Steve260E
Active Member
I've recently took possession of a 1989 200TE M102, it was won a few weeks ago by a friend on an online raffle for just £6 but it is miles away from roadworthy, so its ended up with me...
Basically it barely runs, very lumpy idle, misfires that gets worse as it warms up and bellows out toxic smelling grey/white smoke and hazes of blue under load in D or R. I have replaced the distributor cap and rotor arm with genuine Bosch parts and that every so slightly improved things but still not good, I noticed the vacuum pipe connected to the ignition advance was perished so I replaced that and again there was a very slight improvement.
Today I took out the spark plugs and they were extremely fouled and coaked up with carbon deposits, not looking healthy at all and having no replacements on hand I cleaned them as best I could and put them back in, again a negligible improvement. I tried pulling each HT lead off while running to try and pin point the misfire but weirdly whichever plug I pulled didn't appear to have any effect on the rhythm of the idle, no change in the misfire and it just remained as lumpy as with all four HT leads in place.
I worked out it must be running extremely rich due to the obvious severe carbon build up on the plugs and upon inspecting the fuel distributor area I noticed the anti tamper ball had been removed from the fuel/air mixture adjustment, I was always told never to mess with this as it was set at the factory but obviously someone has been tinkering and appears to have enriched the mixture to make up for some other issue, I tried a very slight turn towards lean but it simply cut out and refused to start again. Is there anyway of determining the default position for the fuel/air mixture adjustment? And is there any other areas I should be looking into?
Thanks
Steve
Basically it barely runs, very lumpy idle, misfires that gets worse as it warms up and bellows out toxic smelling grey/white smoke and hazes of blue under load in D or R. I have replaced the distributor cap and rotor arm with genuine Bosch parts and that every so slightly improved things but still not good, I noticed the vacuum pipe connected to the ignition advance was perished so I replaced that and again there was a very slight improvement.
Today I took out the spark plugs and they were extremely fouled and coaked up with carbon deposits, not looking healthy at all and having no replacements on hand I cleaned them as best I could and put them back in, again a negligible improvement. I tried pulling each HT lead off while running to try and pin point the misfire but weirdly whichever plug I pulled didn't appear to have any effect on the rhythm of the idle, no change in the misfire and it just remained as lumpy as with all four HT leads in place.
I worked out it must be running extremely rich due to the obvious severe carbon build up on the plugs and upon inspecting the fuel distributor area I noticed the anti tamper ball had been removed from the fuel/air mixture adjustment, I was always told never to mess with this as it was set at the factory but obviously someone has been tinkering and appears to have enriched the mixture to make up for some other issue, I tried a very slight turn towards lean but it simply cut out and refused to start again. Is there anyway of determining the default position for the fuel/air mixture adjustment? And is there any other areas I should be looking into?
Thanks
Steve
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