They Said it Can't be Fixed - A Journey to the Inside of a Mercedes Bluetec

Before closing it up, I decided that I would also go ahead and change the serpentine belt and tensioner.  I've had the tensioner on the shelf for a while mainly because the bolt head that's cast into the OEM tensioner has gotten all chewed up and is really hard to actuate to remove and install the belt.  The belt has definitely been slowly degrading and leaving powdered rubber everywhere.  I'm pretty sure that either the timing cover, the front main seal, or both are leaking and it's landing right on the belt.  I should fix that leak.  But for now, I'll just prophylactically replace the belt.

New belt and tensioner:
 

Old belt:

Old tensioner:

It's not completely awful, and it's only got about 15k-20k miles on it, but I'd rather not have it let go.  I'm mildly curious what they'd charge me to do the main seal, but I suspect I'd be looking at over a grand for that.

These have actual functional ram air intake. Cold air & road grime goes straight to the filter boxes, without any screens, traps or hot air crap. Dirty filters means everything is working.

wae said:

I went ahead and took care of the air filters.  I think that perhaps I have gotten my money's worth out of them now, though.

Oh, that's not so bad, right?  Flip it over for the horror show:

I'm a little bit surprised at the sheer number of insects in there.

I took it up to the dealer this morning to have them look at the exhaust leak.  I was told that there is a bolt broken off on the turbo.  They washed the car and sent me home telling me that it was covered, they would order the part, and let me know when it comes in.

When I was basically almost all the way back home when it occurred to me that it seemed awfully weird that they need to order in a bolt.  I wonder if their plan is to replace the whole turbo.  Again.

wae said:

When I was basically almost all the way back home when it occurred to me that it seemed awfully weird that they need to order in a bolt.  I wonder if their plan is to replace the whole turbo.  Again.

Hopefully it's just some sort of weird and exotic bolt - nickle iron, wavey, or something else to make it stay torqued at high temperatures.

I popped a new fuel filter on last night.  I think this might actually fix the fuel leak.  The back side of the filter looked more like this:

Fingers crossed that fixes it 

MadScientistMatt said:

wae said:

When I was basically almost all the way back home when it occurred to me that it seemed awfully weird that they need to order in a bolt.  I wonder if their plan is to replace the whole turbo.  Again.

Hopefully it's just some sort of weird and exotic bolt - nickle iron, wavey, or something else to make it stay torqued at high temperatures.

Confirmed this morning: they're putting another new turbo on the thing.  Wyler wouldn't submit it for warranty coverage for one turbo and MB Cincy has now done it for two!

This thing stays broker than plate glass in a 70s action flick. 
 

LOL

MadScientistMatt said:

wae said:

When I was basically almost all the way back home when it occurred to me that it seemed awfully weird that they need to order in a bolt.  I wonder if their plan is to replace the whole turbo.  Again.

Hopefully it's just some sort of weird and exotic bolt - nickle iron, wavey, or something else to make it stay torqued at high temperatures.

They very much are very fancy high temperature rated fasteners and you have to remove the turbo for access to extract it... and it probably ain't coming out without a major fight, meaning damaged threads in the turbo.

Of course, they are inverted Torx, but this is a godsend if you have ever tried to insert a bolt on a socket on an extension way back where you can't see what you are doing.  They don't fall out of sockets the way normal hex bolts do.

Picked it up this morning and things are running way more betterer.  The turbo sound is gone, it doesn't make my eyes water a little, and the low-end grunt is back.  I'm guessing that since it's running so much better, the broken bolt must have been in the collector such that exhaust pressure was bleeding off before the turbo.  If the exhaust was open post-turbo, it would make a literal hot mess under the hood and smell and sound bad, but I wouldn't think that would affect performance.

Quick, sell it!

(mostly kidding)

In reply to Lof8 - Andy :

In all honesty, I'm kind of thinking that what I want is an Armada or QX80 for slightly greater towing capacity and a simple naturally-aspirated gas V8.

In reply to wae :

Do it.  Quickly.  Before anything else breaks.

Yeah, at this point, I think we can confidently say that they were right.   It cannot, in fact, be fixed.  

But that's all on their engineering ability, not on your mechanical :)

Sell it quick!

Indy - Guy said:

In reply to wae :

Do it.  Quickly.  Before everything else breaks.

FTFY

No!

If Wae bails on this, who will I commiserate with?

Certainly not the huffy stuffy MB enthusiasts on their forums, who don't actually work on the vehicles. 

BTW, I will now curse my vehicle by saying it's been.... like 6 months since the last MIL, which was bad ABS sensors. So tomorrow the tranny will fall out of it.

In reply to FJ40Jim :

MB certainly seems to be trying for the smorgasbord of failure modes...

We made it to Gainesville last night:

The MPG is a little optimistic, but calculating it myself, I came up with about 18mpg.  Not bad for 70mph pulling a trailer.

Drove the ML350 & towed the camper to PittRace last weekend for 24HL. On the way there, while pulling hard up a long grade, the CEL came on & stayed on. Vehicle continued to run fine, as usually happens. Scan tool came up with the usual "Undefined" code. Cleared the code at track. Drove home with no CEL.... OK, whatever. I'll keep driving this thing as long as it keeps running.

