Conrad D. Conelrad

Mot time today.  Clean sheet, no advisories!!! Happy days. 

The lovely Stowe.

The decline of traditional media has caused so many problems. Last time I needed to mask up my car, I had to print out a load of Reddit posts. 

Test drive completed.
No wobble whatsoever, the Sierra was only giving me good vibrations.
Looking good with a squirt of tyre shine.

We be home.

Only +10 minutes from Google's original estimate which I thought wasn't bad going.


She had one distinct cough after we'd sat in a traffic queue for 15 mins or so, but other than that didn't miss a beat the whole 120 miles home.  I reckon that cough was just one of the plugs getting loaded up a bit most likely.
Used exactly half a tank of fuel which my math makes to be roughly 45mpg.
It is possibly the strangest car I have ever driven.  
I guess my brain was kind of prepared for it to be in some ways reminiscent of the Lada, but it really isn't (other than being damned noisy at speed).  In the Lada everything is heavy (except the excellent gear shift) and fairly vague.  This is really the polar opposite.  All of the controls are light (the clutch in particular you could press with a finger), and the car feels light and nimble.
Actually gets up and goes a lot better than I expected given the blazing 26bhp on tap.

The fact they have put sound deadening on the underside of the bonnet to attempt to tame the ridiculous amount of noise generated by that engine does somewhat amuse me.
The vast majority of my experience with two stroke engines has been with a couple of Detroit diesel...which share one thing with this, the fact that biblical amounts of noise are generated...I don't think a bit of padding really is going to make much difference!
The car was absolutely happy to buzz along at 55mph and definitely had more to give it needed - but I was definitely taking it easy on the trip home.  Not least because I was having to lean halfway into the passenger seat to see where I was going because the driver's side wiper is loose on the spindle and only wipes about 1/3 of it's intended stroke (most of the time).
Ride is a little bouncy but not at all jarring.  Kind of unavoidable in such a light car, especially with such a comically short wheelbase.  Surprisingly comfortable I found, even if the driving position is exceedingly odd.  

The seat is very low to the floor, and because of where the wheel tub is the pedals are massively offset to the right, the accelerator being well over the centre line of the car I think.
Nice little period accessory, intended to track fuel usage.

It currently seems to be jammed up but I'll see if I can get it working.  Would be nice to be able to set it to when I next needed to plan to refuel.
Something it also shares with the Lada is a heater which could double as a blast furnace.

It is *fiercely* effective.  First air cooled car I've driven which actually has a halfway decent heater, even if it did take me a few minutes to figure out the controls.
Which is a good thing as otherwise keeping the windscreen demisted might have been a bit of a chore given I've apparently got the optional indoor swimming pool specified.

Not particularly surprised.  The windscreen definitely leaks and there's signs of water ingress from around the rear windscreen too - I'll look into that in due course.
There are some areas where the wiring will definitely be needing some TLC.

Plus we've ascertained that there's an earthing issue somewhere in the vicinity of the offside headlight as the indicator is back feeding into the sidelight circuit.
The fuel usage meter is currently dead as when the tank was replaced the sender for that apparently was also removed.  They're pretty cheaply available though so that should be simple enough to reinstate.  It doesn't actually give you any numbers, it's just a bar graph based on flow rate.
The taped in switch was originally for a fog light installation, that will be ousted for a correct switch which actually fits in the dash which I'll probably run a reversing light with as that's actually useful.
It also needs a Damned Good Clean inside and out and a few bits of paintwork touching up which will have it looking a lot better I think.
All in all, quite taken with it so far.  It's a wonderfully bizarre little car, and my immediate reaction is that yes it has shortcomings, but it doesn't seem anywhere near as bad in any way as the urban legends would have you believe.

You know I called that fault resolved?  Yeah... about that.
First thing today I wound up swearing at the fuel pump again as I discovered that it was now leaking from the base gasket.

Thankfully it stopped once I got in there with a stubby wrench and got a little more tension on it.  Without having to remove it from the car yet again.  A job I am thoroughly fed up of doing!

