A few jobs after holidays

[Paul64]

Trusting all had a grear new year evening and the headaches are not too bad today?

For us, Christmas and New Year over, 1300 miles completed and time for another service - 260k km on the W124 300D-24v now and a few extras due to be done.
A superb car for the trip up to the North East of France via Switzerland - on the way back, I think it's the A26 South past Milan, we kept up between 110-115mph for about 25 mins on an empty motorway with great surface and clear skies and still managed 33mpg for the whole journey in mostly negative temps.

During the return journey home, I started to get a buzzing from the gearlever so today during the service, I changed out the bush in the linkage at the bottom of the lever.
As previous posts mention, it was a bit of a pain to fit without a special tool so I made one up with a long bolt and nut, a couple of washers and a short length of copper pipe as suggested but didn't go as far as using epoxy to centralise the pipe. Once that was done, the bush was fitted in 2 mins. The hardest part was getting the cables back in place at the side of the lever....
Hopefully, that will be the end of that as it was more than a little annoying over an 8 hour drive!

I want to replace the sump gasket perhaps this time the oil is drained. There's a small leak that's persisting and getting me told off by the Mrs.... I'm 99% sure it's the sump and have done a few other leaks higher up before picking up a new gasket yesterday.
I had a quick look and it appears that the anti-roll bar has to come off - does the damper have to come off the crank nose too allowing the sump to come forward and down?
Any hints on this job? It looks reasonably straight forward otherwise? Is it worth trying to retighten the bolts before doing the job or not worth the bother??

We had the air vents shut off for a while following an old truck over the mountains and when the system was back in operation, I got a whiff of coolant - could this perhaps be from a failing heat exchanger I wonder? Certainly, the car has been losing a small amount of water over the last few months - a litre since November perhaps - with no obvious signs of external leakage once the new radiator was fitted.
I know the A/C evaps tend to fail sometimes, is this the same with the heater matrix?? If so, I see big job on the cards this year then I suppose??


Looking forward to hearing from anyone up and about this 1st of Jan!


Paul

 

[Paul64]

So, I pressure tested the cooling system to find a leaking seal on the water pump with only a little loss obvious onto the undertray.
Removed and replaced with a new pump (109 Euro with deposit of 20 Euro) - Hylomar on the faces and yes, I had to remove the timing plate to allow access though not the dipstick tube in this case.
I just set the pin on the crankshaft wheel, which was almost in line anyway. to the pointer and didn't move the crank during the job.
I noticed a little corrosion in the pump housing so cleaned that back and will make sure the correct ratio of coolant is in there this time.
Come to think of it, the agent asked if I wanted the housing too - a little excessive I thought but perhaps it's not so uncommon??

I cleaned up the pump retaining bolts with a thread chaser and the same with the holes in the pump casing. Some were pretty manky but all went in nicely after with a coating of grease.
No flexi pipe from the bottom of the drain on the pump was offered in the kit and the local agent said nobody bought it so neither did I!
Also to be replaced is the tensioner pulley - it's noisy when you spin it off the car.

I took off the alternator whilst the front of the engine was in bits and cleaned it up with Gunk and washed it off - the voltage output is fine and I think the bearings are OK so will replace that tomorrow when it's dried out.

The new bushing in the gear change linkage did the trick; in the words of The Tremelos, Silence is Golden. Relatively speaking in a W124 diesel of course.......

Paul