Hello friends,

Thank You again for all Your really good help and all the advices. I cant thank You enough and I really appreciate it.

I ordered new rails, a tensioner and a new chain earlier today. The rails were cheap but the chain was about 120 USD and the tensioner about 190 USD. Probably because the sales tax here in Sweden is 25%. Anyway, I thought it probably be well spent money if it cures my car.

Some of the stuff needs to be sent after from Germany so I probably have to wait until this weekend before I can get busy with the fixes.

IŽm thinking of borowing a fiberoptic setup the have a look through the spark plug holes at the pistons for any signs of contact between the valves and the pistons. It probably works great as well to see when the number 1 piston is at TDC so that I can determine if the harmonic damper is out of alignment.

One thing that I wanted to ask about is if there is any good way of checking if the tensioner is OK or not? The reason is ofcourse if I should try to save the 190 USD.ŽAlso I would like to ask how this Mercedes tensioner works. All the other tensioners that I have seen, be they mechanical or hydraulical, they only elongate and never retract. But when I rotated this engine by hand I could clearly see that when i started to put load the wrench the tensioner elongated with about 1 1/2 inch and when I released the pressure it retracted by the same amount. I might be completely wrong here but wouldnŽt that mean that everytime You start the car, and until the oil pressure builds, You would have a lot of slack causing the chain to slap the rails?

Well, I guess that was all for now. IŽll let You all know how it goes with my replacement and the fiberoptic inspection.

Thanks again,

Mikael