With my confidence boosted by yesterday's good running we went out to drop off a whole bunch of oil at the recycling centre.

Aside from the temperature getting higher on the gauge than I would have liked before the stat opened (the joy of aftermarket parts?), things were going well.
Right up until about 90 seconds after that photo was taken.


That "fixed" fuel pump has only gone and completely stopped pumping now.  Previously when it was playing up I was still getting *some* fuel, so you could nurse it along even when it was acting up.  Today, nope.  Nothing.  My guess is that I'm going to find that one of the valves has unseated itself.  That however is purely going to be to satisfy my curiosity, it clearly just doesn't want to live, so that pump will shortly be getting chucked in the scrap metal bin.  Not without a certain degree of vindictive pleasure I might say given how much time I've wasted on it.
Electric pump and blank off plate have been ordered, along with a few other bits and pieces.

Thankfully a friend of mine only lives a few minutes away, so salvation arrived driving a Nissan Pixo and gave me a run back home (seriously, I was like five minutes drive away) to grab a couple of things to hopefully get me going again.  Especially as recovery was estimating about two hours of a wait.  Made it clear to the operator that we would be trying to get the car going in the meantime, and would call them up to cancel recovery if we were successful.  I also asked for them to get the recovery agent to give us a call for an update before actually dispatching.
Grabbed all of the testing setup from a couple of days ago - which thankfully I hadn't reattached to TPA yet.  One very quick and dirty get-me-home bodge was thrown together.



Janky as all hell, but it worked.  Car didn't miss a beat on the way home.

Really frustrating when gremlins like this appear as it runs this smoothly now when actually getting fuel.
Which shows I think that we are actually making progress, even if it maybe didn't feel like it this afternoon.
Shout out to Reeve's Recovery too.  Contrary to the call handler's estimate, they called to say they were in the area and would be with me in less than 30 minutes - right about the point at which we got the car going.  They were really polite though, even though they had basically just wasted their time because Autoaid hadn't passed on my message asking them to call us.
So, hopefully in a few days we will be back up and running - without that blasted fuel pump.  
May use that opportunity to drop the radiator off to be recored, will see how time goes.  Or I may tidy this setup a bit more.  Main thing I need to do is to get an ignition switched wire into somewhere accessible in the engine bay.  An additional component I will be ordering will be an inertia switch to kill power to the pump in the event of an impact.  Any vehicle using an electric fuel pump really should have one fitted.

Tentatively calling this one resolved.
Had a look earlier on today and there was definitely an eccentric on the cam, and it looked to be intact from what I could see.
The arm on the pump looks to be fine.

Bit of wear but nothing I'd expect to cause issues functionally.  No plastic end piece or anything on here on any of the new pumps I saw on sale so I don't think anything is missing.  I do wonder about a spacer on the block as it really would help with heat management, but looking at how the rigid fuel line lines up it doesn't look like there was ever one there.  Plus I can't see one in any of the diagrams I have.
A bit of experimentation continued, and I discovered something.  The pump would expel fluid through the outlet with great enthusiasm - however what it wouldn't do was suck anything in through the intake.  Leaky valve...
Said valves were changed when the pump was rebuilt - that was a pig of a job without a vice to hold the pump body in as removing the old ones eventually required quite a bit of violence.


What did I eventually discover on closer inspection?
A bit of bloody dog hair wedged in the suction side check valve.
I blame my "helper" who was assisting me during the rebuild process.

With said hair removed, the pump reassembled (again), and refitted (again) I'm glad to report that we had a proper flow of fuel at the outlet again.

