A little markup showing what can't get past what at removal of the fan (areas circled in red). Lots of prying, jiggling, swearing. This is so stupid, it would have cost BMW $0 to do this differently... somebody just had to think of it. At one point as I was struggling with this, I began to think the only solution would be removing that duct... but I've seen videos on the interwebs clearly showing folks getting the fan out without needing to remove the duct and so I stuck with it.
Funny thing, too... without that clearance problem, getting the fan out turns into a 10 minute job (very straight-forward and, frankly, less work than getting the fan out of an S/M52)... but with that, I gave up entirely the first time, and this (second) time probably took an hour just to get the fan out... and that was with complete understanding of the rest of the job, having failed once already. One thing that helped the second time was doing this outside in my driveway on a bright sunny day (really helps to see).
The first BMW I ever worked on (having grown up with GM cars) was a 1978 530i a buddy got for next to nothing (had a huge hole in the right-front floor where the A/C wasn't draining and had oil issues... two months later it spun a rod bearing and this became our first rebuild). I was never more impressed with how intelligently that car was engineered. I guess those days are gone...
