PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum - View Single Post

MikeTangas · #4 04-01-2002, 01:04 AM

You can get the weather strip and the thermo switch right here through PartsShop or FastLane. The wood pieces and some of the other trim items are going to have to be hunted down at a breaker yard. The 108's are getting a bit harder to shop for now a days. Try doing a serach, there have been a number of parts dealers posted before.

How to troubleshoot vacuum locks. Wow, I'm not sure there is enough bandwidth to cover it all

.

First, what do your locks do?

You will need a Mighty-Vac vacuum pump, an additional vacuum gauge is nice to have too. You'll use the vacuum pump to test individual parts of the system.

Get in the car, start the engine have the driver's door closed. With the enigine running lock the driver's door. All doors should lockl, now unlock the door and all should unlock. Leave the engine run for a minute or two, shut the engine off and repeat the above. How many times can you lock/unlock - should be about 6. If nothing happens while engine running then you have a major vacuum leak.

Coming off the intake is a yellow vacuum line, it goes through a blue/black check valve. You can test the check valve with the mighty-vac. From the check valve the yellow line heads up by the brake booster where it splits at a three way splitter. One leg goes into the left fender to the vacuum resevoir the other leg goes into the firewall - it eventually comes out and goes into the driver's door and to the master valve. The master valve splits the vacuum to direct the other doors to lock/unlock.

To check the condition of the door lock actuators you will have to carefully remove the inner door panels. You will then be able to access the actuators, but using the might-vac you can try to isolate the problem side at the master valve. You will probably have to replace/rebuild the actuators as the upper diaphrams probably have deteriorated. You will also want to replace all the connectors from the hard line to the diaphrams.

Tracing out vacuum leaks is a very time consuming process. It takes patience and persistance, but in the end it is nice to have a functioning central lock system. Also, a major vacuum leak, such as one would have if the vacuum line isn't connected to the intake can also affect the engine performance.