With the wife away visiting family and the daughter staying at a friend's house, it was a great opportunity to catch up the MBs.
I replaced a cylinder for the top latch on the 500SL, a relay on the 300E, and went to work on the sunroof assembly on the ML.
As noted, I had to buy the whole deflector assembly, which consists of the deflector and two metal levers (spring material) with the plastic clips already attached. One of the plastic clips broke on my original assembly, hence the (ridiculous) need to purchase the entire unit.
Instead of replacing the whole unit, I chose to replace one of the levers and attached clip...and save the other parts for future repair.
This is easier to do if you don't attach the lever to the deflector shaft first. As I mentioned earlier, the lever is spring tensioned, so you'd have to work against that through the install process. It's best to intall the fixed end to the sunroof track first, THEN go ahead and gently slide the other end onto the deflector.
The install of the plastic clip is tricky. There is a metal clip that holds the lever onto the sunroof track, and you have to get the lever to line up with the matching notch on the track and fasten the clip. Not much room above the metal clip and coaxing is best done with a flat tipped screwdriver.
A couple of failed tries had me searching for a metal clip that launched itself onto the garage floor.
Once that was done, I had a second issue which other owners may/may not encounter...installing the plastic end first left the unsprung end of the lever positioned above my accessory plexiglas wind deflector...so I had to unscrew one side of the plastic deflector and move it out of the way so that I could push down on the lever and slide it onto the the metal deflector shaft.
Total install time (including several iterations of garage floor searches for the metal clip): 30 minutes.
