Worthless DIY Repairs - PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum

G-Benz · #1 08-31-2004, 01:39 PM

Anyone want to share any stories regarding time spent painstakingly replacing, refurbishing or installing a component...only to find that it did NOTHING to improve the performance or alleviate the original problem!

Last night I spent the evening removing the brake pads sets on all 4 wheels of the W124 and liberally applied brake paste in order to quell the annoying squeal I have lived with for months...a brisk test drive and continued brake squeal only served to demonstrate that I wasted my time!

So I pulled the car in and decided to replace the ambient temp sensor cable I had sitting around that I never installed since I ordered it about a year ago. Carefully disconnected the old cable and unrouted it through the winding paths of the engine compartment, and routed the new one through the same path and back to the fuse box, where I soldered the new leads, clipped them back into the fusible link and reattached.

Temp indicator still reads with the same inaccuracy!

So there went an evening of wasted repairs!

Anybody else gone through this?

Arthur Dalton · #2 08-31-2004, 02:00 PM

Nope ....[bg]

AlexTheSeal · #3 08-31-2004, 02:06 PM

I recently replaced a window regulator, then realized that the problem was broken wires in the rubber boot at the doorjamb.

Not such a big deal, since I hadn't put the door back together yet, and the inner panel and plastic moisture barrier need to come off anyway to fix the wiring... except that I HATE getting W124 window regulators in and out. It's like trying to maneuver a sofa up a flight of stairs, plus you get to cut your hand on all the sharp edges in there.

yal · #4 08-31-2004, 02:09 PM

G-Benz I had a similar experience with my brakes. My rears kept squeeling. I bought new rotors, new pads, even bought new pins and new backing spring and spent a beautiful afternoon changing the rear brakes. Used lots of paste and used regular OE pads. No DICE!

Squeel returned. And I could have been at the beach.

By the way my rear brakes finally stopped squeeling after I bought wagner brake shims from www.********.com They cost $5. Wafer thin alloy shims that fit between the pads and inside caliper face. They also sell a front set.

I think the chronic squeel on W124's with correct OE/OE-like pads has to do with the age of the calipers, this is just a guess, my front ones use to squeel until I replaced them with rebuilt units.

bhatt · #5 08-31-2004, 04:06 PM

Had a "wheel bearing" type noise from the rear left that was intermittent. When making hard right turns, it was almost guaranteed to appear.. also appeared sometimes when going straight or curving to the right on the highway. Figured it had to be the left rear wheel bearing.

Dropped it off at the mechanic for his expert advice. He couldn't find anything wrong with the car so said our only shot was to change the wheel bearing. Replaced it and showed me the old one. Old one looked *brand new* at 200k mi! Problem went away for a week and reappeared...

I gave up! Decided to drive the car until either the problem got worse (and more obvious!) or went away (which it never did..)

A year later, I changed the diff fluid and put in synthetic. Problem went away immediately and never came back. Even 2 years later, it's completely silent. Noise is gone and so is the $$$ I paid to replace the "good" wheel bearing!

Neal

csnow · #6 08-31-2004, 04:10 PM

Replaced fuel sender. Still have intermittent gauge. Hate when that happens.

mctwin2kman · #7 08-31-2004, 04:42 PM

Replaced the Fuel Pressure Regulator, Fuel Filter, OVP to correct a rough idle and to no avail, fixed it by other means! Replaced a Kickdown Solenoid on the tranny only to find out the wire was broken in the connector! I have spent almost a few hundred bucks on parts that I did not really need! Basically all I got was peace of mind that these parts will not be replaced in the near future! Replace the fuel gauge cluster because it would not go to Full, now it bounces all around once past 1/2 tank! Tach cluster to replace a bad clock, other one worked for a few days then died and now the tach bounces when shifting! **** I have broken old sensors and had to get new to fix, then broken the new because everything is so close and one slip of the wrench even the slightest breaks the damn things! I curse out the German who designed the W201 oh so often!!!!

