Hi guys,
I'm trying to take the EGR valve off. I was able to loosen the two 22mm nuts holding both ends of the valve but the nuts won't seperate from the valve fully. Do I need to loosen the two smaller nuts holding the valve onto the a bracket?

 

To take the valve off the car you certainly have to undo the two 12mm bolts holding it to the block on top of the oil separator. Good time to clean the separator, too.

 

Thanks for the reply.
I do not see any 12mm bolts. Bolts and nuts I see around the EGR valve are bigger than 16mm.

By the way, how do I take off the nuts on the intake port on top in this picture? These nuts looks like two separate nuts with same diameter but they keep turning together. Are these nuts separate ones or one piece?

And there is a nut at the end of the EGR valve body that looks as if it is part of the valve body. Is that one also supposed to turn or is it fixed?

 

You need to undo the nut on the farthest right on your photo, it's a 22mm. Don't worry about the one you are asking about if it comes off. Disconnect the vertical silver pipe from the top intake manifold. Undo the rubber hose and the electrical plug.

Now, there are the TWO 12mm bolts which are holding the silver bracket which sits below the EGR, on the other side of the EGR as pictured. I remove those when I take out the EGR but they may be hard to get to--you may need to bend the bracket AWAY a bit to access the heads from above. The other way to get the EGR out is to undo the other nut on the right side of the bracket but that I have found really hard to do. The black plastic box on the other side of the EGR is the oil separator and that probably needs servicing (cleaning), and getting to it you need to get the 2 12mmm bolts off as well... I can't tell how much access you have there, but I like to remove everything south of the intake manifold when I do this job, easier in the end than trying to work around it, OR take off the intake manifold which is not as hard as it sounds.

 

Got the EGR off. Got both 23mm nuts on the top and right side. Didn't touch the 12mm nuts holding the valve onto the bracket. It was good thing to keep spraying PBblaster over night every hour before taking it out. Whole procedure of cleaning the valve took me 2 hours. Now I will watch out the milege and let you know if it has improved or not. Thank you very much for your help! Next to clean is the throttle body. Tomorrow hopefully!

 

Despite of cleaning up the EGR valve and a tube coming out of it, I don't see any improvements on the fuel milege. City driving used to cost me sub 14 miles and still hovers arond 14. Only good thing is that I don't get ECU codes related EGR any more. What else should I clean? TB?