and they look and react the same as the old style. but instead of there being a needle to pop the metal, it has a plunger that opens the valve basically when I turn the fitting down, it would be like putting your finger on a water leak, while the leak will slow down considerably.

Little water will still come out. The same thing was happening with the valve all the way down, only a little bit of refrigerant would come out. Basically this plunger only needs to move halfway and then the coolant will flow freely once I move it. the compressor sucked in the coolant, the gauges started moving and the temperature in the Bentley started to drop, you can finally see the can sweating here, it's very cold to the touch, it's actually running and our numbers actually read two different sets of Val okay, so we have the low side around 25 the high side a little over 100 we don't even have a can, but this is going to take up two cans, so here we go, look at this, uh-oh, look at this, no way way is starting to fall.

We're getting some action, the air is still pretty warm, let's see what's going on here. Oh, this can is empty. I can feel that this can is empty. I'm going to tighten the low side here, the connector off and get another can, we got really lucky here. The luck wasn't just the quick and easy replacement of the AC valve, it was the timing of Ryan's message. If he had emailed me just a day after he did it, he probably would have done it. the whole front end of this car in pieces and I really learned a lot here, if you did too be sure to hit the like button and if your car has a seat that you've been putting off fixing, just know that there might be an alternative. economical solution and rkx has excellent information on how to diagnose and replace these ac valves.

I left you a link in the description with the Bentley quite well organized. I considered it my new daily driver, which is by far the newest and best. Car I've had for a long time, just four or five miles down the road, a doorbell rang and a big warning message on the dashboard says the coolant temperature is high. However, I didn't touch anything to do with coolant. What the hell is that not good? Yes, every time we run a car, especially one that is new, and then something breaks immediately after a couple of guys in the comments always say this has to be fake.

Now, in this case, I totally wish it was because it was. I really want to drive this car, but there is good news here and that is that these cars break down so often that there is already a service bulletin on why it overheats. The bad news is that the service bulletin says that the entire front of the car needs to be repaired. Come out to solve our problem, oh.