On the plus side, got 14MPG coming home because I didn't drive like a racer, got that outta my system at the track.

I made the mistake of throwing away my extra empty Liquimoly oil jug and the oil extractor only holds 7 liters.  So today's oil change will be extra messy since I need to dump a couple liters in a drain pan before finishing the job.

But other than that, just a normal oil change.  Oil looks good and the filter is clean.  That one fuel line still seems to have a little leak in it, though.  Which is annoying.  I'll see about getting a new bit of hose and replacing it next week sometime.

Junkyard update: the PnP in Columbus shows a 2008 E320 Bluetec in the yard!  I was there for half price holiday weekend yesterday, but was disappointed to find the entire engine was gone, a long with exhaust DPF/cats, ECU, BCU, radio, etc. 

On the plus side, they have an intact Volvo 244 Diesel, which coughed up a good intake manifold and PS pump& bracketry for my other turbodiesel project.

TPMS saved my wife's life yesterday.

She took off to go on 40-50 mile trip up the highway @ 60MPH. Made to the end of our little street and message center turned red & said "Check tire pressures!". Indicated pass rear was down to 10#, from 32.

Pulled up in front of the shop, verified tire was 11psi per my digital gauge. Started looking around, saw a nail in the middle of the tread. She sat in the car while I pulled out the nail, which was actually broken off of a longer rod, not a nail at all. It was an ideal candidate for string repair, so I did that. Let it cure for a couple minutes, reinflated tire, verified no bubbles, sent her on her way. I had her leave the TPMS up on display and she said it went from 31 to 34 while she drove, matching the other tires. I'm tickled that I fixed a $300 19" tire in less than 10 minutes for less than 1 US Dollhair.

Winning!

That's winning for sure!  Having a TPMS system like that is actually pretty helpful.  What isn't helpful is the one in my wife's Mazda5 - That one just gives you a light on the cluster that there is at least one tire that is somewhere below not-low.  The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.

I don't leave home without my plug kit! 

wae said:

I don't leave home without my plug kit! 

Hmm. My truck does not have a spare tire because the DEF tank fills some of the spare tire well. The factory spec run-flats have been replaced with conventional tires, because RFTs sucketh. A collapsible compact spare and the 12V compressor to inflate it was sourced from an R350 in the JY, so I'm covered in an emergency. But a plug kit would fit in the rear basement next to the compressor. I think you've talked me into talking myself into adding the stabby plug kit. Thanks!

Not quite 3 months later and it's about time for another oil change.  The oil is on the way and should be here in time for me to get that done before heading to West Virginia this weekend for the next rallycross.  The last one was up at Joe's Speedway and getting there and back took basically one tank of fuel at 19.8mpg.  I wasn't in a hurry, so I was only doing about 68mph on the highway which got me about a 1.5mpg bump.  This past weekend, we took it down to McKee, KY to volunteer for the Boone Forest Rally and it worked out really well for that.  It was pretty neat to get it onto the gravel roads and drive it down a couple of the rally stages on our way to our work assignments.  For the second day, we even had a nice little spot to set up in at the flying finish.  We were going to park it a little differently so that we could put out the canopy, but as it happened the trees gave us all the shade we needed!

It's just under about 164k on the odometer right now and I've been starting to plan out what to do once the transmission goes out.  My first thought was to go ahead and get it sold/traded in now while it's still running and replace it.  Contenders so far have been the Lexus GX460, Infiniti QX80, Armada, an x166 GLS550, 4Runner, or...  something.  I did some preliminary shopping and came close to buying a GX460, but the problem that I've run in to is that the trade-in value is kind of low, apparently.  Since we don't have any immediate need to get rid of it, we started just making our "car payment" to a high-interest savings account and once we get to the point where replacing it moves into the "immediate need" category, we can use whatever loose change we'd get for whatever is left along with the cash saved up as the down payment instead of a trade-in.  If the truck lasts at least 4 more months, we'll come out ahead on that deal and on top of that it seems like used car pricing is trending down a little bit as well.

But that brings me to the current dilemma:  Tires.

I had new tires put on way back in 2017 at around 105k miles, give or take 5k miles.  They're not quite down to the wear bars yet, but we're starting to get close.  It seems kind of crazy to go and spend $1200-1400 on a set of tires - the math says that if I'm gambling on the transmission kicking the bucket before 200k, I'd be better off applying that $1,200 towards the replacement.  If I did that right now, then the car would only have to last 2 more months in order to be ahead of the trade-in value and these tires will more than likely get me through at least 60 more days.  I am gambling, though, so it's also possible that I could put tires on it now and get another 2 years out of it.  In which case, I'm way ahead.  Flip side, the driver's seat is getting pretty torn up and there is something rattling a little bit in the front suspension that should probably be looked at.  And it wouldn't suck to replace or fix the fender I banged up.  So that's a little more money to throw at it which would be totally worth it if it's going to last another couple years.  I'm leaning towards seeing if I can find a decent set of used tires that I could have put on to maybe find a bit of a compromise solution.  The problem, really, is that I really like driving it, I just don't know if I can trust it!