Quote:
Originally Posted by gsxr
If it's original, it's fairly likely something is broken - or stuck/jammed - inside the valvebody. Mechanics generally won't want to mess with diagnosis and will recommend replacing the entire transmission. If all other shifts are good, I'd want to fiddle with the valvebody and see if you can find what's wrong. No point shelling out $1500-$3000 if you don't have to.
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So it turns out it
was a broken spring inside the valve body. Fortunately, I seem to have found a good mechanic who was willing to dig into the tranny a little bit to diagnose and repair. So, shout out to Lakeside Mercedes Repair in Portland, OR (well, technically Tigard, OR, I guess).
Quote:
Originally Posted by gsxr
It would have to be an incredibly bad oil leak to not make it 300 miles... like, dripping into a puddle when parked at idle. If it was that bad, I'd suspect the big O-ring between the block and the IP.
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If it's funny you should say so - when I asked Mark, the owner at Lakeside, how bad the leak was, he told me "pretty bad," and then proceeded to describe oil pooling underneath the car when parked (not running). I was bracing myself for an IP rebuild, even scouring the internet to see what was out there. But when I talked to Mark on the phone yesterday, he told me that he tore into the IP himself, and found an O-ring that was "hard as a rock," which he replaced. I don't know which O-ring it was, exactly, but it seems reasonable that it was probably the one you describe, between the block and IP.
So that ended up being a pretty big relief - two issues with the potential to be catastrophically expensive ended up costing me almost nothing in parts, and just a few hours of labor. Another shop might have easily sent me off to find a rebuilt IP and valve body (if not transmission!). I could've probably figured out the IP reseal myself at home, maybe even the valve body, but the job ended up being so reasonably priced that I think it's more than worth it in time and frustration saved.