Well this past couple of weekends I finally made some headway on the 1981 240D I have. Manged to flush the cooling system and what a MESS! PO apparently had used straight up water. Course I only paid $1000 for the car and it looked like crap! I pulled god knows how much rust , scale and other bits out of this thing. Flushed everything totally. Did the degrease and citrus flush and put in new antifreeze and distilled water. Thermostat worked great. Opened and closed when it should. radiator actually looked kind of new inside despite all the sludge. I will probably flush it again in a few months. This car is undergoing a complete restoration though so it will not be roadworthy for some time.
Since buying it I have managed to gut it. Rusty areas to be fixed are the two trunk wells and the sills between the rockers and floor. Fortunately that had just got started so I won't have to weld in much. All 4 doors where rusted out at the bottom and I managed to procure 4 rust free doors from NC-Friend about 6 months or so ago.
Tasks completed so far:
- removed PO homemade glow plug under dash switch. PO had rewired the car for series loop plugs because the relay had gone bad. The car had been retrofitted with the fast glow system and relay. He left all the old wiring in place so I just got a new relay, new pencil type plugs and redid everything back to the way it should have been.
- Replaced lift pump gasket. It was leaking oil so I took the whole thing off and cleaned everything and inspected.
- New injector pump hard plastic line. The old ones broke when I was working on them. Had to get these from Mercedes.
- Replaced the trickle bypass line from the block to water pump. Was leaking so I put on a new one with new copper rings.
- Replaced broken 2/3 switch and vacuum connectors. PO had then connected wrong and many where leaking or falling apart.
- Removed the fuel tank and cleaned it out. New basket filter and new fuel line from tank to the hard lines. New proper Mercedes fuel cap. When bough this thing had about an inch of crap on the bottom. I went as far as to order the proper adhesive from Mercedes to put the biscuits back in under the tank. Flushed all lines with Mineral Spirits. No more clogged fuel filters!
- Stripped the old gaskets and ground down the front and rear window pinch welds. Both have been covered with Por-15 and chassis black.
Probably the next task to tackle with this one is to get the front and rear windshields back in and finish rebuilding the sunroof. The PO had broken the sunroof and literally pumped an entire tube of silicone in the old one. When gutting the car I pulled the old one out and it was rusted and in very bad shape. I managed to buy a manual sunroof from NC-Friend when I bought the doors. I have it in pieces in my living room right now. I just got my new springs and the gaskets and seals from Mercedes. If my week goes well and weekend has decent weather I may get the sunroof and the windows back in. I'll try to periodically post up my progress as I go on this. This one is going to take a while!
11-26-2012, 09:45 PM
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