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1991 300D Valve Body, SUCCESS!!
After roughly 2 years, I drove my 91 300D today for the first time without having to shift through the gears with the selector AND the kickdown works again. It was a great feeling putting the selector in D and letting the automatic shift gears as it should.
A little background: a couple years ago my transmission all of a sudden wouldn't shift past 1st gear. Took it to my trusted indie and he said transmission was toast. Couldn't believe it could just go bad just like that, but who was I to disagree with him. He is strictly a Mercedes mechanic and had never steered me wrong. So he put in a used transmission that had been rebuilt 50,000 miles early and shifted perfectly the day before he put it in mine. He called a few days later and said it was installed but wouldn't kick down and was up shifting way to early. He believed he would get the issue resolved and call me when it was ready. The issue wasn't resolved in a few days and he said he didn't have the time to keep trying to track down the problem. So I went and picked the car up (didn't pay the full amount obviously) and drove it like a stick. Began to research these issues and I came to the conclusion there was nothing wrong with my original transmission except for a bad governor gear. Unfortunately nothing I could do about that. So over the next several months I rarely drove my car for several reasons, the biggest was fear of screwing up this transmission even more. Finally, after many months and countless searches and threads read, I came to the realization that hopefully this was valve body related. So a few weeks ago I pulled the valve body and began to disassemble it hoping to find a broken spring or something obvious. Much to my dismay nothing like that was found. I really needed/wanted a known working valve body to compare/replace mine with. Forum member Ridgerunner sold me a complete transmission from a wrecked 92 300D. Brought it home, pulled valve body, cleaned it a little, and installed it this afternoon. After putting new fluid in started it up and went through all the gears. Slowly backed out of my driveway and put it in D. It shifted! I was ecstatic. All gears shift firm and crisp. Only issues are the shift points are a little off and I need to go back and readjust Bowden cable to dial them in. I had done the wastegate modification about a year ago trying to help my poor performance with only moderate success. Now that the transmission is working correctly, the wastegate mod is working beautifully as well. Only problem is I need to get a manual boost controller as my boost gauge was reading close to 20psi when under WOT. Still have several other issues like #3 injector leaking (recently installed refurbished injectors from Greezer), AC issues (hoping transmission fix may help with the AC issues), rear window regulator, minor oil leak, etc. All that being said, I could have never gotten my car back on the road without this forum and its many awesome members. Needless to say this experience has taught me even more about these incredible cars. Thanks to all. |
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