RE: Shed of the Week: Mercedes-Benz S500

[Uncle Dicky]

BigBen said:

Totally and utterly the best £400 you will ever spend if you are going to own a car like this. Mine has paid for itself so many times with my W220 and previous R230 and various other Mercs.

I'm glad to hear it. Some years ago I got a bit of a reputation among friends and acquaintances of being a dab hand at diagnosing diesel turbo car issues - usually Fords. Many were getting stung at main stealers and even specialists for new injectors when their car actually had clogged inlet manifolds - arterial clag like a 60 year old Scotsman. My solution was to buy a new set of overalls, put on a chemical filter mask, buy 10 cans of carb cleaner, a bottle brush and about 4 miles of blue paper towels, remove the entire inlet system and scrub it inside and out - you cannot burn out the clag on a Ford manifold because they are plastic. When finished, everything used - the overalls, the paper, the bottle brushes, the rags everything got binned or burned (cut up and used for firelighting in the winter) - the toxic mixture of horror was enough to put me off working on diesel cars for a lifetime.
Anyway, usually there was an injector or two to replace and the cost of new ones was eye watering so I bought the software to allow me to reprogram the injectors. Used to charge cost and a few beers but kept these cars on the roads long after the owners had lost patience after multiple high cost repair jobs.

These days, if you're going to run a modern older car and you don't want to do bangernomics (£1500 is a bit high for bangernomics - imho) then you need the software, it's essential - more so than a torque wrench IMHO because you can always buy a torque wrench - what's more there's no point in just being able to diagnose and clear codes, if you are going to do the servicing yourself, you need to be able to talk to the car and you need to learn how to do so without screwing it.
The alternative is to have deep pockets and I wouldn't be taking on a car like this without doing the servicing and repairs myself - it's the only way I can afford to run one with the constrained budget.