After much fretting and fussing I am happy to report that my "new" 230.4 is driveable again. I finally traced the problems to the obvious. All of the intake ducting was missing, and the PO had retrofitted some type of breather with a round filter directly onto the carburetor. It had airflow to a point, then it would dump more gas than incoming air and bog down. I found all of the ductwork at a MB salvage yard here in Memphis for $25 and installed it, leaned the mixture to the extreme (no power on throttle opening) then enriched the mixture until I could do a full dump on the throttle without bogging. I took it on a 10 mile run - it did great. The only thing I can figure is when I first got the car every vacuum port was open and it was getting enough air through all of the ports to compensate for lack of airflow through the breather. If anybody needs any MB parts, let me know, this shop in Memphis is great - they have a nice junkyard with everything from new cars that are totalled to a couple of Pontons rusting away in the back. Now that I have big issues taken care of, I can move on to my list of things to improve on the car. It needs a headliner BAD and it needs the radial oil seal behind the harmonic balancer (it may seal off with use, though).

Yep, it pays to go stone-stock even with air filters I guess. Electronic ignition for 108's seems to be the only exception. Yet aftermarket ignition systems werent designed until decades after the car was built, were they?

Carburetor work is probably as tough as it gets. No mean feat reworking the fuel to air ratio. Nachi here had a pretty good solution to improve fuel flow on his 115, something about opening a breather passage in the float bowl that was blocked off by the gasket.

MB went to trigger point transistor switched igntion in 69 or 70, then to Hall effect pickup in the late 70s, ahead of everyone else. The transistor switch system was used on all gasoline cars after about 70, with the possible exception of the 6.9 L V8 (dual point distributor).

Restricted air flow is a baddie.....

Glad you got it going, Arkie!

Peter

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1972 220D ?? miles
1988 300E 200,012
1987 300D Turbo killed 9/25/07, 275,000 miles
1985 Volvo 740 GLE Turobodiesel 218,000
1972 280 SE 4.5 165, 000 - It runs!

Hello,
Glad to hear you got the four banger working without spending a fortune, not many Mercedes 4s around from the seventies, you guys love your V-8s.
Have a good week.

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Nachi11744