Hey everyone!
I am a aircraft mechanic/diesel mechanic who just bought a Saturn. Its a 2005 saturn vue with 121k miles. Girlfriend loves it! its a 2.2 ecotech with the getrag manual! smooth and efficient, really happy.

Unfortunately, I already have an issue, a week after purchase. The air conditioning works great, however 5 minutes ago I went outside to look at my POS BMW and noticed a big puddle of bright yellow oil under my new love the saturn! Smelled it, definitely not engine oil, I took a picture of it leaking out of my compressor. This oil appeared today, it was NOT there yesterday, I know this because I had a good view of it while sliding out from under the POS BMW all day.



I do not have enough equipment or no-how to measure the pressures in the system, but if thats a must have peice of information I could probably get someone to help me out with it!


So what is under that black cover? gasket? O-Rings? Could this be an easy fix? Certainly looks like it but that never seems to be the case!

I saw a few threads about this from google searching, however none of them really had a good answer, so figured I would throw this up in hopes that someone here has already learned all about it!

I look forward to doing some writups on mods and repairs on here as I do on oilburners.net for my ford diesel and some BMW websites.

 

I'd simply try tightening those two bolts on that plate first, if it were me. Clean that crap off there and see if it still leaks.

 

Underneath the cover is an o-ring. When you take the cover off, you will lose your charge. Don't bother with gauges, on small systems there are too many variables to get an accurate charge indication from discharge and suction pressures. You can fix this yourself if you find a vacuum pump. That is the only special thing needed. You can find out how much R134 the a/c system holds by looking under the hood. It should have the amount. Any auto parts place can tell you how much oil the system holds. Anytime the system is open, you need to change out the filter dryer. If you remove the compressor, drain all the oil out of it and add half the amount of oil to the compressor, and the other half to the filter dryer, vac the system down for about an hour, take the vac pump off, add freon and let the pressure equalize, then start the car and turn on max air. The compressor will then suck the freon out of the can.

Make sure you keep the can upright to prevent any liquid freon going straight to the compressor. I set the can on the manifold to heat it to aid in transfer. It will take about 20 min. to get a 12 oz can transferred. You will know when the whole can gets warm. Repeat this process until the amount specified by the info tag is added.

Its really not that bad. Just a step by step process.