The year 2021 ended in disappointment following the death of Betty White. However, 2021 is still not complete with I not yet. The evil ex-lover has another victim in mind to take before she loses her job forever. That victim: My Benz89.
I can already hear your fingers creaking when you warm them to delete me in the comments with, “Well, that’s what you get when you buy a used Benz.” Yeah I get it. I bought a Mercedes as a project car. I should have been ashamed with my starry eyes believing that would be anything but a problem. But here she is, and in my garage with wheels (I’ll explain later in this story), so for the rest of us, let me lament and at least give give you a more solid status update.
Back to December 31st.
Up until the last day of 2021, I’ve been enjoying the little essentials of my 1989 Mercedes-Benz 190E like coolant leaks, checking and replacing relays, installing new headlight bulbs , fix my broken wiper motor – little things – before my work will eventually lead to engine tearing. I also found some money (the whole seven dollars!), a screwdriver got lost, and my dogs decided to hang out and thought it was the new “go” car now.
I honestly believe that I at least have some good reason for my decision to start small. Until that day, there hadn’t been a solid reason to open up to her. Sure, the engine was oiled (and it looked like it had been sprayed a bit, for a while), but she ran, and I can take her out for a 25-minute drive and bring her home with no problem. So with blind confidence, I felt maybe she was ready to take me into town and finally get the fit I’d been waiting for.
Not surprisingly to you, this drive has largely been unsuccessful. Wait. Let me retract that. I went to the shop where I had an appointment for the alignment with no problems. My first mistake was shutting down the engine so it wouldn’t keep running and burping whatever it was putting into the air. I signed up, started her up, switched to driving to pull her forward and she stalled.
Agree. Please try again. Begin. Change. Prevent. Begin. Change. Prevent. Begin. Begin? Begin? Begin?
I’m in line to get into the store now, so with the help of two mechanics we pushed the Baby Benz into the parking lot so I could try to fix the problem (or technically) going on. Still new to the diagnosis, I’ve tried some of my own but called my husband (who actually took the shop class in high school… smart guy) and talk through some other approach over the phone.
One thing I have yet to try is starting the car in neutral mode. You see, Last week, the car stalled while I was backing the Benz into the garage. We’ve found that if we start the car in neutral and give her a little throttle, sometimes she’ll be cooperative enough to reverse or steer and move the car. Determining it could be a fuel or link shifting issue, we’ll look into it later, but it’s worked enough for now.
This was a fun little game that I had to play to get her started. I pushed her back, switched to neutral, and with whatever bit of karma I threw into the universe that day, used it to help her start over, and then tried really hard not to. blocking my whole way home. Here’s me just slowing down really early to hopefully pass the lights when they turn green.
Ten miles later – only nine miles from home – she took her last breath, and stopped while I slowed down in front of the light. No warning lights are on or flashing. Not much of a thrill. She just died. So I put on my flashlight and opened the hood (which is what you usually do when your car stalls on the road) and sat in the middle of the road about 50 feet from the intersection.
Two men stopped to help me push her back down the street, to turn into the square for a parking lot, so I wasn’t right at the traffic/crossroads. There, I awaited the arrival of my husband with the tools so we could coax her back to life and bring her home.
Nothing we tried worked. She will crank but didn’t start and then will not crank. We tested a few things before we gave in and dragged her home. The whole adventure lasted three hours.
Our tow truck guy was polite enough to unload the Benz straight into the garage, and that’s where she’s been since winter began. It’s just too cold to try and try any of these garage jobs. And my garage doesn’t currently have the means to properly warm it, so here we are.
As far as my list of potential problems goes, it now includes gearshift and/or transmission linkage, coolant leaks (a bug that I patched decided to flare up after this adventure), head gasket problems and potential fuel injection problems – and that’s just what i noticed almost two months ago!
Luckily, temperatures are warming up a bit in Michigan, so we’re getting the garage ready in favor of tearing this thing up. Yesterday, we took the car dolls we bought at Harbor Freight over the weekend and used them to move her to the other side of the garage to make our childhood toys easy. take a little more. I explain more about the dolls and movement in this video:
Now we have to wait a little longer for Michigan to thaw, and with it the garage and this shabby car.
