W113: New Life Old Soul, Ch. 5 Digging In Deep

A burst of motivation got me out and further taking apart this pile of misery. Continued with hose removal and started removing what I could from the front of the engine. 

Heater hose vacuum tubing, if it fits and works, but is horribly hideous, why not? 

Hose clamp central 

More incredibly tightened down SAE heater hose for the vacuum check valve. I forgot to check if this valve is even working correctly, so sometime when I remember to check, I'll have to make sure it's working before putting in back into use.

Caked on oil and more caked on oil. Having a nice clean engine is going to be fantastic. 

The power steering reservoir had an incorrect seal that was shown in an earlier blog post. It's clearly been leaking for ages. 

 Finished removing the air line that shot over to the CSV. 

Take a guess at why I'm pointing at this particular hose. 

and this one

Man, this hose sure is soft for a power steering hose....

TADA! Heater hose used for a power steering hose.. The hose was sweating ATF throughout. 

Here's the build tag that I had to scrub through a layer of grease to find. On the bright side, the 10mm thick layer of grease, grime and overspray of undercoat did a pretty good job of keeping the build tags in MINT shape! The conical shape of the power steering pump pulley made it a bit difficult to remove. I used the actual bolts that hold the pump in place to put some tension on the pulley and used a small chisel and hammer to tap the pulley off. Popped off like a charm. 

Power steering pump bracket. 

The now power steering-less area of the engine.  

I set the engine at TDC, based on strictly piston travel and the cam sprocket lines up PERFECTLY. I'd consider that a pretty good sign, at some point it seems as if the chain must have been replaced. 

This is the alternator tension arm. The small rubber bushings on either side of the arm are completely deteriorated and allow the arm to wobble. 

Before further disassembling the engine, I decided to turn it over a few more times by hand and line up the engine via the harmonic balancer. 

Everything lined up pretty damn well up in the valve train! 

Area void of the water pump assembly. I removed it to either replace or rebuild it. Getting it off the engine can't be done unless the V-Belt pulleys are removed off the balancer. On the bright side, the coolant passages on this engine look pretty good! 

New shot of the engine. It's missing a few parts here and there, but overall she's coming apart VERY well. Nothings broken and everything is coming off easily. Not sure if this is a good thing. It's probably plotting a way to murder me in my sleep or make my life difficult somewhere down the road. 
Just in time for me to remove the harmonic balancer too. I usually use a trifecta of pry bars to remove the balancers on every other MB engine I work on. A bit of a wiggle with all 3 and the balancers usually pop off with ease. Not so much with this old girl. 

These engines use two dowels to keep the balancer in place. These are usually one time use only and removing them will ruin them. There are two 2 small alignment dots used for installation. 

I used the three bolts that hold on the pulleys and used a puller to yank the balancer off the crank. Came off VERY smoothly and wasn't being fussy.  

You can see where the dowels sit on the crank and hold the balancer in place. The front main seal here doesn't seem to have been leaking, but it also seems like there was a bit of RTV used to seal the oil pan.

The upper timing chain guide is ridiculously difficult to remove. It's two allen key bolts and off it comes. SUPER difficult. It's under no tension and slips right off. 

It's seen better days that's for sure. 

Here it is removed. To make my life easy in the long run and so I don't lose anything, I'll usually put the bolts I took out back where I pulled them out from. Keeps me organized. 

Here's the front cover off with the distributor auxiliary drive gear and spring. 

A close up of the drive gear and distributor spring. Don't mind that it looks a bit odd, getting all this off with greasy hands makes it look far worse than it actually is. The drive gear doesn't have any wobble when installed in the cover. It's a tight fit, but spins easy. 

Can see here where the auxiliary gear sits in this cover. The little "cups" there catch oil and keep the drive gear lubricated. Pretty nifty little design. 

That's all I got through today. In the coming days, I'm going to be working on removing the head from the engine and getting a better idea of parts needed to get everything on this engine sorted out. The project is moving at a fairly decent pace. 

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W113: New Life Old Soul, Ch. 4 Chilly

I spent today clearing away the passenger side of the engine bay. Low and behold, I found the body vin tag (?) stamped into the passenger frame rail. Always a exciting to see things like this hiding out. I'm going to try and clear out the whole engine bay of anything that isn't original, get it down to the original paint and try to save what's there. If that proves to be too difficult, I'll respray the engine bay.

Passenger side frame rail cleaned out of all the undercoat/paint that was sprayed on. Original paint seems to be in okay shape, albeit a bit darkened over the years. Does anyone have an idea whether or not these exhaust manifolds are original or some sort of aftermarket units? 

I found the driver side data tag buried under 2" of undercoating. This is it after a few minutes with a wire brush. 

Here it is bare and easily legible. Would anyone have a Pagoda code decoder, or can break this down for me for future reference? 

Started alternator removal. It was two 13mm bolts that held it in place to the bracket and the tension adjustment arm.  