Everything was connected back up sans any bodgery from yesterday.

and I went out for about half an hour of driving around in circles without any incidents.  Right up to the point where the car which had been running flawlessly cut out without any warning - halfway around a dual carriageway roundabout.
Mercifully I was pointing downhill at the time so was able - amid much honking of horns, wound down windows, hurling of profanities and rude gestures at me - to slowly roll out of harm's way.
And people ask why I want to move.  
Positive wire to the coil has come off.  The connector was quite a loose fit so gave it a nip up with the pliers and it now stays in place properly.  I will probably replace all the connections to the coil in due course as a couple aren't pretty.
The coil etc needs some attention anyway.  Now I know I've got the Pertronix Ignitor setup in the distributor, that changes a couple of things.  For a start it's designed for a coil with a 1.5 ohm primary resistance (which this isn't), and shouldn't be run via a ballast circuit (which this is).  So I'll need to look at sourcing an appropriate coil and removing the ballast from the circuit.  That may well go a good ways to explaining why the spark isn't quite as lively as I'd expect from a system like this.  I also need to gap the pickup properly as it's currently far too close to the magnet.  Just realised I'd meant to do that this afternoon but managed to forget.
Despite that minor hiccup, the car seems to be running fairly well again.  I've tweaked the kickdown cable a bit again so it now will actually drop into 3rd when just bumbling around on idle in residential areas rather than being totally absent until over 40, but still changes at sensible seeming points when actually under load.
Getting there.  
Given the time of year, next up on "broken stuff I really need to sort" is likely to be the heater blower, as being able to demist the windscreen on demand would be nice.  Hopefully that's not just a solid block of rust.
Also hopefully I don't need to dismantle the entire car to get to it...

It's a tricky one as yes, I'd like the space back and don't really know what my plan would be with the bodywork long term.  Equally, I really do enjoy driving it.
Big box of stuff turned up for the P6 this morning.  The vast bulk in terms of volume was a full set of coolant hoses.  Additionally there were a full set of light gaskets, full set of stainless steel screws for all the light lenses as virtually all of the heads on mine were mangled, a thermostat and a pair of wiper blades.
The front indicator/sidelight units were both about as capable of keeping water out as a sieve.  The gaskets having long since turned to plastic was the reason.

They were also about 1/4 the thickness of the new ones.  Sadly the above one has had one of the screw risers snapped off, so I'll need to either replace the assembly or figure out an alternative arrangement with a bolt from behind the assembly or something like that.
The tail lights also weren't water tight as evidenced by the condensation.

These turned out to be completely missing the gaskets - so this should be an improvement.

Also threw on the new wiper blades.

I know these modern repro stainless blades aren't great, but I wanted to have a second set of them on hand so I could have a go at rebuilding the original ones I had with new rubber blades in case I wreck them.  The stamping of the ones I took off is definitely far superior to the replacements.  They do clear the screen acceptably though for now at least, and this isn't a car I'm likely to be using a huge amount in poor conditions anyway.  That's what I have a modern daily for.
I've been looking into the options regarding the radiator.  Off-the-shelf replacements don't appear to be available.  No huge surprise to be honest.
There are a couple of suppliers offering exchange units for around the £300 mark by the time you've factored in two way postage etc.  Alternatively there's a well reviewed company over in Kempston who can recore this one with an uprated core for around the same money.  Which is probably the option I'm leaning towards.  Being less than half an hour from home rather than having to entrust things to the postal system is a big plus, and being able to support local businesses always appeals to me.  They can also carry out a repair to that end tank no problem, whereas those offering exchange parts I imagine may object to that damage.  So that's likely to be the route I take there.
...If it ever stops raining so I can properly get back to it again anyway!  

Sounds a good deal better now she's not idling pretty much entirely on one carburettor.
This morning the P6 was booked in to The Garage over in Wolverton to get the wheel alignment looked at.  First trip more than a few hundred yards from the house, of course in the rain.  Of course the wiper blades haven't made it to the top of the to do list yet, so they're still ancient.  Thankfully they do actually still have blades on them, and I was able to clean them up enough that they were functional, albeit emphatically not great.  Sufficient for dealing with three miles of light drizzle though.
We made it there in one piece - albeit having discovered that these tyres have about as much traction off the mark in the wet as industrial grade Teflon.  Wheelspin at 900rpm, no problem!  Yeah, they'll be getting changed soon.  Actually seem to handle braking just fine, but trying to pull away anything other than exceptionally gently they're not a fan of.

