MBDiesel.net - An Owner's Journey

It only took 16 months, but I actually managed to photograph me doing something with the 280S. Seriously!

You can find it here.

Donna and I had a great time at Old World Automotive this past Saturday. There was a big turnout for the event. I took some photos of the goings-on that can be found here.

I have the photos for the 300TD manual transmission conversion hosted and posted. You can go here to check out the write-up.

The conversion is complete, and the wagon is back home! We'll post pictures next week - I promise!

Flywheel was static balanced to the old automatic flywheel yesterday at Hendrix Auto Machine in Locust Grove, GA, so Wednesday morning at Old World Automotive we installed it, the clutch, and the pressure plate, as well as inserted the pilot bearing into the tail end of the crankshaft. You can see all of these parts in this photo.

Amidst the chaos of the vicious underbelly of a w123 dash lies a symbol of tranquility in the center console - the shifter. We rebuilt and relubed the shifter, as well as the new pedal cluster.

More later...

Day 1 of the manual transmission conversion has come to a close.

Read something kind of thought-provoking about hybrid vehicles today. Since I'm not even remotely sure of where the data is coming from and the possible bias that could be associated with it, I'm not keen on linking to it. The overall point was that on a dust-to-dust analysis of a hybrid vehicle such as the Toyota Prius versus take-your-pick-of-any-large-SUV, the hybrid cost considerably more energy to produce, maintain, and dispose of than it's gas-guzzling counterpart.

Now, I'm a huge proponent of small diesels, most of which we simply don't see here in the US. So reports like this makes me a little happy, because the fuel economy that hybrids tout in textbook theory here in the US are being easily met and exceeded in real-world application elsewhere in the world by diesel-powered cars. Overall, though, I hope that the current generation of hybrids is a stepping stone for even better, more efficient technology in the future. But home-charging systems that rely on the existing power grids are not the solution with the plethora of coal-consuming power plants we currently have. We need a definite alternative, I'm just not sure what form it will take.

Something big could be coming to MBDiesel.net in the very near future. We shall see!

Donna and I had a lot of fun yesterday. Go here to see more.

In other news, we resurrected the 280S yesterday as well. One fuel pump, one water pump, and a coolant flush later and my beloved rust bucket was back on the road! Sorry, no camera work on this one. Neither were particularly bad jobs, and I took my time. Replacing that Pierburg fuel pump transformed the car - granted, the last time I drove it, it wasn't pumping much fuel at all, and wouldn't move unless I was bump-starting the car back into the shop parking lot... ;-)

Been a while since a good update.

The 220 is giving me fits right now, what with it's whole not-starting thing. It's getting air, the fuel pump works like a champ, and I've got spark (at least to the distributor), what I'm lacking is better weather to continue to troubleshoot the issue. My bet is on the cold start function of the carb constantly sending a slug of gas into the intake, or a post-dist cap spark issue. If the weather is nice this weekend, and I'm over my cold, I'll see if I can fool around with that old Stromberg 175 and see what's up.

On the plus side, I did give the car a fuse service on Wednesday. Whoopee!