Hi to everyone on this forum. My name is Imanol Alamillo and currently live in Mexico. I own a 1980 280E Mercedes that has been through several failures.
The car used to drive great and we used it a lot in travels and whatnot.
All the ordeal started when driving at highway speeds and reaching a work zone. A semi bumped a traffic cone (those big ones ) and under the car it went, busting a transmission cooler line and spilling oil everywhere. A shop on the side of the road managed to fix the line and refilled the trans.
Since then the car started acting weird, will upshift fine but would not downshift (had to stop completely to engage first gear again and so on).
We decided to go to a transmission shop to have it checked and they took it for a test drive. Long story short, they revved the engine several times and all of a sudden bam! the engine made a horrible sound and died.
Upon disassembly the woodruff key on the exhaust cam was sheared off and valves hit pistons.
I teared down the whole engine and already changed rings, bearings, valves, guides and valve seals along with all the gaskets and seals to have a healthy engine again.
The catch is that the intake cam sprocket went missing so I got a new one from MB. The only problem is that it doesn't have the timing mark
Do you guys know how can the timing be set correctly without it?
Anyway! Some pictures to show the progress so far.