Have sympathy, guys....the awful truth: your 240D can be repaired (most stuff) for about the same cost as any other car. So fix it, already. Do you think thepower windows on a 'new' car are going to keep working if you don't service them? Take the money and time you would spend buying a new car and maintaining it, and spend it on a 240D, and you'll have a much superior car. Just that simple.

Nick,
If you are "sold" on Mercedes, I would suggest keeping the one you have, or selling it and getting a similar model in better shape. From your post, cost does not seem to be the major problem--just the time and inconvience.
If time is availible, I would suggest starting to repair the broken items on your car and keeping it. It has ( potentially) more than half its life left.
Sometimes a long list of items to be fixed can be frustrating, but you can make a dent in it by just starting.
I have manual windows, but when the vacuum system starting leaking and the doors wouldn't lock, or unlock and the engine wouldn't shut off, I found it very frustrating. All it took was a couple of hours and I'm back with a fully functional vacuum system for a total cash outlay of about $1. ( I bought a bag of balloons, found which door actuator was leaking and installed a balloon over the rubber bellows) You may have more leaks. You admit to being scientifically aware--I would suggest using a scientific approach and eliminate the variables until you isolate the problem--then repair it. Start small, each solution will encourage you and enable you to work your way down the list.
Electrical problems seem to be due to poor solder--you could try simply resoldering the connectors and see if that fixes the window switches.
Don't give up! Keep the 240D
....or get a new car....

A cursory glance at this part of the Forum reveals that there are a lot of folks in here willing to "do whatever it takes" to keep one of the best, mass produced vehicles ever manufactured (most of which are 20+ years old) on the road. But on the road isn't enough. Many of these cars are operating reliably enough that their owners willingly use these cars for cross-country trips.

So, to the forumites, a individual that won't maintain a car and expects infinte, flawless operation from one... well, to coin a Texas phrase: "They Get Our Goat."

Realistically, unless you are willing to invest the time in 1) learning how to maintain a vehicle, 2) actually doing the work or, 3) have sufficient income to have all maintenance performed, you probably aren't a good candidate for owing an older Benz.

Based on the information you've provided I suggest: Find the highest paying job possible and then buy whatever Benz (or any other car for that matter) "flips your switch." Trade it in for a new model every two years. Oh, and one more thing, be sure and take it to the dealer for ALL service and repairs too.


Hope this helps,
R Leo

__________________
Never a dull moment at Berry Hill Farm.

LOL! You have been justly initiated to the forum now! I dare you to ask which oil is best, synth or dino! Go ahead, I dare ya!

__________________
past MB rides:
'68 220D
'68 220D(another one)
'67 230
'84 SD
Current rides:
'06 Lexus RX330
'93 Ford F-250
'96 Corvette
'99 Polaris 700 RMK sled
2011 Polaris Assault
'86 Yamaha TT350(good 'ol thumper)

If this :

". i just know i like the fact that i have through negilgence or fate ran my 240 out of both engine and transmission oil .."

does not 'qualify' him as a ' sinner' needing 'preaching to'... I don't know what would.....

It's been known for a long time that dealerships make more money in the service departments than from car sales.

Dealership shop rates have hit $90/hr around here. I know the guys are only making 25/hr. This creates a tremendous pressure to beat flat rate and make extra money; the quality of the work suffers from this.

No, driving an old car has many monetary benefits, no collision insurance, which saves about $2000 a year. That generally pays for one new (old) car every year. Plus, you avoid the height of economic insanity; financing a depreciating asset.

A friend bought a new 3-something BMW. It cost him $900 a month just to own. I told him that if I put $900 a month in parts into my 240D that I would have rebuilt the entire car in two years.

Plus my 240D has class.

Paul

i had expected that posting to a forum such as this one would achieve more productive results than posting to say, the forum for the online video game i play. there the average age of the respondants is 10 to 15 years less than mine, so i expect the people to be arrogant, judgemental, annoying, etc. given their lack of maturity i would be foolish to expect any better.

here i expected to find a higher maturity level. alas i am sadly disappointed.

my questions were simple and non-confrontational. i had read that the engines in diesel mercedes from 86 to 90 were sub-par, i wanted to know if that was true. i wanted to know some general information on the early '90s 350s as i hadn't been able to find much. i wanted to know what the approximate cost of regular annual maintenance would be on an early 90's 300 or 350. these are pretty simple questions.

sixto made a good effort at answering at least part of them. a few other people at least seemed friendly, if not helpful. the rest of the responses were such useful gems as "buy a honda" .... um, thanks, but no thanks. unless i can find a diesel honda manufactured in mercedes factory, in which case i will take it under consideration.

hopefully someone will come along and continue what sixto attempted to start, which was being helpful.

for all you imbeciles who feel it's amusing to be preachy and judgemental, here is a little story for you. since i feel like making you look stupid, as that will be fun. about two years ago i was driving a pile of plymouth reliant. it blew a head gasket, so i grabbed the sunday times and phoned my old man, who has 40 years experience as a mechanic. i told him i was tired of driving heaps, i wanted something which would last a while and be a little more classy than what i had, but i didn't have too much cash to spend. he suggested a diesel mercedes. so i looked in the paper and there was a 240d for $1500. i phoned them up, strong armed my old man into coming along, and went to check it out. someone had backed into the door or so the story went, so it had a bit of body damage on the drivers door. and it needed a bumper. we had a chat and my old man told me to offer them $800, the girl said she really needed to get rid of it so that was fine with her, i handed over 8 ben franklin credit cards, hopped in, and away i went.

