Conrad D. Conelrad

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My Mercedes Experience:
W124 300D: Repeated breakdowns due to OVP, heater never worked properly, sunroof broke
W124 280TE: SLS pipe ruinously expensive to fix, seized PAS pump
R170 SLK: Supercharger broke on day 1 of ownership, gearbox went into limp mode, oiled up its MAF and lost power
W201 190E: all good so far, except the stuff I mentioned above

 
 

Oh! It broke down!

50 miles into a trip, mercifully within walking distance of home, it stumbled a bit and cut out. When it restarted, the idle was all over the place and any application of the throttle killed it stone dead. I limped it home idling in drive. 
The forums came to help. "It's the OVP" they all said. 
I have encountered the OVP before, in my 300D. It's a little relay designed to stop the delicate circuitry being damaged by voltage spikes, but they have a reputation for causing trouble, usually because of dry solder joints. Re-soldering the OVP in the 300D fixed it permanently, so it was time to do that again. 
You just carefully slide it out of the case:

Then check out the solder joints on the back:

Resolder and slide it back into the case:

(I have a new one in the post)
With this installed, the car worked perfectly. Drove like a dream. Phew! Glad we got to the bottom of that once and for all. 

Oh! It broke down! 

This was about 200 miles after purchase. Conked out in a queue of traffic and wouldn't restart. Huh, weird. You'll notice there is no traffic chaos in the above photo, that is because it was taken much later than the actual breakdown, where I can assure you there was traffic chaos. As I struggled to push it out of the way, catching the odd glimpse of the mouthbreathers in the other cars gawping at my misfortune and doing NOTHING, I pondered how wonderful it would be if one of the globe's current conflicts escalated into a full scale nuclear exchange and they really got to experience what the breakdown of society looks like. I'd break into their shelters and loot all their prawn cocktail crisps. I'd even smirk as the traffic warden executes me. Should've helped me push, motherfuckers. Just then a very nice minibus driver arrived and helped me push it clear of traffic "as no other fucker will". 
As I was saying, it cut out. I walked home, scrolling Mercedes forums all the way. "Can you hear the fuel pump prime?" Fuck, man. The fuel pump is whisper quiet and there were cars and lorries thundering past. But yes, the fuel pump relay was the most likely culprit. I called my breakdown service (Junkman in his W210 full of straw) and we got it back to my place. I opened up the questionable relay and re-soldered the joints. Car seemed happy again. Phew. That's the end of that! 

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. 

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. 

I've been looking forward to this day for the past two months.
Once the Sierra was back on its wheels, I undersealed the jacking points that were concealed by axle stands / ramps.


The other side is the same.
It was time to pull the Sierra out of the workshop. As the underseal was still fresh and the car isn't taxed, I only drove the Sierra to the end of the road and back to outside my house to take photos.
At this stage, I recommend that you rewind to page 4 of this thread and remind yourself what the Sierra looked like on the 30th January, the day it arrived from Northern Ireland. I am pleased with the results and I'll let the photos do the talking. Please note that I haven't washed or detailed the bodywork and trim yet, hopefully I will get a chance to do that next weekend.






The bonnet, roof and boot lid look much better in sunlight than they do under a LED lamp. Yes, if you look closely and at the right angle, you can see the fine scratches but overall, the paint looks great.



Remember how the four corners looked? The tarpaulin that the Sierra was stored under rubbed the blue paint off down to primer / bare / rusty metal. My masking off and dabbing of blue paint has worked well. Up close, you can see the touching up but I am pleased with my low cost solution.




The sills and inner sides of the rear wheel arches look much better too.




The boot lid and rear valance now gleam.

I left the engine to idle for about 15 minutes and it ran well, nice and quiet, with no smoke. The temperature gauge reached half way quickly (and stayed there) but the coolant level was still low. The idle speed is a little too fast, I need to work out which screw needs a tweak.

With the Sierra outside, it took me two hours to clean the workshop. EVERY surface was covered with a layer of black overspray dust, which spread when I was painting the bumpers. Got there in the end.