Guys there were their usual efficient selves, and took a lot of interest in the car.  Tracking wasn't actually anywhere near as massively out as I'd expected, though it was definitely out.  Having it sorted has definitely vastly improved the straight line stability, previously the car wanted to wander all over the shop when you were trying to drive in a straight line.  We did have one bit of near excitement on the way there, in that the temperature gauge crept up very nearly into the red on the way there before the thermostat opened and it calmed down - sitting here under normal conditions.

So I will be replacing that in case it's sticking.  That's a failure we could do without.
I took the opportunity to stop on the way home to grab a couple of photos to commemorate the car effectively being released back onto the public highway.



After we were home I changed the oil & filter again.  Aside from wanting to flush out any remains of the slime that was in there when the car arrived, having just had the heads off I was always planning to treat the first fill after the heads were off essentially as a flush to ensure there's no debris I've introduced getting stuck anywhere.
The drained oil was still a little cloudy, but nowhere near as bad as what originally came out.

Here's what was drained from the engine the day the car arrived here just for reference.

That's after it had settled out for a while too.  You can see why I was planning on doing a couple of changes one after the other.
No noticeable moisture gathering on the oil filler cap any more it looks like - this used to be literally dripping wet whenever you took it off.  This is after sitting overnight too so did represent a full heat cycle.

Later in the day I had a couple of errands to run, so took this out again.  She's officially burbled her way to a supermarket to pick up groceries now, that feels like a decent landmark for a car that's been off the road for an indeterminate period of time.

Handling was further improved by me actually checking the tyre pressures - which I thought I'd already done, but apparently not.  Especially as they all had north of 40psi in - nearside front was nearly 50!  I imagine this was done while the car was in storage to help avoid them getting flat spotted.  Which sadly hasn't worked, one of the rears is definitely out of round.  I'm really annoyed with myself for not checking that sooner though, no excuse for that.
Things I've got out of today's driving - probably 20 miles or so in all.
[] Possibly sticky thermostat when cold.
[] Reversing lights don't work.
[] Light metallic click from somewhere in the rear end driveline when coming on/off the power.  Hopefully just a UJ needing some grease.
[] Windscreen wiper blades desperately want changing.
[] Rear tyre{s} out of round which becomes very obvious if you try to exceed 50mph.
[] Kickdown cable still needs a tiny tweak - I've gone too far the other way again now and she won't drop into 3rd at all until 42mph even when coasting.  Suspect there's going to continue to be a bit of going round in circles until I get that spot on.
[] Low end acceleration even when being deliberately really gentle is such that you almost invariably find yourself being held up by modern traffic almost the moment you pull out of a junction.
[] The burble is addictive.
[] Heater does work, albeit currently sans blower.
[] I keep looking for a nearside wing mirror that doesn't exist.
Aside from the brief bit of anxiety before the thermostat opened (and it may just be like that - this is the first time she's been out of a 20mph zone really, so I would expect the engine to have warmed up a lot faster than when I'd been testing before) that's not a bad result I reckon.  Not even any maddeningly annoying squeaks or rattles in the cabin which have made themselves known yet.

Getting rid of the small mountain of random parts and suchlike in the boot of the P6 was something I'd been wanting to do since it arrived. 

So I now just have yet another pile to work around in the garage of course!  That wheel is absurdly heavy.

Need to try to track down a battery cover at some point. 
A couple of things I'd been looking for did appear while rummaging through the boxes.  First being this.

A simple but quite important bit of hardware - the heat shield which should sit between the brake master cylinder and the exhaust manifold to help prevent it from getting cooked quite as badly.  This has now been reinstated.

The other was a whole bunch of screws which belonged in the tail lights - the vast majority of these were originally missing, though both of them now have all seven screws correctly fitted.

