The New Mexican 300E - stop shooting the parts cannon

 So this car was shipped up to me from New Mexico as the owner was fed up with his mechanic not being able to get the car sorted out properly. It saw a replacement engine being put in (and the mechanic wanted to put in another!), with a host of throttle bodies, engine computers, etc being thrown at it to no avail. While these are all pictures from the car in it's "completed" state, she came in a little worse for wear. 

We ended up putting a set of 500E wheels on it that I had in stock, compliments the stock body very nicely and improves the handling of the car considerably! 

Malachite is also a phenomenally gorgeous color. 

The engine bay POST Artisan clean up - it was missing fan shrouding, a host of parts to complete the engine were missing. Everything was sourced by me to ensure a totally complete engine bay. 

One of the major problems the car had was it's inability to rev past 1500 rpm. I can see why the previous mechanic was chasing his tail on the problem, as it was a single wire being bitten by a mouse under the fuse box causing the problem. The wire was for the fuel safety shut off circuit coming off the throttle body, the engine would fire up and idle, but would simply not rev. Upon finding the break, we can see a critter's been in this fuse box. 

The entire upper half pulled up to find the break. 

The wire in question! Repair the wire, button everything back up, and she's running smooth as silk!

Nothing a wiring diagram, a DVOM, and a test light couldn't find. 

So with the electrical problems sorted, we dug deeper. The engine was leaking oil considerably from the upper timing cover. First step with the job is obviously pulling the valve cover off. This engine is amazingly clean underneath, no sludge at all. Seems like whichever car it was pulled from, had a wonderful service life. 

Of course, when playing around with timing components, I tend to get away from the camera, but here everything's cleaned of grease, put back together, and a couple replacement fasteners and vacuum lines put in place. 

What ultimately happened was someone tried doing the repair before and screwed up the installation of the seal. You need to be very careful doing this job, this engine would've been pumping it's engine oil with the owner wondering why! 

The biggest problem while repairing this leak was finding out the o ring for the coolant bypass from the head just had a thick layer of RTV all over it. You can see how it was slowly dribbling coolant into the engine oil dead center of the head.

All in, there was quite a bit around the engine bay sorted beyond the work outlined here. It worked out to where the owner picked the car up and proceeded to take it on a road trip to New York, Michigan, and then back to New Mexico. The car performed flawlessly. 

If you need any extensive work done on your W124, get in touch!