Yesterday Jill called me in the night and the car was acting up. Lights on the dash, no power, died at stops, etc. Badness. She was able to limp home, but didn't even make it into the garage, it stalled in the driveway. Jill had bought this car so as to have a 'newer, trouble-free' experience, and this was chipping away at her confidence. She was most upset.
I went out this morning and had a look, with her permission, and the first thing I did was check the battery voltage and put it on charge. It was needing some, probably due to all the starting, but it was not apparently an electrical problem. I started it and it started fine, but as the initial high idle came off it would falter and die. Dang. I had the hood up and the door open, and it seemed excessively 'whistley'. While it was still running I could stick my head in and hear a wind leak. I had a look at the intake manifold hosing, where the noise seemed to be from, and I found a tear in a corrugated rubber elbow coming off the main air intake. Manipulating it affected the whistle, and its ability to run. What's more, when I went to show my discovery to Jill I noticed that the big air pipe had popped completely off the MAP sensor and was leaking profusely. I don't know how it could even have been running, but obviously it had been mating just well enough to get some fuel in there. More than enough was wrong to cause all the trouble. Well, _that_ kind of thing I can fix. I started pulling it apart, to gain access to the torn elbow. That wasn't too hard. I could see then, though, how dirty the engine had _originally_ been, pre-sale. They'd cleaned it well, no doubt of that. I used brake cleaner to clean off the elbow, and some of the grunge on the occluded bits of the piping, and rigged a socket into the elbow to force the tear mostly closed. I then smeared the good black 3M weatherstrip cement on the edges to hold it together. I then got a piece of bicycle inner tube and cleaned it, then glued it as a splint around the tear and used zip ties to hold it in place. Once that had fully set up I put the car back together. It worked perfectly again. This repair should hold for some time, plenty long enough to schedule a proper replacement of that rubber hose. The car worked well for us on errands today. -- Jim _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com For new and used parts go to www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
