Hi all--
I'm new here, and while not a regular DIYer, I'm not afraid to tackle a job if have the tools, time, and I can acquire the knowledge. So forgive me if this should have gone into another forum; if it should have, I'd be grateful to get pointed in the right direction. Hopefully it'll turn out entertaining enough that it'll be worth the read. And there are some actual questions after that tale is told.
I've got a 99 E240 that we picked up cheep; it most serves as my station car. But having been out of work for a while it's been sitting at home more than being on the road.
A while ago my wife said she thought the brakes sounded funny, although the garage couldn't find anything wrong. Then, the ASR, ABS, and BAS lights started coming on, and these systems obviously stopped working. So we figured that we had another trip to the garage in our future.
Now, some time after that, I noticed a pile of shredded newspaper in the right-hand well in the boot. I suspected a mouse had gotten in there, probably attracted by the chicken feed that occasionally spends a few days in there before going into storage. One more thing to sort out, I figured.
Then, I started getting occasional strange behaviour from the car when I'd lock it with the remote-- the car would lock, but the parking lights would flash rapidly as if the alarm was going off. Unlocking and relocking would clear it. Now it looked like a mysterious electrical problem was creeping into the mix.
The last straw was when the remote boot release stopped working, both from the fob as well as from the console switch (whose light had gone out). This seemed like a fuse, so I started hunting for fuse boxes.
I checked the one at the end of the dash, and then the one under the bonnet, which then informed me that there was a third (really?) under the rear seat. When I pulled the seat up, I saw that some of the padding looked kinda chewed up. More interesting was when i had the seat up and I hit the boot unlock button on the fob, something that sounded an awful lot like an air pump kicked on; it was coming from a black device under the right side read seat, which looked similar to the air pump that drove the self-leveling suspension in my wife's old BMW E39 estate. There was a loud hissing that accompanied the running of the pump, but assumed that was normal since I had never even heard the pump before.
Up to now, I hadn't been able to get into the boot (embarrassing truth: I had never used the mechanical key before, and not only did it not want to turn in the lock, but when it did the boot still didn't open. It wasn't until I found someone else on this forum who had a similar problem did I find the right combination of turning and pushing). When I finally did, I figured it was time to clean out the shredded paper and start looking for a broken wire or other obvious fault.
It was when I removed the boot floor that I found the real surprise-- all the paper above was just a prelude. This industrious mouse had shredded and pulled big strips of paper down below the deck and built an impressive nest in the spare tire. By the smell I could tell it had been down there a while (amazing that I could smell it before), and so it was clear that it had to be cleared out. So I wadded up the nest into a ball and shoved it into a garbage bag.
And there he was.
The little creep was staring at me from an opening in the spare, all beady eyes and twitching whiskers. I covered the only escape hole I could see and shouted for the wife to come and bring some gloves to grab him (she actually has mad skills when it comes to grabbing mice with her hands, as it happens). But when I lifted the spare so she could get at him, he actually jumped high enough to make it back into the side well and disappeared somewhere under the liner.
I thought I'd perhaps catch him in the back of the car, thinking that maybe he ran into that part thinking there was suitable refuge, so I went back to the already removed back seat and started rooting under the shredded padding. It was at this point I looked more closely at the yellow lines coming from the pump-like thing, where I then noticed that one of the lines had be gnawed through completely, and another chewed enough that it would no longer hold any air. This explained the hissing that I heard when I'd hit the boot release on the key fob.
I now have an E240 whose back half is torn up and dotted with almond-butter-baited mousetraps, although I can at least open the boot. But that now leads me to my questions (finally):
- What is that thing under the rear seat, and why is it running when I try to open the boot?
- Could this the above device and the gnawed air lines have anything to do with the ASR, ABS, BAS system that is malfunctioning?
- Given that the inside boot release control not only doesn't work but doesn't have a power light, am I going to have to look for gnawed wires as well?
- Is this going to be stupid money to get the car back in shape?
- Can anyone recommend a good and reasonable Merc mechanic in Herts, preferably in the area of Stevenage/Letchworth/Baldock? Cambridge is also a possibility as I'm up there periodically.
