[speeder]

That’s 240D, as in the slowest car ever sold but still hella sweet. 35mpg and eats up the miles in comfort and safety. As most of you already know, I have a car problem and it revolves around saving old Benzes from the trash heap the way that some people rescue dogs. Like Doris Day, actually.

I’ve had a few of these 240D manual cars and they were not only the cheapest car that MB sold at the time but by some measures, the best. They were the lightest and simplest, for starters. Lowest maintenance by far. Best fuel economy and built every bit as well as the top S-class. Definitely a momentum car but a great handling one with the light 4-cylinder engine over the wheels.

I bought this one sight unseen up in Tacoma, WA, a couple of years ago. A classic case of late night CL browsing, it was advertised as having a bad engine but looked clean and in a fairly rare color that I cannot resist, Pastel Beige.

To make a long story long, the guy wasn’t in a big hurry to have it picked up and weeks turned into months into years. After a couple of months, I started paying storage and it kind of became a running joke between us. I simply never had the chance to go and get it. I have a PU and car trailer and occasionally haul cars for people but nothing ever came up going that way. Having it shipped down occurred to me but it’s expensive and I was already fairly upside down in the car with all of the storage. I also had storage issues, in the intervening time I was given 2 free cars and got 3 back that I used to own like boomerangs, (including one of the free ones). Everyone knows that I have this strange “dog rescue” thing with cars and they just find me.

Anyhow, I finally made it up to get the 240D earlier this year and got it over to the shop to evaluate. It was definitely running on less than 4 cylinders but sometimes you get lucky and it’s just a bad injector. Not this time…a compression test revealed one dead cylinder. Ok, I bargained for that when I bought it so off came the head today. Nothing really apparent visually but I did not inspect closely. It’s hard to do the old soapy water and compressed air test on a diesel head because they don’t have a dish in the compression area, they are just flat.

At this point, I’m going to pull the block and tear it down, ridges in cylinders do not seem bad so maybe just a good hone and new rings plus all bearings and seals. The machine shop will measure everything and then I will know for sure. One problem is that repair size pistons are no longer available through normal channels, which is weird since they sold a zillion of these cars worldwide. I found a guy on eBay who has a few but I really need them for my 5-cylinder car that needs rebuilding, so I’m hoping to be able to reuse these ones. The other cylinders had good compression, so I’m thinking it will work out well.

The car is fairly clean, though it does have some paint and body work that has been done on the LH rear quarter at some point. It’s hard to really see them from 1000 miles away and CL of course is not exactly BaT when it comes to photos. The interior is fantastic with a very nice dash, that is what made me buy it in the first place.

I’ll update the thread with progress posts, should not take long. Here was today: