After watching a couple videos and looking at the situation myself, I realized removing the intake manifold wasn’t needed. I found this guide that seemed to be nearly dead-on accurate as far as the procedure was concerned, HOWEVER, I’m adding some notes below that may be specific to the 2015 Hyundai Sonata Sport that were a bit different from that guide, and stuff I struggled with:
- Bottom bolt: Having a very long handled ratchet or breaker-bar helps loosen this up, as the bolt is really tight against the engine block and its up there. A ratchet wrench or pneumatic/electric ratchet makes quick work of removing it once it’s loose.
- Bottom Intake Bracket: While the instructions recommend just loosening the bolts; that may be fine, but I found it was a lot easier to work in there just removing the bracket. It wasn’t too hard to put back later, but a bit of a challenge to line up the bolts.
- Top Bolt (NIGHTMARE): On this particular car, the top bolt was practically buried next to the oil filter lines. After I fought with it for quite a while, here’s my tips specific to this car:
- Remove the air intake tube from the throttle body and air box
- Remove the 10mm bolt holding the oil lines on top the trans (in addition to the bolts the guide told you to remove underneath)
- Take some zip ties, and lift up the oil filter lines and zip tie them to the radiator hose to hold them up. That gives you direct access to the bolt from the battery area, and makes a HUGE DIFFERENCE in getting it in and out.
- Next, remove the battery, as well as the battery tray. These are pretty easy and now give you direct access to the top bolt using a 12-15″ extension. Again, using an electric/pneumatic wrench really helps here, and having extensions with the wiggle connectors kinda helped too.
- Once the starter bolts are removed, you can wiggle the starter out and disconnect the battery and solenoid wires. Save the nut from the battery cable; it wasn’t included with the replacement starter!
- Re-installing Starter: Re-installing was also a nightmare, but I found this process worked doing this alone:
- Test the starter first – a heavy-duty clip lead sending 12v to the solenoid plug and ground on the case of the starter ensured the solenoid was engaging the starter
- Connect the battery and solenoid cables to the starter, then wiggle the starter into place. Insert the bottom bolt and try to get it started to hold it in place. Leave this bottom bolt a few turns loose.
- You have to “clock” the starter to get the top bolt to line up – which is a nightmare (again). I found I was able to use the battery cable to clock it into place, and the little mounting clip on the cable just happened to hook onto a bracket to hold it where it needed to be to get the (censored) top bolt to thread in. Having an extra pair of hands would also really help – while you can lift the starter from up top, clocking it is nigh impossible without reaching from the bottom
- Once you get the starter bolts in – breathe a sigh of relief, because everything else is super easy.
- Re-assemble everything, remembering to tighten the lower starter bolt
Hopefully the steps above help you out and save you a bunch of time, it may have actually been a 2 hour job had I sorted all these out earlier on. See the next page for some speculation…