4 months or so passed and a friend of mine and i decided we were gonna go on a road trip. he knew someone in ohio. his car was pretty reliable he said for the price he paid. i asked how much he paid, he said it was free. i suggested we take mine.

so we pile, hop on I-90, and head out. about half way up the hill i noticed it was acting a little funny, but thought nothing of it. well .... we got right to the top of the pass, and low and behold high gear fails. what fun! so back toward seattle we go, coasting as much as possible. i was hoping to make it to issaquah, alas first gear was starting to fail so we limped into preston, which for those of you who have never been there, it is a 3 building town. fortunately one of those buildings is a gas station, with a pay phone. we called for a tow truck to haul us back to seattle.

i call my old man who eventually wanders by, his diagnosis? a clamp near the front of the vehicle holds the steel hose which takes transmission oil from the transmission to the radiator to be cooled came loose. an unknown number of years ago. as years passed it slowly wore a hole in the steel hose, until it finally broke through, allowing all my transmission oil to run out of the car and onto the road.

and that is how fate ran me out of transmission oil, 40 miles into the start of a 2000 mile one way trip, at the top of a mountain where i could coast back to within range of being rescued.

you see, rather than open up flaming, the intelligent man would ask "how did you manage to run it out of oil?", where the unintelligent man just opens up flaming.

with a new steel hose and a few quarts of transmission oil, i was back on the road. it was mortally wounded and did finally completely fail 3 months later, but by that was enough time to track down the only replacement transmission for a 1981 240d west of the mississippi. thanks to the wizardry of one of the local iranians who owns a foreign car lot here in seattle, no one else could help me. i believe he had it shipped in from montana or some such place.

with the manual, my old man (who refused to get dirty) sitting in a lawn chair with a beer coaching, and 2 days of cursing and smashing my finger with the hammer, my benz had a new transmission. $650 for the transmission shipped to seattle, $20 for oil and such, and 2 days of irritation saved me the extra $1000+ that would have been necessary to have it rebuilt.

this concludes today's lesson for you people who like to be judgemental, who like to preach, and who like to jump to conclusions. if you do not get the point of the lesson, re-read it until you do.

so i'll ask one more time, again nicely. is anyone willing to answer my questions?

and one more thing. hi rick.

that's an easy one. i stick with the standard long dead plant oil myself. my oil gets changed about every 4 weeks. every week a quart or two leaks out or gets burned up, and every week i add more back in the top.


--Nick


edit: PS - the body damage we more or less straightened out with a 2x4 and my old man's tractor providing muscle. it's could use a professional fix if i cared as it is still bent enough that air and stuff like water from a car wash can squeeze in, but it is more than serviceable. the bumper we pulled off one of pop's old 300d project cars he has rusting out on the farm. one has a good engine, the other a good transmission. he's gonna combine them some day he says. some day being the operative time frame, they've been rusting out there 5 years + by now i'd say. unfortunately their blowers don't fit in a 240 or i'd have snagged that ages ago.

If you will go back and read your own first post you will see that it is a LOT of whinning about things inherent in owning an old car...that makes people think you might be better off with a bullet proof car like a Honda.... I know plenty of people with Hondas that love them... I know of no one that has a list of things as long as you do on your 240 that need fixing.

Your fuel mileage is terrible... and a Honda for the same amount that you are thinking about putting into an old MB.... may get twice the miles per gallon, even though it is gas....

You say you are not mechanically oriented in your first post , then proceed to tell us in the last that you replaced your own transmission...

I have reread everyone's posts in this thread and not one of them have a shred of mean spiritedness in them. Every one of them was trying to help you out going on the information and attitude which they sensed from your original post.

Your question about the 90 -93 cars was overly broad and simple... the answer would COMPLETELY depend on what the prior owners had done to the car. So there was no way to give a good answer on that.... so people just tried to answer what they could with the best advise they could figure out for what you had expressed in your original post...

You say you have owned your 240 about two years.. but don't know much about engines and such.... Why would we think that you should now buy another old MB with even more systems to go wrong when you have have not shown an interest or joy in fixing the little things on your present car or started learning about ' engines and stuff'....?

The fact is that the " buy a Honda" suggestion by Jim and seconded by me had plenty of wisdom and helpfulness in it....

