I've just bought my first MB -- a 1988 300TE with 150k on it. It's been well taken care of as far as I can tell (primarily serviced by the dealer and by MBI).

The only thing that worries me a tad is that the driver's power seat is exhibiting a few symptoms:

1) Some "grinding noises" when transitioning from one position to another (I'm tall, my wife is short, so the transition between the two memory positions will be frequent).

2) Sometimes, the seat "tilts" first to one side and then to the other when it's going up or down.

Naturally, when I took it to the shop today for the provincial inspection, I couldn't get it to do anything wrong, so the mechanic said that "it works" (prompty followed by -- make sure you don't break it, it's expensive to fix!").

My questions are:

1) How worries should I be about the noises, which seem to happen especially at the "end" of the ranges? I haven't had a chance to dig deeply under the seat to see if anything's stuck, but so far I haven't found anything untoward. What about the tilting? It "feels" very wrong, but clearly the switches, motors and wires are mostly working.

2) Is there anything I could do to e.g. take off the seat, and lube "something"? It feels as though a good lube could help a lot, but I'm not quite sure how to attack the problem.

I have the 124 service manuals (paper, volumes 1 & 2), but they don't say much about the power seats other than to give a picture of the various motors and the "gear assembly".

Thanks for any advice.

-- David

I'm pretty sure that the passenger seat has probably 10% the "age" of the driver's seat, so if it's easy enough to swap the two seats, that would relegate the problem to a seat that's much less critical to adjust.

Are the seats "sided"?

--david

I've read up on the seat-swapping howtos, and at this point I'm most concerned about the electronic bits, not the seat cushion -- also, I'd rather not deal with the armrest issues if I don't have to. Can the electronic bits be swapped while leaving the actual seat in place?

know the last q. but i would look around under the seat and see if anything is hanging down and dragging. then i would lube it while at it, prob with white lithium.

good luck

tom w

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[SIGPIC] Diesel loving autocrossing grandpa Architect. 08 Dodge 3/4 ton with Cummins & six speed; I have had about 35 benzes. I have a 39 Studebaker Coupe Express pickup in which I have had installed a 617 turbo and a five speed manual.[SIGPIC]

..I also have a 427 Cobra replica with an aluminum chassis.

So I looked under the seat, removed the front carpeting cover and rear plastic covers, cleaned out what I could, lubed w/ silicone & lithium depending on the spots, and I've got a bit more information.

All of the motions work well (beautifully, in fact, after the lube, for an '88!), except for moving the aft part of the seat cushion up and down, and only in _some_ circumstances. What happens then is that one of the two gears in the back (the right one, I think) doesn't move as fast as the one on the left, so that the seat tilts -- if I keep going (down or up), then it "catches up" and the seat straigthens out. When that happens, there's a grinding noise as if the gear or the motor is caught on something.

Strangely, the problem is intermittent -- so it doesn't seem that the gears themselves are worn or that the motor is failing. It also happens "under load" (as in, with me sitting the chair) and under no load. I can't reliably reproduce it with a particular motion, but I can make it happen with a few minutes of "going through the motions".

My best guess at this point is that some of the cabling under the seat that drives the motors are themselves sometimes getting caught in the mechanism and somehow causing a side to get "stuck". Is that likely, or is a foreign object more likely? (The cabling story works for me because I could see the cables getting stuck and unstuck).

My question to y'all is what my next step should be -- Should I try to disconnect the seat from the floor of the car, so that I could see much better what's going on? Should I give up and find a mechanic to take the problem on? I'd like to solve this one myself, it seems it should be doable...

Thanks in advance,

--david

'88 300 TE, 150k