Only missing one now, the bottom one for the nearside front indicator.  Annoyingly despite having gone through all of my boxes of fasteners I can't find one with the right thread pitch which is long enough.

I had that apart today as well to resolve the issue with the non functional sidelight - which just needed a new bulb.  Though the lenses were both filthy and the whole light unit was full of dead spiders and general grime so I took the lenses inside and gave them a thorough wash.  This predictably made the other one look visibly worse so that got taken apart too and given the same treatment.

Also finally got around to removing the plethora of stickers on the windows.


That was somewhat precipitated by the desire to *clean* the windows so I could actually see through them properly as the windscreen in particular was absolutely filthy.  The rear windscreen still is - sadly it's been quite noticeably pitted on the inside by grinding/welder spatter so is never going to be 100%, though it would be far worse if that was the windscreen.  Rear one being a bit pitted isn't the end of the world.

I'm really happy that we finally got Skizzer's artwork as the forum logo proper. It looks great up there, doesn't it?

They don't need (or have) any oil pressure at hot idle. I know it's unnerving seeing the gauge resting on zero and the light on, but they're working on volume, not pressure. 

solder fuse has blown, easy fix

That's a beautiful photo! Vaporwave is BACK!
 
Here's my current daily on the roof of a car park. 

That's a beautiful photo! Vaporwave is BACK!
 
Here's my current daily on the roof of a car park. 

The decline of traditional media has caused so many problems. Last time I needed to mask up my car, I had to print out a load of Reddit posts. 

Upthread I complained about my wheel trims and @AndyW201 mentioned that he had a set. Well, now I have a set. And what a difference they make!

A side by side comparison with one of the old ones... they really were shamefully tatty. 

I'm loving how it looks now. 

Upthread I complained about my wheel trims and @AndyW201 mentioned that he had a set. Well, now I have a set. And what a difference they make!

A side by side comparison with one of the old ones... they really were shamefully tatty. 

I'm loving how it looks now. 

Upthread I complained about my wheel trims and @AndyW201 mentioned that he had a set. Well, now I have a set. And what a difference they make!

A side by side comparison with one of the old ones... they really were shamefully tatty. 

I'm loving how it looks now. 

Upthread I complained about my wheel trims and @AndyW201 mentioned that he had a set. Well, now I have a set. And what a difference they make!

A side by side comparison with one of the old ones... they really were shamefully tatty. 

I'm loving how it looks now. 

Upthread I complained about my wheel trims and @AndyW201 mentioned that he had a set. Well, now I have a set. And what a difference they make!

A side by side comparison with one of the old ones... they really were shamefully tatty. 

I'm loving how it looks now. 

You have been summoned for jury duty, because it's
MERCEDES ON TRIAL

GUILTY of STALLING AGAIN!!
GUILTY of stalling once at some lights and me pretending maybe that didn't happen! 
GUILTY of stalling in the car park at The Trafford Centre, causing me to have to be at the Trafford Centre for several minutes longer than necessary!
GUILTY of stalling while turning around in a cul-de-sac and then not starting again, ironically blocking a driveway containing a W124 300E! 

(photo taken by passenger)
Mercedes is hereby sentenced to SHIT CHINESE PIECE OF SHIT POTENTIOMETER THAT ONLY LASTED LIKE A FUCKING WEEK to be UNPLUGGED 
(*gavel bangs*)

With the potentiometer unplugged, the Baby Benz has done 50 miles in varied conditions without stalling. 
 
So here’s a £70 vote of confidence:


don’t let me down now, hurensohn!
 
How does it drive with a bit of the injection system unplugged? Beautifully! I’ve fallen back in love with the car. The only noticeable issue is that it doesn’t know what to do with itself for the first few seconds of a cold start but settles once the throttle has been blipped. 

