Sorry for all my questions, I have searched for this but to no avail. As I have also found an ac clutch sitting on the bottom plastic shield, thought I'd take a look to see if I could rebolt it on, or hopefully find it's a 'spare'.

Haynes Manual says to gain access to the aux belts, remove road wheel and access panel. That sounds easy enough. Mmm, I got the wheel off, wheel arch liner 3/4 unbolted. triangular shield from front rhs under bumper, but I cannot get the main panel off that is hiding the nearside end of the aircon compressor! There are two fixings at the top of this panel that appear to need to be undone from the top. Is this right? If so, it looks like I'll need to remove loads of stuff around the coolant bottle area to get to these. I did manage to force the one nearest the rear off, but cannot do the front one from underneath. The fixings are round metal discs that a screw is screwed into. Am I being a bit dense here, I hope so as an easy way would be handy! Once I access the compressor, do I just need to mount the cleaned up clutch back on a spline and add a new nut or washer & nut? What sort of torque required?

Sorry for being such a pain, I'm trying to love my Octy but turbos & compressors keep complicating the affair! Many thanks for any advice.

The metal discs unscrew, they are on bodywork studs and you reach them from underneath within the wheelarch.

Having just done a cembelt change this weekend I had to remove that as well. On the one towards the rear of the car I used a small screw driver to gently bend some the metal "fingers" down, and at the front, due to worse access I just used a large screw driver above the plastic and twisted it, thus forcing the thing down. Before reassembly I flatted the fingers back down with a hammer.....

Thanks. A great design! I did try to turn the metal ring on the rear one and then gave way to brute force & ignorance. The front one is even less easy to get to, will give it a go. It really needs a tool with teeth to go in the slots to turn it, similar to a castellated socket. Why coudn't they have just used screws like on all the other places?

I thought about trying to turn the disk, but decided I could not be fussed with it! Brute force is the way to go ;-)