I hope you spend plenty of time with your online video game playing....a fine pursuit which will make you much wiser very quickly...:p

What the guys are trying to say, in their gruff way, is that if you fix up and care for the 240 you won't even wnt a newer car, because they're not as good. I commute two hours a day in a 240D and if there weren't any speed limits I'd drive even further. A year of this has persuaded me that caressing the engine with cleaning wipes is a small price to pay to keep my mechanic happy and interested. I've kept Valiants running by changing trannys as often as 'rebuilt' starters, and life is much better when you're keeping a Benz running by pampering it. 'Nuff said.

I would not expect someone that is not mechanically inclined to be able to replace a tranny. You should have shared that in the first posting. The way I interpreted your first posting was that you are a type of owner that never looks under the hood of their car and a Benz, in my opinion, is not for a person like that. Hondas and Toyotas are built for people like that. My wife is one. As long as it has fuel in it and the a/c blows cold she could care less what is going on under the hood.

Now, back to your subject question. I would recommend that you stay as far away from anything MB ever built after about 1985 and especially after around 1993. The engines that you were questioning were the diesel 3.5 liter engines that were put in the early 90's diesel models. I am somewhat mechanically inclined (having earned a Mechanical Engineering degree in 1979) and owned a 1985 E320 for a period of time. Don't get me wrong - it was a great car BUT I did not like all the "stuff" attached to it. Knock sensors, power seats, etc.... because I love to turn wrenches on them too much and like to be able to get to the stuff under the hood. From a mechanical standpoint, in regards to the drivetrain, I don't think you can find a better car, it is all the other stuff that causes the headaches. In addition, we have had a Honda in the family for years and it has been my experience that they will beat a "newer" MB hands down in regards to maintenance cost/activies all day long.

No imbeciles here. Never been to a gaming web site so I don't know how those kids are. I'm just telling it like I see it based on how I interpreted your first post.

I'm surprised he let you begin a 2000 mile trip in a car without giving it a quick look at hoses, belts and such seeing as how he has 40 years experience as a mechanic. The majority of the time you can see stuff going wrong on these cars a long time before they will leave you by the road. I would also think that he would make you aware you already own the most durable cars in the world with the right maintenance.

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Jim

Lest you go away thinking that all of us at Mercedesshop are a bunch of old curmudgeons, I will make an attempt to answer your questions. All of the information you seek can be found here using the SEARCH button near the top of the page. There is a thread that has been active just in the past few days about a gentleman who is replacing the engine in a 91 300SDL. Here's another thread I found by searching for "350 and rebuild" : 350 rebuild The 3.5 liter Diesel is known to have major problems. The early W140 chassis (1992 - 1994) also has a whole different set of problems that can cost a bloody fortune to fix.

Sorry, I can't help you with annual maintenance costs on an S class because I've never owned one. Now here is the best tidbit of info I can give you: In 1986 Mercedes started using aluminum heads which are prone to cracking if the engine is overheated. Based on the information you have given us about yourself, I recommend you stick with a 1985 or older all-cast-iron engine.

Finally a note about miscommunication. We in the Diesel Discussion forum are a bunch of people who love these cars and take a great deal of pride in caring for them. A lot of information is shared about how to maintain and repair them ourselves, because they can eat you out of house and home if you pay somebody else to do the work. Your first post gave the impression that you are the exact opposite of the rest of us.

And finally, I think engatwork meant 1995 E320, not 1985.

__________________
Rick Miley
2014 Tesla Model S
2018 Tesla Model 3
2017 Nissan LEAF
Former MB: 99 E300, 86 190E 2.3, 87 300E, 80 240D, 82 204D Euro
Chain Elongation References

I did mean a '95 E320 - thanks Rick.

__________________
Jim

BTW, did anybody actually say "welcome to the forum"? If not, welcome to the forum!
We're really a harmless bunch. Don't sweat it. You'll actually get a lot of good help from this gang. Ya just have to smile thru the "other stuff". I use a couple other forums for other makes of vehicles, and this one far out does any of the others with usefull help.

__________________
past MB rides:
'68 220D
'68 220D(another one)
'67 230
'84 SD
Current rides:
'06 Lexus RX330
'93 Ford F-250
'96 Corvette
'99 Polaris 700 RMK sled
2011 Polaris Assault
'86 Yamaha TT350(good 'ol thumper)

First off, I don't think you really deserve to own one of the best produced cars ever made. I *****ed and moaned about my car initially like you, but came to realize that a 20 year old car with 328,000 miles is going to have it's little quirks, and if you wanna fix them you can. None of my power window buttons worked. I took them apart (with the help of my dad on the first button) put them back together, and they worked. Ever checked the fuses? They could be blown.
And you run the car low on oil and you KNOW it? You should be ashamed. Young kids in my town are killing for Mercedes of any type, and your here telling us how you run your car low on oil, know it, and are amazed? Wow.
Get a 1988 Toyota Camry with 100,000 miles. Run it to 200,00, when your feet are busting through the floor (Flinstones propulsion system) because of the rust, when you wish the plastic bits weren't cracking, the paint wasn't fading, and the transmission wasn't slipping. Throw it out at 200,000 and get another.

God.

Balloons, that's totally brilliant!

M.