I bought it. I was curious what went wrong with it. Plus I could use about $1000 in parts right off the bat on my cars. It has an Elsbett single tank system that had been run for 45,000 miles about using a good amount of oil over those miles -- 50 to 70 % . It has lots of new parts and maintenance records. The seller said he thought it needed a ring job or engine rebuild and had lots of blow by. It came with 150 gallons of oil and his vegetable oil filtering system.

I went and picked it up with my father in law in his 6.5 Turbo diesel and drove it almost all the way home from Durum, NC to Nashville, TN. For a car with a blown engine it sure ran well. It started right up in dead cold after first short glow. Smoked a lot of white smoke until warm and bumped around a bit as it has bad motor mounts. However it drives good and climbed the mountains at 60 mph in 3rd gear.
I hit a top speed of 90 mph without trouble and it outran the 6.5 Chevy Turbo diesel pulling the tow dolly and loaded with 1500 lbs in bed.

The main problem was it used a lot of oil , either leaking it or burning it. However once warm it doesn't smoke. It used about 3/4 to 1 gal. of oil throughout the whole 600 mile drive. Haven't looked at it to see where its leaking.

Also another symptom was when you would try to accelerate over 60 mph you had to feather the pedal. If you punched it or gave it to much fuel, it would bog down, like there was a fuel restriction somewhere or the IP was throttling the fuel down somehow , not like the hesitation you get with a clogged fuel filter h-h-h-hes-hesitat-ion. So you had to ease the pedal down and gently accelerate to 70, 80 and 90. But it would go. This problem fixed itself after me driving it hard over a few hundred miles and blowing out lots of smoke. I topped it off with 12 gal. of biodiesel B50 and kept giving it Italian tune ups. Now you can floor it at 60 mph and it will downshift to 3rd and take off without hardly blowing any black smoke.

The wvo system was fine except i noticed they T'd into the coolant for the heat exchanger before the auxillary water pump, not after it. This caused that fuel heater to stay cold for a long long time. After 30 minutes of idling and driving, long after the engine was warm, that heater was still only luke warm. T in after the aux water pump and the pump pushes coolant to the veg heater rather than suck it away from it. That heater will get hot as soon as coolant is warm usually. Also, he wasn't making use of the built in heater as the thermostat was not bypassed. That is free heat.

His vegetable oil was top quality. Mostly soy oil but it was clean and not even cloudy at 40F or so. That's what you want. He was filtering to 1 micron through a hand pump and a big water filtration filter housing like you have under your house. His good oil is what made the engine last as long as it did given the poor heating. Just speculating. If you run vegoil you should definitely make sure your heaters are working and the oil is getting hot asap.

Attached are some pics. The body is not rusted out underneath at all. No holes in spare tire or tool compartments. It has the trailer hitch and wiring. Exhaust muffler is new. It has a bit of surface rust in places but nothing major. Overall, it has 275,000 miles on it and looks like a car that has been well used and still would give great utility for 20 more years. I would classify it as a nice beater that could have every dent and scratch fixed if you really wanted to but is perfect as is for family road trips camping and canoing. Plenty respectable. The sunroof and a couple windows don't work which is a bit of a problem.

I'm going to do a compression test and check injectors and glow plugs and see where the oil leak is coming from asap. I'll keep you all posted. If the oil leak is fixable without pulling the engine and engine is ok or anyone wants to save this car from being parted out, send me a PM or email.

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What Would Rudolph Do?
1975 300D, 1975 240D, 1985 300SD, 1997 300D, 2005 E320 , 2006 Toyota Prius