Background:
Last summer and through the winter I read a few posts on NAM where some R53 MCS's had problems with the oil in the waterpump gearbox on the back end of the supercharger going dry, thereby grinding the gears up to powder, ultimately causing the water pump to fail to spin and therefore overheat the engine.  Even worse is that I understand that the gears are not available as individual replacement parts - an entirely new supercharger would be needed.  Given that I'd accumulated around 78,000 miles, and that I was not fond of the idea of the car overheating someplace, curiosity got the best of me and I figured I day's worth of fiddling with my car would set my mind at ease if a problem was brewing or not.

Results:
In my case I found that the supercharger on my 2004 MCS was still full of oil on both the nose gear side and waterpump gear side.    Here's a pic. of the waterpump side gears, full up to the fill plug.



If it's not already obvious, there was qute a bit of work to get at the supercharger to take it off, (like removing the bumper cover, bumper, crush tubes, modular front end, air intake, throttle body, bypass valve, intake plenum, alternator, dipstick *whew!*) but it was pretty straightforward since I have the Bentley service manual and also read numerous posts online.    The whole project went smooth.  If I had to do it again I bet I could do it in about 1/2 the time.  I started around noon and after taking breaks for lunch and dinner, and working steadily but in no rush, we buttoned it back up and went for a test drive around midnite.  No problems, no codes, no sweat. 



You can see lots more photos here.  If anyone has any questions about the process, feel free to ask.



-- Edited by the_copi at 21:53, 2008-08-08