kerry · #8 08-31-2004, 05:03 PM

30 years ago, I bought a 67 Austin Healey Sprite blowing LOTS of smoke. Owner told me it had been diagnosed with a bad head gasket. I concurred and bought it. Replaced the head gasket (twice). Made no difference. Decided rings were bad. Rebuilt the engine (twice). Made no difference. My wife found me in a state of despair sitting beside the car with huge clouds of white smoke billowing out the back. She said, "Looks like it needs some kind of pollution control device." Those words spurred a new thought. I reached under the hood and pulled off the PCV hose. Problem solved immediately. It had been sucking oil directly into the intake manifold via a bad PCV valve.

tan man · #9 08-31-2004, 06:41 PM

when going over hard bumps in the road i heard something ratling loose in the passenger door. took the door panel off and found a screw and a bolt laying on the bottom of the door frame. looked all around and found where they came from, noticed that the window was now nice and tight. put everything back together. drove over bumps and the noise is still there. tried to localize it, definitely coming from the passenger door. then a thought occured, it may be coming from under the convertible top lid. openned it and found some of the top bows have room to clank around in there. put some towels in there to eliminate...drove around...noise is still there. in a "eureka" moment i decided to look in the glove box.. ahah! loose junk rattling around in there. took it out. drove around. still have the noise. now i think it may be the passenger door is not snug up against the body when closed. looked for and adjustment but not sure yet how to go about it.

brewtoo · #10 07-31-2006, 09:58 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by csnow

Replaced fuel sender. Still have intermittent gauge. Hate when that happens.

What he said.

Kestas · #11 07-31-2006, 10:50 AM

I had an a/c that crapped out and only worked intermittently. I took it to the local mechanic who diagnosed over $700 worth of work (compressor, expansion valve, convert to 134, new dryer). I did the work myself. It worked for a while, but then started to crap out again intermittently.

The problem turned out to be a $25 relay that needed to be replaced!

wbain5280 · #12 09-01-2004, 10:58 AM

Sometimes I'll replace something if I read about a high failure rate in some forum or other. It saves me the headache of fixing whatever it is when it breaks.

Resoldering fuel pump relays for one. Plastic/aluminum radiators for another.

zafarhayatkhan · #13 09-01-2004, 12:00 PM

Replaced the MAF sensor for the check engine light, only to find that it was the ECU.

Replaced the AC control unit to solve intermittent hot air, looks like its the monovalve.

Lebenz · #14 09-01-2004, 04:01 PM

Not a car problem but one I came across several years ago while at a customer’s office. When doing a tape backup, not only would the backup stop at a certain point, but the tape drive would cause the computer to reboot. I worked with Microsoft support, Dell support, even the tape drive vendor’s support. We could duplicate the problem 100% of the time. Along the way, I replaced the tape drive, the tape drive cable, the SCSI host adapter for the tape drive, the system board, the computer's back plane, the power supply the cooling fans, even the video display card and ultimately the hard drive, and the network interface card. Still the problem persisted. Microsoft gave up. Dell gave up. I gave up using the tape drive and had the customer buy another hard drive, put it on a different machine and simply copied data from the problematic machine to the other one. Problem was side stepped.

A little more than a year later I was talking with someone at MS support about a different topic, and mentioned the previous one, and said it was never solved. He did some research and found a case with a similar operating system where a pipe “|” character in a file name caused a similar problem. I went to the customer’s office the next day and looked for a file with a pipe character as part of the file’s name. Sure enough, in a directory with over a thousand files on it, one file had a pipe character. I renamed the file to remove the character, duplicated the test, and the problem was solved. I renamed the file again and put the pipe character back and the problem resumed. That was it! Never did get an explanation why this caused the failure of the backup software....

Dee8go · #15 07-31-2006, 02:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by G-Benz

. . . Anybody else gone through this?

Everything I've ever tried to fix was fixed perfectly on the first try and never, ever broke again. I'm surprised to hear that you're having problems.