I finally changed the hose on the bottom of my reservoir today. The directions in the post above are pretty straight forward. The hardest part was getting the old hose off. It was hard and brittle and I ended up having to take it off in two pieces. The replacement hose was 15 mm ID.

You will have a lot more room to work with if you take off the plastic cover for the left distributor, the left air intake hose and the poly v-belt (to get to the hose and clamps below). I thought I had run into trouble when I got to the big hex plug/connecting pipe at the bottom of the reservoir because I didn't have an Allen that big. It turns out that a T-60 torx worked perfectly. The v-belt required an E-10 torx socket for the tensioner. The four bolts at the bottom of the reservoir require an E-8 torx socket. I unscrewed the long stud in the center of the reservoir so I had room to get a ratchet and torque wrench on the plug.

Getting the connecting pipe back into the hose was initially difficult until I realized that I could use the handle end of a 1/4 ratchet to line the hose up with the hole from the inside of the reservoir. I coated the connecting pipe and the hose with a light coat of Vaseline and it slipped right on.

The gasket at the bottom of the reservoir was in good shape and I think I could have reused it if I had to. Also, the aluminum washer under the connecting hose plug could probably have been reused as well, but since I had the new parts I went with them.

Thanks to Gilly and 88260E, it turned out to be a fairly easy job. All of it can be done in a driveway without jacking up the car. It took me about 2 hours, but almost an hour of that was wrestling with the old hose trying to get it off.

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1993 400E, 256,000 miles (totaled)
1994 E420, 200,000+ miles
1995 E420, 201,000 miles