Once you've stopped laughing and showing this to your partner, any help you can provide will be appreciated ;-)
I'm new here, and while not a regular DIYer, I'm not afraid to tackle a job if have the tools, time, and I can acquire the knowledge. So forgive me if this should have gone into another forum; if it should have, I'd be grateful to get pointed in the right direction. Hopefully it'll turn out entertaining enough that it'll be worth the read. And there are some actual questions after that tale is told.
I've got a 99 E240 that we picked up cheep; it most serves as my station car. But having been out of work for a while it's been sitting at home more than being on the road.
A while ago my wife said she thought the brakes sounded funny, although the garage couldn't find anything wrong. Then, the ASR, ABS, and BAS lights started coming on, and these systems obviously stopped working. So we figured that we had another trip to the garage in our future.
Now, some time after that, I noticed a pile of shredded newspaper in the right-hand well in the boot. I suspected a mouse had gotten in there, probably attracted by the chicken feed that occasionally spends a few days in there before going into storage. One more thing to sort out, I figured.
Then, I started getting occasional strange behaviour from the car when I'd lock it with the remote-- the car would lock, but the parking lights would flash rapidly as if the alarm was going off. Unlocking and relocking would clear it. Now it looked like a mysterious electrical problem was creeping into the mix.
The last straw was when the remote boot release stopped working, both from the fob as well as from the console switch (whose light had gone out). This seemed like a fuse, so I started hunting for fuse boxes.
I checked the one at the end of the dash, and then the one under the bonnet, which then informed me that there was a third (really?) under the rear seat. When I pulled the seat up, I saw that some of the padding looked kinda chewed up. More interesting was when i had the seat up and I hit the boot unlock button on the fob, something that sounded an awful lot like an air pump kicked on; it was coming from a black device under the right side read seat, which looked similar to the air pump that drove the self-leveling suspension in my wife's old BMW E39 estate. There was a loud hissing that accompanied the running of the pump, but assumed that was normal since I had never even heard the pump before.
Up to now, I hadn't been able to get into the boot (embarrassing truth: I had never used the mechanical key before, and not only did it not want to turn in the lock, but when it did the boot still didn't open. It wasn't until I found someone else on this forum who had a similar problem did I find the right combination of turning and pushing). When I finally did, I figured it was time to clean out the shredded paper and start looking for a broken wire or other obvious fault.
It was when I removed the boot floor that I found the real surprise-- all the paper above was just a prelude. This industrious mouse had shredded and pulled big strips of paper down below the deck and built an impressive nest in the spare tire. By the smell I could tell it had been down there a while (amazing that I could smell it before), and so it was clear that it had to be cleared out. So I wadded up the nest into a ball and shoved it into a garbage bag.
And there he was.
The little creep was staring at me from an opening in the spare, all beady eyes and twitching whiskers. I covered the only escape hole I could see and shouted for the wife to come and bring some gloves to grab him (she actually has mad skills when it comes to grabbing mice with her hands, as it happens). But when I lifted the spare so she could get at him, he actually jumped high enough to make it back into the side well and disappeared somewhere under the liner.
I thought I'd perhaps catch him in the back of the car, thinking that maybe he ran into that part thinking there was suitable refuge, so I went back to the already removed back seat and started rooting under the shredded padding. It was at this point I looked more closely at the yellow lines coming from the pump-like thing, where I then noticed that one of the lines had be gnawed through completely, and another chewed enough that it would no longer hold any air. This explained the hissing that I heard when I'd hit the boot release on the key fob.
I now have an E240 whose back half is torn up and dotted with almond-butter-baited mousetraps, although I can at least open the boot. But that now leads me to my questions (finally):
- What is that thing under the rear seat, and why is it running when I try to open the boot?
- Could this the above device and the gnawed air lines have anything to do with the ASR, ABS, BAS system that is malfunctioning?
- Given that the inside boot release control not only doesn't work but doesn't have a power light, am I going to have to look for gnawed wires as well?
- Is this going to be stupid money to get the car back in shape?
- Can anyone recommend a good and reasonable Merc mechanic in Herts, preferably in the area of Stevenage/Letchworth/Baldock? Cambridge is also a possibility as I'm up there periodically.
Once you've stopped laughing and showing this to your partner, any help you can provide will be appreciated ;-)
