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