'88 W124 Ex- Berlin Taxi - suddenly a millionaire

[MrT]

looking' good!

I don't suppose you've got a spare left-hand LHD electric mirror for a '94 C124 you'd like to part with have you?

[TurboDieselWeasel]

Hey! No, sorry. Can't help with that... Series 1 Coupé mirrors are a highly valuable rare element of unobtainium. New they are something like close to 1k€ IIRC. Bonkers. I hope they never fall off. I'd like a - even non-electric - spare myself!

[TurboDieselWeasel]

So, I borrowed a little magic box from work to test the injection timing. Whilst it looks incredibly simple, it must contain some highly secret alien technology made from pure awesominium or something like that. Because this little magic box is only sold to trained personel for the little sum of 230€. For a blinky-box with two strings... Okay.



Anyway. One end goes into the inspection port of the injection pump, the other to the plus terminal on the battery.



The next bit is a bit of a pain in the a§$ on a OM603; removing the fan shroud (hnnngh) and then skinning your knuckles whilst trying to turn the engine with a ratchet to find TDC. But after a non-lethal amount of blood loss and a couple of turns - there it is: the fabled TDC:



Next bit: some more knuckle skinning... Turning the engine until one of the Amber Lamps - er lights - er - lights up...



And then veeeeeeery carefull!! Injection time is when both LEDs light up. and there's about 1/10th degree between them, it's a pretty accurate measurement. and after a couple of rotations - you go full disco!



Success! now all that's left is a quick look at the crank pulley - and we are at:



15.5° aft TDC. That's spot on! MB specification is 15° +/-1°. So 15.5° is well within the tolerances. Since it's not way off the 15° mark, I'll leave it at that. The engine runs well enough, only the smoke after 35-4000RPM is bugging me a bit. But since it's only realy visble at night with someone driving behind you, it might look like more than it actually is.

anyway, I now know that the injection timing is healthy, that as the point of the excercise. All good.

Cheers,
Jan

[TurboDieselWeasel]

I have a new car!

I greased all the countless throttle linkages and replaced the worn out and binding throttle pedal bearing on the firewall (bigpiece of plastic, 3€ something from the counter!!!). Before the throttle was very sticky and hard to depress (especially going slow). You always had to "kick" it down and release untill the desired speed was achieved.

And I could'nt resist advancing the injection timing a bit - to 14°.

And well - the engine feels a bit more agile and the "soot fart" is smaler. Not a huge difference, but it feels slightly less heavy to drive.

All good!

Cheers,
Jan

[Carlosfandango.]

Nice result @turbodieselweasel, always good to get progress following s bit of effort!
Keep up the good work ?

CFD

[TurboDieselWeasel]

I will. And there is a LOT of work ahead. And to make a start on this big pile of work, I dug out some generators which I will take to work tomorrow with the Taxi.



There's no work needed on the Taxi, but a lot of work on the Taxi. I'm not poor yet, it can wait untill next year.

You don't understand a word? I'll explain soon.

So long,
Jan

[TurboDieselWeasel]

[oukie]

Another taxi?

[TurboDieselWeasel]

I can neither deny nor confirm that...

[TurboDieselWeasel]

So, after about 43.000km the car had it's first breakdown. The starter would engage, but not dissengage again... 1-2 trys and it would work normaly. Began on monday - I was hoping it'll last to the weekend. But no. Yesterday was the day. Luckily it was at the bakery literally 50m from work. So we towed it in and in the evening I got some emergency lift-time.

This piston whingy was stuck. Not totaly, more like sticky. I polished both gliding surfaces, gave it a dab of grease and it did move smoothly again. Coupled to this, the fan shroud had come undone (for the blöödy second time!), which may have also caused unpleasant noises (though I can't tell, last time it happened it just jamed the fan and that was it. No noise.).



A short lesson of anger management after I had forgott to re-attach the engine's earth strap - and all is fine again. And I'm just damn happy that removing the starter doesn't require the sump guard to come off

All in all - I think given the milage and use of that car, 42.000km of driving until the first breakdown is some damn well going! And once again proofs that daily-driving ultra-high milage cars is not neccesarily a pain. Close to 938.000 currently.

Cheers,
Jan

[lukas]

But I guess it´s a lot easier to daily-drive a car with 938.000km if you are able to do almost all of the repairs yourself.

I have to say though, 42.000km without a breakdown with such a high-mileage-car is really impressive.

[TurboDieselWeasel]

Today I took the self leveling suspension for a stress test.

As it happened, there was a eBay auction with zero bids. I read the - short - autction text for like 10 times and couldn't find a fault. So - I bid the obligatory 1 Euro.

5 days later, today, this happened:



One Euro. I kid you not. 153.000km (I saw the car it came from, it adds up). Apparently has some issue with compression. Whatever that means. I don't care. There's so many parts on that engine... Any single part on that is worth more than 1€. I payed the chap a bit more, though.

