Before Pierre arrived, he jokingly said that his visit would be “the worst three days of your life.” (He didn’t know that I’ve been going to Louisville in December for RVIA for eight years.) He threatened ten hour days, lots of grime, and him barking orders at me all day long.
Ho-hum. If that’s the worst he threw at me it would be a cakewalk. And indeed it was on Friday. I spent much of my time scrubbing decades of grime off old parts in a tub full of black greasy water, I kept the carport organized, hauled trash, handed Pierre tools, and cleaned up spills. It was kind of like being a dishwasher in a busy restaurant, only things were dirtier. So this was no big deal.
On Saturday things got a little more challenging. We are having what is described in Tucson as a “stormy weekend,” meaning that the temperatures plummeted to the 40s overnight, and we had light & scattered rain showers for a few hours in the morning. Not too bad considering what’s happening in other parts of the country, and it was just enough for me to switch to long pants, a sweatshirt, and a wool cap until things warmed up. We started promptly at 7 a.m., while the sky was still gray and dim, and plunged right into it—literally. I can say with certainty, there’s nothing like cleaning brake parts with a toothbrush in cold black water at 8 a.m.
I was chilly, but Pierre was in his element. Relentlessly cheery, this 6 foot-4 inch dude wedged himself under the car on the bare concrete and happily spent the morning hammering away at reluctant suspension parts. He replaced the ball joints, the brake rotors, re-packed the wheelbearings, the flexible brake lines, and the often-overlooked “brake sensor harness cables.” Occasionally he put me on something easy like installing the new brake pads.
Around 9:30 we were joined by Nicholas, a fellow 300D owner who I had met through an online Benz forum. This led to the highlight of the day for us, when Pierre taught us how to adjust the valves on the engine. Nicholas and I took turns getting the feel of each valve. I had a really hard time with this, because it’s hard for me to get my head around spatial orientation things sometimes. Once I could visualize the setup of tappet-nut-nut-spring, it got a lot easier. We felt good enough about our skills by the end that Nicholas and I vowed to get together later and do the valve adjustment on Nicholas’s 300D without our benevolent teacher to bail us out.
Even though I’ve griped about the weather, we couldn’t have picked a better time to do this job. A week ago we would have been sweating in 95 degree afternoons. For this kind of work, it’s nicer to have to wear a cap for a few hours until things warm up, than to be dripping sweat all day. And of course, being Tucson, it was sunny and pleasant for the rest of the afternoon.
Another bit of good timing: Monday is our local semi-annual “brush & bulky” trash pickup day, when the city comes around to pick up almost anything that won’t fit in a regular trash barrel. Everyone piles up all their stuff on the curbside, and then in the days before the official pickup, guys in beat-up old pickup trucks cruise the neighborhoods looking for free stuff. Some of them pick up old furniture for their homes, others collect scrap metal, still other seem to be looking for overlooked treasures to bring to “Antiques Roadshow.” (Good luck with that.) So getting rid of a radiator, four rusty brake rotors, and a water pump was easy as pie. I piled it all on the curb and it was gone a few hours later. Nicholas took the air conditioning compressor, as it was still working and his doesn’t.
I estimated that in this three-day automotive orgy plus the month of work I’ve done already, we’d be resolving about two years worth of sorting-out tasks. Normally you pace yourself when sorting out a car, because it’s expensive and because it takes a while to figure everything out. This approach with Pierre is unusual but I think it makes sense for a car that is basically sound, and an owner who wants to be intimately involved in the process. The downside of doing it all in three days is that one little glitch can really screw up the plan. That’s the thing I’ve been fearing throughout the two days we’ve been working on the car.
We were lucky until about 4 p.m. Saturday. We’d made a few runs to the local autoparts stores to get minor supplies and tools, which is par for the course. But then disaster struck. Pierre had disassembled a difficult part, an oil drain tube that runs down from the turbocharger to the oil pan. This tube was leaking oil, so I had ordered a special grommet and two rubber O-rings specifically for it. They were shipped from a Mercedes dealer in California, and each plastic package was labeled exactly as we expected: Seal, turbocharger oil return, 1984 Mercedes 300D. These silly little rubber circles cost $0.94 each, which is probably ten times what they cost to make, but when you need them you’ll pay whatever it takes (and they know it).
Except when they’re wrong. After cutting off the old O-rings, we discovered that they’d shipped us the wrong ones. And as quick as that, we were dead in the water. Without the proper rings we couldn’t reassemble. The system would leak oil like an old airplane radial engine. That meant our other jobs scheduled for Sunday couldn’t be completed either, since they required a running engine. We were completely screwed.
This is where you find out what your mechanic is made of. Pierre didn’t disappoint. First, he committed that if we couldn’t get this engine back together, he would personally harass certain senior management of the company who sold us the part until they paid for the local Mercedes dealer to fix it next week. Then, he told me that were going O-ring shopping. And so we spent the next hour or so digging through O-rings at various hardware and autoparts stores in an attempt to find one that was close enough to do the job.
That’s how we ended up working in the dark at 5:45, with the air temperature once again plummeting, when we should have been done for the day and taking hot showers. We found some O-rings that might work, bought a bunch of them in case we had to double them up, and Pierre meticulously tested them on the drain tube until he was satisfied they would work. I think he had to do that before he could relax and eat dinner with us in the house, just to know that the job was going to be OK.
Other than that it was a great day. We did a complete four-wheel brake & bearing job including the parking brakes, adjusted the valves, replaced both engine mounts, an oil change, and replaced the rear shock absorbers. The list on the wall is getting considerably shorter. Today won’t be completely easy, as we’ve still got some messy and time-consuming tasks on the list, but if it goes well we will have time to put the wheels back on and the seats back in, and take her out for a test drive. It’s 6:45 a.m. now, and time for me to get ready to meet Pierre in the carport.