Update. Things still not going very well - it played up both going to and from work yesterday. I dropped into my local motor factor - the proprietor also owns a broken 190E - and he loaned me a fancy multimeter which does duty cycle and can potentially help diagnose it. Well, it's certainly fancier than my multimeter, which I bought about ten years ago for £1.97 including first class post. His multimeter does this when you turn it on, which confirms it speaks the same language as the car: 

The next step was to drive the car around the backstreets until it stalled, and then hook this thing up and see what it had to say. I did loops of deserted suburban streets for 15 minutes with no issue, until I accidentally turned down a street terminating at a main road. With two cars behind, the second I pulled into traffic, it cut out. Awesome. I got it restarted and limped it out of the way. It was idling, but any touch of the throttle killed it. Multimeter time. I hooked it up and... a quick flash of 666... then nothing. 
When you looked at the photo above, did you notice the low battery warning? Because I sure as shit didn't. I put the dead multimeter back in the glovebox and waited for the car to regain composure, then drove home.
But! When I got home my AutoDoc parcel had arrived! In only twelve days. This contained the second valve cover gasket. The first one I bought was wrong (no-one says there's two. But there's two). When I test drove the car it STANK of burning oil, but I wasn't too concerned as there was oil misted all over the engine bay. I thought it was the valve cover, but the first time I took the air filter housing off I found this broken pipe:

So that was an easy fix. It did leak a little from the valve cover gasket, though, so a new one was a good idea. 

While I had such good access I was having a poke about looking for clues when I decided to test the potentiometer, which I'd forgotten to do last time. Here's the criteria:

Nominal value between 3.6 to 4.4 Ω. What's mine?

hmm, quite out of spec. Good work, cheap multimeter buddy! Friends 4 eva!
whoops!

I checked with the borrowed meter and it gave the same result. The values are correct when the air metering flap is pushed, but too low when it's closed. Could this be why it flakes out when I come off the throttle or apply the throttle from idle?
 

The morning after the first breakdown, I was tentatively driving to work when there was a huge bang from the rear of the car, followed by a loud hissing sound. I've had tyres blow out before, and this didn't feel like a tyre blew out. I pulled into a bus stop and sprung from the car to investigate. It didn't take long to get to the bottom of it. To jump the car the night before, I'd taken a spare battery and jump leads. I left the battery in the boot and immediately forgot about it. Then, that morning, for no apparent reason (I was driving down a straight road) the battery fell into one of the wells in the boot and pierced a can of lithium grease I had purchased 12 hours prior. The can exploded. 
So it was time to sort out the boot. 
However tatty my car is, the boot is always clean and clear. I hate cluttered boots, and I hate dirty boots even more. If the spare wheel is in there, it should be clean, too. I also hate a boot you can't leave a coat in, and this boot was damp and musty. Not tolerable. 
Water gets into the boot, and then condenses on the bootlid. This condensation then runs down the bootlid into the channel behind the latch, and then when you open the boot, it all suddenly empties into the boot. This video illustrates it very nicely at about 20 seconds:
I found the source of the water ingress and plugged it. I also employed Kent's suggestion from the video of drilling two train holes in the bootlid, which immediately dribbled a load of water onto the taillights so that's definitely going to be a big help. I left the boot open all day, then when it started to get dark I stuck a fan heater in there for half an hour to completely dry it out. 
The carpet, miraculously unharmed by the burst-lubrication, was damp and musty. The hose will sort this out! My hose attachment was all fucked up by the frost a while ago, but I bought new a one. Although it was pretty frosty a couple of weeks ago... I hope it's okay...

Oh dear. 
The carpet came up nice though. Smells of Woolite. I draped it over a radiator and put the heating on a little early (a move which likely cost more than ordering a new carpet) and I'm pleased to say the boot is now really quite pleasant, and up to my exacting standards. 

This has KE-Jetronic, that’s good ol’ K-Jet with modern fripperies like an ECU but unencumbered by modern nonsense like fault codes. It’s really quite simple, if you look at the following diagram of how it works:

 
…and from what I read, it’s super simple to figure out faults except for the fact that every one of the components appears to cause every conceivable symptom an engine can suffer from.