A look underneath

Okay, I've got the Kona in the air and the first front under-cover off, enough to
have a look at a few things that have been noted over the last few months.
There might be a few pics, but it's not that exciting.

No evidence of coolant leakage/corrosion in the pump connectors. I unbolted
their mounting brackets so within the limits that their connected hoses can move,
I could twist them around for a better look. My car is just outside the build-date
range in the TSB, but I'm going to record the numbers on the pumps and see if I
can get more info on which revs *of the pump* have that problem or not.

I don't understand the bit with the longer motor bolts into the reduction housing.
The bolts I see go all the way through and end just flush with the other side of
the flange, so there would be no point in longer threading. Stock -0E700 motor.

The gear oil fill and drain plugs are 24 mm. I loosened the upper one and since
the car is up on ramps, all the oil is toward the back and thus definitely higher than
the fill plug ... but I let a little bleed onto a piece of white paper and that looks
pretty clean. Maybe when I can tilt the car the other way I can safely open it up
and fish the borescope around in there.

A shot of De-Oxit into some of these exposed lower connectors like the pumps
and the motor resolver and such before reassembly couldn't hurt.

Anything else I should look at while it's still off the ground? I'm not going anywhere
for a while so it's easy to pop back under there.

_H*

 

One problem is tbat the tangle of cooling and AC hoses makes it hard to
see stuff. I think that all the heavy wiring is internal, i.e. once the battery feed
comes up to the big junction-box the rest goes through direct feedthroughs
to the VPCU and thence the motor. There's no orange stuff underneath.
The VPCU is basically hemmed in with various plumbing.

I do have one general shot on an existing page, but I haven't really tried to
identify things. The reducer fill/drain plugs are at the rear near the drivers
side axle. I'll see if I can find a compass or equivalent; I would expect the
magnet to be incorporated into the drain plug to make it easy to clean off.

I have no idea what the black bolt with the yellow paint splash, just right of
the flange is. It's probably lower than oil level, but too high to be a good place
for a magnet. There's a tiny drain hole at the bottom of the flange junction --
you can just see the edge of it in my shot -- that I can see a little bit up into
with a strong light, and spot what I think is a tiny sliver of the motor shaft as
it goes through.

Maybe it's worth draining the sump, inspecting, and just putting the oil back?
Or go check if the auto-parts place has 70-weight... but given how clean it seems
already, probably best not to goof with it until it actually needs changing.

_H*

 

Not a whole lot of miles yet, still have yet to crack 5000 I think. But I do also
like keeping car undersides fairly clean, esp. with New England road salt.

So I've taken a good look at both "EWP" coolant pumps, as much as I can
without draining the coolant and removing them completely. I don't see any
of the warning signs of leakage, i.e. corrosion in the connector. I went back
and read the pump TSB/recall documents, but cannot find the affected
*manufacture date range* information that I know I've seen somewhere.
Does anyone have an exact reference that states the Kona manuf dates?
The hyundaiusa website doesn't show a recall for my VIN [just the new 960
thing for the BMS et al that I'm ignoring for now]. The pumps themselves
are the same part numbers, with date codes in the 201902xx range which
I think puts the pumps themselves outside the range of concern too, but it's
not a different part number. I also don't see any of these "QQH" suffixes
that the part numbers in the TSB have.

So what would we conjecture happened after the run of bad pumps? Better
build process? Different O-rings? There's apparently no visible difference, the
fix-kit is just new parts for the same pump.

I am working on a handful of pictures that I'll add to my existing
"look underneath" page.

_H*

 

Huh. Hard to read the .jpg, but I see it. That's a fairly narrow slice of production,
really... a little over a month. The relevant bad run may be longer... I did also find
the Kia Niro TSB, SA394, reflecting dates between Nov 2018 and late January
2019. The backstory is probably hilarious.

_H*

 

I have now updated the "underneath" page with the new pictures and discussion.
The reducer oil is clean enough [at ~ 5000 mi] that I'm a little more confident
in this gearbox not lunching itself any time soon, and what I can see of the pumps
seems ok for now.

Alex2802, if you're reading this, I pulled the relevant audio out of the video you
posted and made a convenient "tapping" .mp3 for playback.

I would have loved to take the pumps apart for an interior looksee, but that would
involve draining some of the cooling system and refilling/bleeding afterward.
Would anyone in the community have any chance of knowing what the CAN
commands to run tne pumps are, or would have a line on reverse-engineering
that out of a GDS session?? JejuSoul and his crew, perhaps? Anybody else
with a CAN sniffing setup and a friendly dealer tech? Subpoena HKMC? This is one
of those [many] things that "right to repair" says that should be made available
to independent technicians. A lot of procedures on these cars involve taking the
coolant system apart, so it would be quite a useful bit of knowledge.

_H*