So, I’ve been chipping away at this job as time allows and of course questioning the wisdom of wrenching on old cars at my advancing age. My body has been sore from wrestling with it at times.
What confirms my decision to do it, (besides the enormous amount of dough I’d spend to have someone else competent do all of this), is the horrible or neglectful previous work I’m discovering. Just so much wrong done by other shops…it’s pathetic. Good work is hard to find.
I paid a MB specialist with a lot of clientele in NC do look it over and do some basic work for me before I flew to get it and I might as well have skipped that. One of the things I paid them for was a valve adjustment which I decided to check now that I have it back home. Two of the 10 valves were adjusted properly or close, all of the rest were off by a lot and mostly tight. The fuel injector overflow hose they installed was inferior quality and leaked profusely on the way home. Always fun to fix your car on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere with no tools.
Here is the latest discovery, someone put brake pads on it that are amazingly wrong. I already knew that they were not correct MB pads by the lack of dust and pedal feel but they are the wrong size!! They fit in the calipers but they are close to 10mm shy of the correct dimension for the rotor, I discovered this by noticing that the wear pattern did not cover the entire swept area of rotor. Check it out:
Here is a photo of a correct pad next to what was installed:
I need to look through the receipts but I’m fairly certain that a shop installed these. It would be one thing if some yahoo in a small town who never works on German cars ordered them from Carquest but I think that the MB “specialist” did it. Like I said, pathetic. When it comes to maintenance on my vehicles, there is short list of shops that I trust.