OK, this is my first post after "listening" for a while, great forum!

So after a while of longing I finally got my first MB, 1985 300D. What a car! A little scary on eBay but I think its OK. There were, of course, no maintenance records on this beauty with 227,000 miles, but she seems in pretty good condition. One owner, garage kept, non-smoker, went to an auction and purchased by my seller who only had it long enough to eBay it, hence no records.

It started right up after 3-4 seconds of glow plug and idles very smooth without any vibration. After driving it a bit and not liking the lack of power and not shifting very well at all, I decided to perform some maintenance and discovery. Vacuum at the brake booster is 19 at idle. I adjusted the valves per spec INT .004" and EXH .014". I did a compression test after the adjustment and found as follows: #1 390, #2 380, #3 280, #4 380, #5 360. I "glowed" all the glow plugs briefly while the injectors were out and they all worked fine, then unplugged the wire from the relay to not heat glowplugs while cranking engine for testing. I replaced the air and fuel filters and put it all back together, using the old heat shields and injector return lines as I could not get new in a timely manner before my eagerness to see how well it was going to run. All of the valves were completely shut down without clearance before adjustment and the timing, when the marks were perfectly lined up, was at 3 degrees ATDC. The timing chain was very tight to the sprocket and there was no scoring on the cam lobes. Upon putting it back together bleeding the injectors the battery got weak so I charged it with my 6 amp charger for about a day. When I finished getting it together and fired it up----I noticed mega white exhaust smoke and boy, was it running ROUGH! There was noticeably more blow-by out the valve cover breather hole. It seemed to calm down after it had warmed up but still smokes a lot. I took it for a spin and it still runs without much improvement in power or shifting at lower speeds but seems to run a bit better at 60-70 mph. It still idles very rough when warm and still smokes. Also the battery dash light is on now when driving---the battery voltage is 12.5 volts off but 12.3 volts when at idle. Could this have happened, maybe fried the voltage regulator, with charging the battery?

I am very confident that the valves are adjusted right as I painstakingly checked them all a second time before buttoning up. I've noticed that the linkages need adjustment as the injection pump linkage does not contact the pump stop--its about a quarter inch short at full throttle. The EGR valve does not hold vacuum so I plugged the line and on test drive it maybe shifts better but can't really tell.

Can anyone offer some advice? I'm going to do a diesel purge and see if it helps. Can the pump be out of time? Can the #3 low compression be the culprit? Could having no clearance on the valves cause the engine to run smoother? I appreciate any input, sorry this got so lengthy.

Brian

Hi , was reading your issues and i'm having some similar Power issues on the low speed take off from stand stills. I was wonder if you had completed the Diesel Purge process and if it made any noticeable changes so far ?

Is your car smoking while idleing or smoking when its under load ?

I smoke black under Load (Hills, take offs with foot in it ) So I've read thats due to extra Fuel being delievered. So I'm assuming I may have some injector issues. So I will try to do the Diesel Purge and if that doesn't do it then I'm considering an Injector Nozzle replacement.

Eric , 85 300D

This tells me that there is some type of maintenance induced failure.

If there was no clearance whatsoever in the valves, the engine would be difficult to start in cold weather and, additionally, would really run poorly when at operating temperature because the exhaust valves would surely be hanging open.

The fact that none of these symptoms were present prior to the valve adjustment leads me to believe that there was some type of error introduced in the process.