Hello all!! Newly acquired 1988 300TE is causing me a little bit of a fuss. Some background of the car, was sitting since 2004 inside a greenhouse of all places. Relatively rust free, with 158k miles. I rebuild the fuel distributor with new seals, new cap/rotor/plugs, new fuel filter, new rad, and a whole bunch of replaced fuses (corrosion from sitting in a greenhouse). The car doesn't have a cat anymore, the exhaust was chopped up and in the trunk when I got it, so I made a new exhaust minus a cat (but still has an O2 sensor).
Was on my shakedown run and made it a couple laps near my house, about 11 miles. Decided I felt good enough to venture to the gas station and put some non ethanol 91 good stuff in it. Fired right up and made it just about home then it decided to tell me "not so fast buddy". Anyways, the symptoms its having now is it will run very smooth up until just below the 80C temp point. It seems to have a little idle "surging" but I use that word with reservations, because it just sounds similar to when an AC would kick on or if you were to hook up jumpers to start another car and the alternator recovers. It has a hard time starting up when warm, which I would attribute to the injectors possibly, but normally it'll start up in about 5-8 seconds when warm. If I let it sit overnight and start it the next day, it fires off on half a rev. Once it does start when warm, it will sit and idle fine, then if I give it full throttle, a blip, it'll just pretend that I didn't even do that. It'll rev a little then sputter, then return to idle (with my foot still pressed down). I checked Idle control valve, works as it should. Injectors were cleaned in an ultrasonic cleaner. I can get it to rev up when warm if i do some form of tap dancing on the pedal, like full throttle, let off, full throttle, let off, ect. I took a video to convey that as its sort of hard to explain:
https://youtu.be/O4b-X8bmy7g yes i know the exhaust sounds horrible at 3k rpms, theres a hole somewhere I need to fill.
What seems odd is when I was driving it on my laps, it was running flawless, and had tons of power (keep in mind I'm used to w123 300TD power level) and didn't have any weird throttle input things going on.
Thoughts appreciated on if I should look at the fuel distributor again(I've rebuilt a few with success so not super worried here, but never know), or check out a coolant sensor that could be making it do weird things when warm. No check engine light present. I've seen some posts about an ignition coil being bad when it warms up, but I am not one for just throwing new parts without reason. Thanks for taking the time to read
02-14-2021, 01:19 PM
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