Was a perfectly, sunny and warm day. And you know it's Christmas soon when you can collect your tree in a convertible



Crazy. Today was like 16°C+... Which was very welcome, as I had to shift a lot of sh!t that collected the last couple of weeks. I didn't have the time to properly store it. Made some room, unloaded the engine (the angled boot opening makes it very easy to lift out an engine with the hydraulic hoist) and put it against the wall. It's got a perfect spotless PAS pump pulley. This will go onto the Coupé, the rusty pulley on that engine bugged me for ages...



Anyway, this realy was a steal - I'll have a look what's wrong with it. If it's not much, I have my low-milage spare engine for the Taxi. 'Cause noone knows how old then engine currently in the Taxi realy is. It's at the VERY least 460.000km.

Current milage: 941.200km
Fluids most used: diesel & screen wash

The oil loss got significantly less after I re-sealed the fuel pump.

That's it.

Cheers,
Jan

[shampooefficient]

Top Ebaying. Can't fault you!

[Carlosfandango.]

Nice find there. Bloody love eBay me.
Well done man.

CFD

[TurboDieselWeasel]

Well, my eBay hunting is quite lucky these days Last week I collected these; 25 4x18W office ceiling lights. For 1€. The chap was very nice and so I payed 20€. Which still is a blöödy steal. They'll be tranforming my little garage into a bright little star



No honestly, I'll be selling most of them on, I need like 3-4 of them... So if someone near needs some - come get some!

Cheers,
Jan

[sciclone]

That's some good work Jan.

I should sit on ebay a bit more, but over here, nearly everyone wants stupid money for rubbish. Plus distances can be a pain. You don't want to bid on something for $2 then have to do a 5000km road trip to collect it.

[TurboDieselWeasel]

So, straight into investigating the potential spare engine. I noticed that there's a rather loud knock & slight resistance when turning the engine. So my first supect was a broken vacuume pump. They'r known to fail. But: nope. When turning the engine very carefull, it went stuck completely. With a bit of inertia, it would make a "bang" noise. Weird. Maybe a stuck lifter!?

So out with the camshaft.



And: engine turns over smooth as silk, no resistance, no bang. Definately an issue with the valve train. It's not the lifters, though. They'r all fine. Valves are all straight as an arrow - from looking at them from the top anyway.



Though since the chain has some considerable stretch (cam timing is about 12° off!) - I suspect it's a slightly bent valve that touched a piston. But before I pull the cylinder head, I want to remove the pre-chambers. Which by the way all have they'r swirl balls present and appear to be undamaged. This was my first assumption; sometimes the loose the little ball/bar that "spreads" the injected fuel. In bad cases they fly around and knock out the bottom of the pre-chamber and in turn cause sometimes severe damage... But this seems not the case here.

I may convert the Taxi to angled injection, and this engine has all the parts on it for that. Pre-chambers, injectors and injector lines. It's best to pull the pre-chambers with the engine as a counter weight. So - I made an adaptor to attach my 4.5kg sliding hammer to the MB extraction tool.





It's a bit long and about as straight as George Michael but will do the job just fine. I hope. Untill monday, damn holydays...

The camshaft is fine, lobes look very good - this will go into the Coupé's engine to finally have a good camshaft in there after my c0ckup with the original camshaft.

Cheers,
Jan

[hairnet]

[TurboDieselWeasel]

Damn those pre-chambers were tight!!



But, my tool adapter did just fine, maybe after all I can weld material thicker than 1mm It took about 5 to 7 strokes for each pre-chamber, they'r pretty gunked up with carbon. It's not difficult to pull the pre-chambers, but exhausting hard work. Cracking open 6 damn tight lock-nuts and then hulking them out... Sliding hammer has 4.5kg - I moved a bit of weight there





I then shoved my USB endoscopic camera into the bores to look for signs of damaged pistons or apparent impact marks from valves - but nothing. Actually, everything looks very clean and free from bad carbon buildup...



^it's a realy lousy camera, but you get the idea... That's part of the "combustion chamber" and valve relief cut on the piston. Also need to take screenshots, as the chinese software doesn't save it's own captured images...

Anyway. I then turned up a bar of POM and a longer bar of aluminium. Both got a M4 thread...



The idea was to create something of a boring-bar for light work, like scraping carbon from a steel pre-chamber. Which sort of worked, but POM tips are way too soft. I should use copper or brass. None of which I currently have at hand...



Though emery cloth does the job just fine, the important bit is to have a lazy-man's spinning machine



So - I still don't know what's wrong with that engine, I guess the next step is to actually remove the cylinder head and pull the valves. I was sure I'd find some shiney impact marks on the pistons, but I didn't. The mysterie remains unsolved...

Stay tuned for the next episode of OM603 Busters

Cheers,
Jan

[william123]

Perhaps the guy sold you his new engine and kept the knackered one by mistake ? Lol