Going to use a new ground strap for it. This one has just about had it. 

Power wire to the starter has been played with and looks like a crimp butt connector was used with some new wire. I'm going to rebuild the harness the best I can, because I'd rather not have this car set itself on fire. 

New shot of the passenger side. I removed the entire Frigette AC retrofit and it cleared up TONS of space on the passenger side. Whomever did the install, did it terribly. If it's not the original AC equipment going on the car, then it's not worth doing in my opinion. The retrofit kits are poorly assembled and the installs are scary looking when removed. So if you insist on having AC in a convertible, please take care to who's installing the system. 

Can see the fuse holder on the left side of the picture. They seemed to have taken power from somewhere (probably the ignition switch) under the steering column. There were two holes drilled into the floor for the evaporator drains and some of the standard Mercedes wiring was messed with a bit to install. 
This will all be cleaned up and the holes plugged and sealed permanently. 

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W113: New Life Old Soul, Ch. 3 Slow and Steady

Nearing the end of March and the Pagoda is a toothless wonder. At this point, I'll have to rename the project "Lispy".

I had to remove the grill as it was misaligned and had completely the wrong hardware holding it in place. I also want to treat the small rust bubbling from the grill mounting points as well. At the moment, the car's looking like a happy go lucky 97 year old redneck from middle Alabama with a Mountain Dew addiction. 

After grill removal, I found some frayed wiring that was pinched between the grill shell and the chassis. I'll have to remove the engine harness from the bay and trace back where this is going. There weren't any blown fuses so I doubt this was grounding itself. Being the chassis has a mile thick worth of undercoat/paint on it, it's a bit of a blessing as this could have caused problems elsewhere.
You can also see a bit of the bubbled rust that I was picking away at. All that will be treated and painted so it won't return to cause havoc on the car. 

The intake/exhaust heat shield was cut in order for the retrofit AC compressor to fit. The way I do things, if you have to start modifying parts like this to make something work, it's just not worth doing. Granted, this isn't something that will cause catastrophic failures or the like.

I started the thermostat housing removal so I could get to the chain tensioner. Two 12mm nuts on some studs are all that need to be removed to get the complete housing off. Four 10mm hex head bolts remove the thermostat cover. It was so caked on that I had to use a small hammer to tap it free. If you're going to do this, be very careful. It's easy to crack anything thermostat related with these cast aluminum parts. 

With some fighting, the thermostat is free. Judging by the seal and corrosion, this hasn't been removed in ages. 

I couldn't get the thermostat free of the top, so I put the actual thermostat in a vice and tightened her down enough to bend it free to break the seal's grip. I didn't want to score the housing cover with anything to cause a leak down the road so this was the easiest method for me. 

After those two 12mm nuts holding on the whole housing, this should just slide right off. The paper gasket welded itself to the head, so that will all be taken care of when the head goes off to the machine shop for servicing. In the mean time, I'll be cleaning off any dirt and grime from this part and have it sit in my tumblr with some polishing media for a day or so. Should come out clean inside and out. 

Other side. It seems like that fitting off the side for the coolant pipe to the cold start system on the injection pump was modified slightly for use with the AC compressor bracket. Luckily, it doesn't seem to be a permanent modification and can be reverted back to original with ease. 

A picture of the kinked heater hose. This was caused by the AC compressor fitment. 

I wonder how well this AC system actually worked. This is one of the low pressure side hoses that was pinched between the intake manifold and the frame rail on the passenger side. Doesn't seem like it was a very good conversion. 

The Bavarian Brethren have invaded this engine bay. One of two BMW hose clamps I've seen in this engine bay, thought it was worthwhile to note. Guess it works, right? 

AC drier hanging out near the windshield wiper motor on the passenger side. It was attached with some duct hanging metal strip and sheet metal screwed in place. My hats off to the quality work on this retrofit. 

Engine bay space reclamation and cleanliness project commencing well. 

Cold start valve power and ground connections. I'll have this removed and cleaned up shortly. I'm going to go over all the wiring and make sure the connections are clean and have good contacts. 

Relay on the passenger side fender well with associated connector. IIRC, this relay should be bare metal? I'll take a nice wire brush to get all this terrible undercoat/paint off of it. 

That looks like a quality ground point, doesn't it? 

Lower connection to the CSV (Cold Start Valve) removed. It's a 19mm fitting at the valve. 

Oh, surprise surprise. Somebody cut it with a pipe cutter and fitted a hose over it to complete the connection! 

At least they made an attempt to make it a clean connection? I really dislike when people start modifying parts to make it work. It'll be way cheaper in the long run to just get it done and over with. Much less of a hassle in diagnosing engine troubles as well. 

A few 14mm nuts and the intake manifold is now removed. Pull out and you can lift it straight off. The intake and exhaust manifolds share the same studs, sans two outermost studs which are strictly exhaust manifold. 

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