Friday, April 8, 2011

Top End Rebuild - Day 2

Spent about 3hours on the car today. You would think that being German made there would be a little more logic to how things are designed and laid out in the engine bay but you would be wrong. Its just as convoluted, if not more so, than working on the XJ12.

The whole intake manifold / induction system is stupidly over complex. There are 100s of fittings for the most trivial things. The throttle linkage alone has about 30 components to it on the 560SEL. Compared to less than 5 pieces for the XJ12.

I wanted to have removed the intake manifold by today but there was just so much fettling to remove all the injection fuel lines that I didn't get that far. I loosened up all the intake manifold bolts so hopefully it will be out by Day 3.

The official Mercedes Workshop Manual is the dumbest service manual you will ever see. "Remove Intake Manifold" is one step in the head gasket R&R job (01-415) - I've spent 2 days removing the bloody intake manifold! You only really figure out the order in which to remove things once you get down to it. Lots of trial and error. Eg. I made the mistake of removing the injector retention bracket on Cylinder #7 before removing the fuel line and spent about half an hour correcting my mistake.

Finding parts numbers for all these vacuum fittings is turning out to be a little problematic. The dealership's parts catalogue is really ambiguous. Order the wrong part and you have to pay for it. Oh and that silly 20cm worth of metal fuel line I busted on Day 1, costs $250 from the dealer!

Some part of the throttle linkage was covering one of the intake manifold bolts. Couldn't figure out how to remove it properly, so I just bent that piece upwards. Hopefully I'm not going to get into trouble for this. It only had some wires grounded on it, so it shouldn't be a problem.









Look at how stupidly they have routed this vacuum line - under the fuel injection retention bracket. No wonder they are all brittle and breaking apart.



Found a leaf on the intake manifold. How did that get there!














Doesn't look like much progress, but I'm exhausted.

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