Morning, I hope this finds you all well.
I recently purchased a 1987 560SEL off of ebay with what the previous owner said was a busted timing chain. I got it cheap ($400) since the car had 200K+ miles on it and the body is in great shape so I took a stab at it. I also purchased a set of heads for it on Ebay (that damn ebay is like elecronic crack -- I'm addicted). Upon getting the car the owner said he heard some slapping noise upon start up and shut the engine down. He took it to a mechanic who said that the timing chain broke. Also it cracked the drivers side valve cover. That to me meant that the chain jumped probably due to the guide rails. SUre enough, I get it home and pull the valve covers. The chain is intact. however both guide rails on the driver's side have cracked off. They were laying down in the engine and I retrieved them. They actually didn't look that bad for going between the sproket and the chain.
No this is where it gets weird. My timing mark on the passenger's side looks good but the driver's side is clearly off by a tooth. The chain has a lot of play in it so I tried to just hand crank the chain around to see where it hits. I painted the top link on the driver's side cam and I can rotate the chain all the way through and back to the orignal cam? Slightly tight in a spot or two but just reversing the rotation and then progressing forward caused it to go right through. So I figured that I must have my valves bent out of the way so that the piston is not hitting them. So I cranked the engine by hand so that each cylinder should have it's valves closed and did a pressure check on them using my compresser and all held pressure??? Could it be that the heads are OK? Am I not thinking of something?
(BTW, I should mention that my daily driver is a 1948 dodge which has a flat head side valve engine. Very simple design. This overhead cam high tech german engeneering stuff may be throwing me if I am not thinking about correctly.)
The final question is that I purchased a new timing chain and rails as well as a tensioner. Can I change the timing chain guide rails without pulling the heads (If they don't need to be pulled)? I plan to purchase this week the access to the pindelski.com website to help me out on the specifics. I am just trying now to figure out what the big project will take.
Thanks in advance to any input that you may offer.