Well, I just completed this hose replacement and I don't ever want to do it again!
For anyone else's benefit here's the account of 4 hours of misery:
The hose is deceptively close but is surrounded by steel pipes of one sort or another and to start with you can barely see it and certainly not get a hand in there. First I drained the coolant. Next I removed the big air intake pipe, the right angle curve into the throttle body and then the throttle body itself. Then all the nuts fastening the big wiring harness in place at the back, plus the plastic oxygen sensor bracket. I pushed the various wires out the way and then removed the coolant temp sensor. I did this because I needed to lift up the wiring harness a few inches and force it forward over where the temp sensor sits. The wiring harness is very stiff and has to be jammed in this forward position so it leaves enough space to get a hand down behind it. I jammed a screwdriver in the sensor hole to keep it in place.
I could now actually reach down the back and put my hand on the hose. I don't know how you would compress the two clamps without a special tool because there's no way I could get pliers down there. I have a special tool where a clamp goes over the hose clamp and a cable goes back 3 feet where you squeeze a handle to compress it. This stage was the only part that worked well.
Unfortunately once you remove the clamps they slide down the pipe and dissapear, into deep darkness. I had to fumble around with a magnet to drag them back up. My hose was very soft and I cut it off and hacked it away with a screwdriver. The access is so limited that your hand can't provide enough force to do much of anything down there. Now here's the stupid part: The rubber hose joins two steel pipes. These pipe ends face each other less than 1/4" apart! No really! So how do you feed a new hose on without removing the pipes? It's either an engine out job or maybe one of the pipes could be removed perhaps if the inlet manifold was removed.
Me, I bent one pipe away with a pry bar, forced the hose on and then bent it back into position and slid the hose into place. Sounds easy but it was tedious and miserable. Even trying to position the compression clamps back to the right place took about 20 minutes.
I was kneeling on top of the engine for most of this procedure with various tools, lights and components falling down various crevices all evening.
There's another fatter horizontal hose back there that probably should be replaced too but after that misery I couldn't face another one so I'm buttoning everything back up. All in all a terrible design. The designer should be forced to replace 10 of these until he begs for mercy