I put the Sierra back in for another week, until it can be taxed and driven from the 1st April.

The 1st April is a Monday. According to the forecast, the weather should be dry. Let's hope so.

 

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. 

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. 

I’m still deep in the throws of KE-Jetronic insanity. The S Class has steadily been getting worse and worse.
 
I had a mobile classic car tuning specialist out to have a look at it the other week. He was recommended by my local Bosch Specialist* 
We put it on an Exhaust gas analyser to get a measure of how it was running. Badly was the answer. I knew it was running rich, given the wallet raping fuel consumption. So we dialled the mixture back to within a tolerable spec. 
Essentially I bought the last year of this model that did not come fitted with an O2 sensor, Those with an O2 sensor have a ‘Duty Cycle’ which can be read from the diagnostic port with a multimeter, which is a kinda basic code reader, different percentages suggest which parts of the system are faulty. 
On mine the fuel mixture is controlled as the engine warms up by monitoring the water temperature rather than the exhaust gases, so there is no ‘Duty Cycle’ to monitor, only the CO level in the exhaust. This means that aside from measuring the specs of each individual component of the FI System (of which there are many) and ensuring that you do not have even the slightest vacuum leak the system, it is notoriously hard to diagnose. To set this non duty cycle system up, it can only be done on an exhaust analyser, tinkering with it without any form of reference will potentially brick the system.
So how did it drive with the mixture set correctly? Terribly. No power, the gearbox did not know what to do with itself, it was continually cutting out etc etc. F*cksticks.
 
The car is now really starting to try my patience, and as I discussed with the tuning guy, cars with KE-Jetronic fall into an expertise black hole. Essentially they are too new (and complex) for the classic repair/tuning community to want to get involved or understand how to repair or deal with them. Any modern garage has the same issue, those techies who did know how to deal with KE have now retired/died/been sectioned.
My neighbour used to run a Bosch centre many moons ago, and for a bottle of wine took a gander over the car. We have found what could be a vacuum leak from the rubber ‘boot’ that attaches the injection unit to the inlet manifold, so I now have one awaiting to be fitted this coming weekend. This means stripping off the FI system, then splitting the base off the fuel distributor as the boot is clamped between the lower and upper halves, which to be honest is a somewhat daunting task. 
The theory being that the vacuum leak has been there for a while, and a previous owner has tinkered with the mixture (which should only be adjusted as a last resort - Mercedes put caps and seals on those adjustments for a genuine reason - mine have all been removed) to try and adjust around the fault(s). 
Mr. Imp has an Exhaust Analyser thankfully that I can borrow, so hopefully once the system is air tight, I can set the mixture to the correct level. Whether this will stop the random cutting out that I have experienced since owning the car, as the vacuum/mixture system is of course connected to the ignition system, remains to be seen.
These also have a reputation of burning through alternator voltage regulators, which also can cause mystery issues. Essentially the slightest fluctuation in charging voltage sends the prehistoric electronics into panic. This is regulated by the OVP relay (covered earlier in this thread) which, if detecting a spike, cuts power to the ECU’s causing no end of running issues. These can happen so quickly that the charging system doesn’t even register that there is an issue, so won’t illuminate the dash light. In fact the ABS system is the first to register that there is some shenanigans going on, and will throw that light on instead. I have noticed that on the odd occasion it has thrown the ABS lamp, especially if I’ve given it a bootful to try and clear its throat so to speak. A new one for the alternator was £20, so that will be fitted on the weekend also. 

There is a particularly nasty looking 300SE being broken on Faecesbook down in Nottingham, but attempts to get the seller to let me know what he wants for parts off it have come to no fruition. He’s said I can come and remove the bits, but not how much he wants for them. The idea was to purchase the Fi System for a source of spares.

Well, let's see how the weekend goes…….

He bought a red one because he likes Rovers of blood

He bought a red one because he likes Rovers of blood

He bought a red one because he likes Rovers of blood