1988 W124 300 TurboD Coupé ''Gold'nBrown'' - intercooling it

[TurboDieselWeasel]

Managed to convince my old Thinkpad (T400) to swallow & digest the 33GB of raw video....

Some ultra boring machining on vidjey-oh, with some Tschaikowsky to make it more bearable.



Like, comment, subscribe, blablabla.

Cheers,
Jan

[TurboDieselWeasel]

Day off work today, so I wasn't all completely lazy and painted & seam sealed the radiator mount...



And I also drilled & tapped the bypass adapters.

Christian milled them flat for me - and he was clever and put a smal paralel flat on the bottom so I could drill them to the required size (I was not sure at that point what thread I wanted to use). And so I did.



Machined a quick'n'dirty taper to center the tap...



Quite nerve wrecking with the low-level equipment I have... But - all went well.



And on the weekend I struck a deal for a set of hoses to retro-fit the heated washer fluid reservoir to a Turbodiesel. Which renders my fabricated adapters redundant as I can just T the inlet & outlet of the washer fluid heater circuit

Cheers,
Jan

[TurboDieselWeasel]

Today I started to drill two smal holes in the firewall. They had allready been marked 28 years ago - how nice!



And these are there to bolt the auxilliary water pump into place. I never had it fitted before, since it was missing. The donor car had an auxilliary heater with it's own water pump. I was never able to find the hoses for this wter pump, untill we broke the grey '87 Turbo for parts (couple of pages back in this thread). Now's the time to finally plumb it in.



There's another set of hoses on it's way from Austria, with the take-off to feed the washer fluid reservoir's heater. Which then goes back to the main water pump resp. the coolant return from the passenger compartment heater core. Hope you can follow me. So this means - with these I can just put two Ts between inlet & return of the washer fluid reservoir heater.

But, I still need a different hose for the heater return... Which is like 100€ new and unobtainable 2nd hand. But - luckily I allready had another plan before I got hold of this set of hoses from Austria...

And - tada:



One of my machined adapters was put to duty. Now all that's missing is a piece of pipe to go along the crossmember to the other side of the engine, to meet up with the washer fluid reservoir's exit.

It was surprisingly hard to find the correctly sized pipe... I found some thin walled 3/8" copper pipe though. It's in the mail hoipefully next week. Air Conditioning stuff apparently uses this size of pipe.

Next I cut up one of the edge protectors/seals that go to the fenders on the inside of the engine bay - and fitted them to the lower side-covers of the engine bay. To give them a nice "connection" to the new radiator mount. I'm quite pleased with that:



Then I spend at least 2-3h looking for all the bolts, nuts, clips and what not I had missplaced during the last 1.5 years...

But...



We're getting closer to an appointment with Mr. TÜV The car's never looked this complete in ages - quite the mojo boost!

Cheers,
Jan

[TurboDieselWeasel]

Ha - I actually did some work on the car... And - I found the solution for an error that was bugging me ever since I put the Turbodiesel in. Basically, the little blower for the cabin temperature sensor wasn't getting any current. Description of what it does here, right at the start of this thread: retrorides.proboards.com/post/1643494/thread - I had spent quite some time to figure out what might be wrong - found nothing. The effect of this thing not working is quite dramatic though; the heater was working in a "wave form" with decresing amplitude. First full steam for 10-15 minutes, then it was freezing again for 10 minutes, full power, freezing etc. Untill at one point it swung into the correct temperature range. Quite annoying.

And what might have been the fault? Me. It was me!

The donor car didn't have the auxilliary water pump, but the aux heater. I didn't want to install the heater. So I just left that pump out, since I was unable to find the correct hoses (formed pieces which wrap through the oil cooler pipes). So I just cut off the wiring plug and tucked it away. Misstake! The aux water pump is wired in series with the sensor blower. So cut off the plug, and there's no more current getting to the blower.

I found out about it when I was trying to determine when the pump would run, or if it would run continuosly and pump against the closed heater valves. It doesn't. So wired the pump in - which also brought the little blower to life. Ha!

Fixed.



It's sucking again. And making the well known death rattle... Damn things! But I have a couple spare ones, no big deal.

Meanwhile, a parcel from Austria had arrived, with the bits required to attach the washer fluid reservoir to the coolant circuit.





Though it has some pretty weird size changes... Inlet to the heating spiral is 6mm inside dia, outlet is 8mm - and the return pipe runing along the engine crossmember is 12mm inside dia... No worky worky for me. But - I installed it nevertheless.

Which meant - drilling another hole into the firewall. And this time I did sweat doing it. But all went well...



No punctured brake fluid reservoir and the vacuume hose for the brake booster survived as well. Phew.

The hole is needed to bolt the washer fluid reservoir's return pipe to the firewall. Which goes along the bottom of the reservoir holding bracket.

