Boy do I LOVE my 300CD!

[TWeatherford]

Well I've been doing what these cars were made for, beatin' on it. Just doing a lot of short city trips for a few days, been pretty busy (42 hours worked this week already, 12 hours of sleep for the week, I go to school full time), so I've been driving her hard. Got a wash, then was crusing at 50 with the windows and sunroof down, started feeling a slight vibration from up front/nocking (sounded like a 4 banger gasser running straight off the block, not quite so loud though). Pretty quickly progressed, I stopped but couldn't tell anything the matter. Since it wouldn't be the first time my paranoid mind tricked me, and I was a half mile from church, I kept going. Did some tests and started thinking, and determined I must have a bad drive shaft joint, possibly something terribly wrong with the tranny, or maybe I lost an entire engine mount (I have spilt a lotta diesel on it) but probably just something bad wrong with the left front wheel.

So after church in the dark I popped the hood, started the engine cause I just love to hear it run (oh and when you rev it up to 2-3K, beautiful), soon I had a crowd of nice old people offering me what they could: rides home. I told most of them I'd prolly have it fixed in five minutes, and even so I would like to get it back to campus and not leave it in the middle of nowhere, "these cars are pretty tough so I'm sure I'll be ok if I go slow, I'd have AAA tow me if I had a problem anyway. Well since they were talking to me I stopped thinking, so I started with the right front tire tightening lug nuts, none were loose until I got to the left front, just a little loose, enough that with a quality car and a clued in driver I could feel it. So there's one big problem avoided, ie my wheel rolling by me, which my buddy's Ford Ranger lost the ENTIRE rear axle before he noticed anything was up (it all fell off at once), another friend was just driving along in his junk Hyundai which vibrates horrribly on the highway, which he paid double what I paid for my car, and the engine threw soem rods at only 34K miles.

If I didn't need a real pickup truck I wouldn't bother buying anything but these old hand built Mercedes diesels, had the car 10 months and I'm in love. If somebody hits me in her I just might cry.