UK-POLOS.NET - THE VW Polo Forum

Anyone here got a 2014 - 2017 Polo 1.2 TSI with an air-cleaner box that has a clip-on, rather than screw-down lid, as in due course I'll need to change the filter element inside, and I've found that I can't get the clip-on lid off? BTW, this is the air cleaner unit that has 'four horizontal ribs' on the lid. If so, how are you meant to remove the lid? It's not obvious, and on the now several different occasions I've tried I've miserably failed to even slightly loosen off that lid.

In going to the 2014 - 2017 TSI models, VW changed the lid-fastening mehod. Before, a number of screws could be undone and the lid then simply withdrawn. But screws have been dispensed with now and have been replaced by clips - but of a sort that are essentially hidden from view. All you get instead is a set of four 'tabs' spaced around the airbox's periphery, where it meets the lid. Pressing these tabs in would seem the most obvious way of releasing the lid (albeit that you can't see the clip working) - but doing so and then pulling the lid has got me nowhere; the lid remains firmly in place.

Has someone here perhaps access to the relevant page(s) of VW's erwin workshop manual, where presumably it'd give instructional details of how the lid's supposed to be released?

Thanks iichel, but what you've provided are, I think, instructions for removing the entire air filter housing, rather than just the lid. I presume that, to change the air filter element, which is what this query is about, you just take the airbox's lid off, the lid being 99% of what you see there, in blue, in the sketch? It's getting that lid off that's the problem.

I'm starting to wonder whether there's a removeable lid at all. Maybe there isn't, on this air cleaner? Perhaps, to fit a new element, the new element fits in the base of the box, and the whole box has to be removed from the compartment? Perhaps this is why all my attempts to remove what I'd presumed was the lid have failed?

Ball studs? 'Lift the air cleaner housing off the ball studs'? On mine, I couldn't see anything that looked like ball studs.

Just follow iichel's guide. Turn the filter housing around and you will find two screws holding the housing together....

Thanks peter,

Yeh, late last night (Mon), before your reply, I found elsewhere on the Web a sketch of the underside of the airbox. I could then see, from that sketch, that there were two long screws or bolts passing through the box, from the underside of it upward. These bolts presumably pass through the element inside the box and screw into the underside of the lid, thus holding the lid tightly on. The four clips or tabs around the periphery of the lid are merely additional but less-strong means of finalising the seal of the lid with the lower part of the airbox.

With the underside of the airbox not being normally visible and the whole thing being held quite rigidly in place on the engine, it's no wonder I couldn't get the lid off. Those two hidden bolts were rigidly holding the lid on!

So, mystery finally solved.

The presumption had been - and a lot of DIY-type owners of these sorts of Polos may well make the same mistake - that the element was replaceable with the airbox left in situ. But it transpires that, instead, you're meant to take the entire box completely off the car and then take it apart on a workbench in order to get to the element. The latter will, I assume, have two pass-through holes in it.

Once again, thanks for your contribution.

ah great that it's been solved. this was the only information in ELSA and I don't have a 1.2 TSI engine at home.

veteran wrote: Tue Nov 21, 2017 9:35 am
The presumption had been - and a lot of DIY-type owners of these sorts of Polos may well make the same mistake - that the element was replaceable with the airbox left in situ. But it transpires that, instead, you're meant to take the entire box completely off the car and then take it apart on a workbench in order to get to the element. The latter will, I assume, have two pass-through holes in it.

Once again, thanks for your contribution.

Correct - the filter has two pass through holes.....