I put the second of my machined adapters into the water outlet of the cylinder head (cabin heater inlet), and joined it with a T-piece with the washer fluid reservoir's outlet. The erservoir has a thermostate build in which opens/closes at around 20°C. To prevent the coolant from boiling off the alcohol in the washer fluid. So I guess it's fine that way.



Confused!? Maybe this helps a bit:


Red = cylinder head outlet to heater core. Red dots: washer bottle intake. Blue dots: washer bottle outlet. Green: bypass for heater core.

And with the washer bottle in place, it's not realy visible if you don't know exactely what you'r looking for. There's such a mess of wires, hoses, pipes and what not, you'd never know.



And to connect all to the water return on the other side, I've ordered some 3/8" copper pipe. It was the only pipe with an inner diameter of 8mm and outer diameter below 10mm to not stretch the hoses too much. And as nice side effect, I wont break my fingers trying to bend it... No, no more pipe bender experiments - I suck at making those



But that's a job for tomorrow.

The onl thing I don't like is the T piece. It's only 6mm on the inside and made of plastic. I'll see if I can find a brass Y-piece with a larger inner diameter. idealy, I want to keep everything as close to 8mm as possible.

Cheers,
Jan

[maxypriest]

Dedication!

[welshpug]

now a heated reservoir is a thing i had never heard of before but makes so much sense especially with where many are located!

i think there must be about 8 feet of pipe between the reservoir and my heated jets on the e34! thankfully the uk rarely gets cold enough to freeze screenwash

[welshpug]

it also goes a long way to explain the weight of the vehicles

[TurboDieselWeasel]

It's even better! From '89 on, the reservoir was heatd by coolant, the hoses runing to the jets were electrically heated (with a thermostatic switch in the bonnet!) and the jets are of course electrically heated as well. Totaly over the top...

[TurboDieselWeasel]

chucked some off-cuts into the lathe and quickly made these:



Bent the copper pipe following the original steel pipe as good as possible...



Put some horrible flares on both ends (who cares, only to prevent the hose from slipping off)...



And installed the pipe to the engine crossmember.





But I'm not exactely happy with that. Maybe I'll make use of the steelpipe anyway. What's bugging me the most is the material. Copper. It gets brittle as fück when swinging, I fear it may break over time, from vibration. And with the pipe being the very lowest point of the cooling circuit, it may dump all coolant on the road... Hmm. Not convinced.

Cheers,
Jan

[mk2cossie]

Not bad flaring on the pipe there

If you are worried about the copper pipe case hardening over time, could you get hold of some cupro nickel (or kunifer) pipe instead to make it from?

[TurboDieselWeasel]

I would love to, but it seems it's not available over here in 3/8". This would be the perfect stuff: www.ebay.co.uk/itm/3-8-OD-x-25-FT-CUPRO-NICKEL-KUNIFER-BRAKE-PIPE-/200293289147 - 378" @ 0.71mm wall thickness. Should give about 8mm inside diameter. It's pointless to order a 25ft roll, though. All I need is ca. 1.5 meter of the stuff.

Anyway, I continued with assembling the car, which took a lot of time - since I just threw all the bolts and stuff into various places... Also did many little things like replacing the clips holding the injection lines. The hardest was this one, almost made me pull the manfold off again. But as you can see - got it in the end.



Put the radiator back in, also the big fan. It's very easy to remove once I dive deeper into the chargecooler again. But for now, TÜV is the most important thing on my list of things. Tidied up the engine bay...



And it's looking like a car again. Things left to do: install battery, sway bar and fill up with coolant. And mounting the 215/55 R16 tyres to the wheels.



First appointment for TÜV is on monday, to talk everything through. The SL brake and wheels need to be registered to the paperwork, and I want to discuss this with the engineer.

Cheers,
Jan

[TurboDieselWeasel]

So - you see the mess around the car in the last picture above!? It's gone. I couldn't bear it any longer. So instead of working on the car, I worked on being able to work on the car with the doors closed. I threw out a huge amount of sh!t I had stored for reasons I no longer can recall... First was to move the car out - filled with coolant, let warm up. Bypass doesn't leak and apperas to be working well. With the heater closed, the pipe gets warm pretty quick.

Anyway. First call was to move the OM606 and the taxi's spare engine & gearbox to where I previously stored my wheels/tyres.



Wheels & tyres I threw out - most of them I actually don't need.

And jepp, that's a bit better in terms of being able to walk around the car.





It's not a huge space I got, but it's bearable. Much better than being forced to work in the open. The space in the lower left corner of the last pic will get a beafy work bench, but I still have to build it. Which was another reason to have a clearout.

