Worthless DIY Repairs

[G-Benz]

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?