So - that's it. I decided to paint the 8x16" manhole cover alloys and mount these to the car. I need alloys again after all those years with steels

Cheers,
Jan

[TurboDieselWeasel]

Decisions, decisions... Had a couple of talking sessions with Mr. TÜV. The verdict is not as clear as I had hoped for. Brakes - if I get more paper work, data, writen documents and stuff and blah and you know. I can get this.

However, one thing I did not expect; brakes from a different car - we'll do it. Wheels - no problem. 215/55 tyres on 8x16" wheels? Fcuk no!!!

So basically - I've allready bought expensive 215/55 tyres which TÜV will not accept. Only on a 7.5x16" wheel. There are plenty of 7.5" wheels available. Just none that clear the brakes AND look acceptable (to me!). So - that's the issue. Tyres.

from my working affair with 911s I had some 225/50 tyres left over I once got for free. I always had planed to just sell them, but never did. Ha!

So today i tried - for the first time ever - to mount one of these by hand. Which was a lot easyer than I had anticipated... Might make this a std. procedure

Anyway. I compared all the 16" tyres I have.

Can you guess which is which? I was a little surprised...



Not that much of a difference... Left to right: 225/50, 215/55, 205/55.

All in all, the sidewall of the 225/50 is about 12mm wider than the 205/55, both are on a 8" wheel:


(Actuall measurement not pictured )

So - a 225/50 might be a possible choice after all. I had always assumed they would be way too wide... In fact; they do look better with hubcaps:

225/50 & 8x16":



205/55 & 8x16":



So I tried the one 225/50 8x16" combination on the car - not bad.

205 to the left, 225 to the right:





Not bad at all!



I briefly had thought about removing the brakes and going back to 15" wheels - turns out my fears were without any reason... 225/50 it is! This 225/50 Eagle GT I put on has a thread that's only 10mm wider than the Michelin 205/55! So I'm on the lookout for some "smal" 225/50 tyres, if possible with protective edge like the Eagle GT. I think it looks quite smart! I will put on the 8x16" alloys though, the steels are only rated for 190km/h winter tyres... TÜV doesn't need to know, but in case of TÜV, you know - better be safe than sorry. And those manhole covers are not the worst looking wheels ever ;-)

So - that's another thing crossed of the list. Well, almost. Only need to buy tyres. The 215s I will sell, should make a good profit.

Cheers,
Jan

PS: hope that post wasn't too tyring...

[varelse]

Get out.

[TurboDieselWeasel]

Nope, sorry, can't do

Let me know if the pictures work, please - I've had a server change, not sure if the IP/DNS has yet emigrated everywhere...

So, I mounted another 225/50 tyre on a steel wheel and tried them on one side...







Doesn't look like they will rub anywhere and the hubcap sits nicely recessed inside the curbing rib. I like the look of that. However - this is stretching legality, a narrow minded Mr. TÜV might dissapprove of this:



Anyway, I've got a a lot of letters from various tyre manufacturers to tell Mr. TÜV that he has to accept 205/55 tyres on a 8" wide wheel. If he doesn't want to accept the 215/55s on his own, he has to swallow the 205s now. I can play this game too. I've put some Bridgestones with a curbing rib to a 911 this week. They'r legal on a 8" wheel and the look rather nice and "classic" with the rib. Plus they'r cheap. About 60e per tyre, so I'm probably going to buy brand new tyres in the first timw for - like - 6 years.

I've also invested some hours into chasing down a vacuume leak. The seat backrests didn't lock and the headlight hight correction didn't work. I was able to trace down a leaky rubber connector on one of the headlights. Replaced it - all working. Phew. Loose backrests are a TÜV fail.

Slowly progressing towards new TÜV and driving it again. I took it for a very brief spin around the block - on a totaly privat road of course! - man, this car drives so nice compared to the shagged Taxi I've also replaced the controll rod for the Self Leveling Suspension, which is now functional again. Veeery nice!

Cheers,
Jan

[mattiwagon]

Yep I can see the coupe! Good to see it all seems to be going your way dude. Hope you get more enjoyment from it.

[varelse]

I no longer see any images from you. Browser looks like it's timing out trying to connect to your server.

[mbbelgium]

Very nice build! Like it! She's beautifull.

[TurboDieselWeasel]

Thanks a lot! Can't wait to take her for a spin!

varelse: should be working again. Little hickup.

I machined some 8mm spacers to go behind the bumper & lower ends of the wing, to try and space it out. I think AMG did this too.



But appart from making if look a little bloated, it didn't bring it out more than 2mm in the middle, so the 225/50 tyre still sticks out a couple of mm. Removed them again. Might use bigger spacers, but this would bend everything even more and created gaps in the inner arch protectors so a lot of gravel and dirt would get trapped behind them - nope. 205/55 tyres it is.

Cheers,
Jan

[varelse]

Seems to be working now.