Mercedes 190E 2.5-16 | PH Fleet
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, Mike's 190E is in considerably more pieces than when he last wrote about it
When I last wrote about the 190E in the winter it was about to go back on the road after a long and wallet-bruising restoration - and I was looking forward to getting behind the wheel for the first time in four years. The fact there's been radio silence since then indicates that things didn't go quite according to plan.
It was all so close. I'd arranged a time for collection, paid the bill, sorted tax and insurance - even persuaded my dad to drive me the 50 miles from home to Autoclass in Milton Keynes, the well-respected specialist which has looked after both the 2.5 and several other elderly Mercs for me over the years.
Then at about 5:29 on the evening before D-Day the phone rang. It was Autoclass proprietor James Tait: the Merc had just been taken for its final road test and was sounding like a drunken firing squad under load, so the collection was delayed until they could work out what was wrong with it.
Things escalated slowly as I got on with my summer. The Cosworth-developed 2.5-16 is pretty rare groove, so even finding parts like an ignition coil to swap out took a fair amount of time. Autoclass gradually worked through the obvious failure points - including some of the obscure electrical borkage the Cossie Mercs are known for - only to discover that none of it cured the car. Meaning that the issue was almost certainly inside the engine, possibly a sticking valve. Could they take the cylinder head off?
Like a gambler trying to turn his last £5 into the mortgage payment, I didn't seem to have much choice at this point - short of stuffing and mounting the Merc in a display case. The good news was that the freshly removed head turned out to be fine. The considerably less good was clear evidence of scoring in the cylinder bores, which shouldn't have been causing the sometimes rough-running, but at least we'd found something that was definitely wrong.
So the engine has been removed and sent to a specialist for further diagnosis; it looks like it has already had an overbore so the critical question is whether it can manage another. Six months on I'm actually less close to getting my car than I was last time. I'm not blaming Autoclass for any of this: they know old Mercs as well as anyone. But obscure cars tend to have obscure problems.
I also definitely shouldn't have been so smug about the rising values of the Cosworth 190Es last time. There are going to be several more hefty bills before I'm reunitied with mine again.
FACT SHEET
Car: 1990 Mercedes 190E 2.5-16
Run by: Mike Duff
Bought: May 2012
Mileage at purchase: 157,000
Mileage now: 161,000 (!)
Last month at a glance: ££££
Previous reports:
AutoClass look after my Mercs, more recently the 600 SEL and 500 SL, and I am pretty sure I saw this in there the last few times I visited!
They really do know their old Mercs, but some of these rarer cars do throw up issues now and then which even the experts find difficult to resolve.
My 600 will be going there in a few weeks, as it has developed a misfire and is cutting out. Just hope is isn't the dreaded (and expensive) engine wiring loom.
Look forward to reading more about the Cosworth once it is back on the road.
Proper touring car pedigree, lovely rwd handling and a dogleg gearbox. I also think the engine in these was better than the S14 in the M3.
My old man suffered a snapped timing chaining on his which was a weak point on the earlier cars if not done religiously on time. I don't remember the full details but even back then parts where hard to find, I remember him having to order parts from Germany and wait weeks for them to arrive. I think the final repair was in the thousands which back then was A LOT of money. Rare even then, I can imagine getting parts for them now must be like finding unicorn poo!
... My old man suffered a snapped timing chain on his
The spec of the parts also changed over the life of the car as it went from 2.3 to 2.5 and even some iterations in between. I seem to emember the Mercedes dealer having to call up Cosworth to get the timing details or something as it wasn't in the Merc system and that was back then, I'm not surprised that some of the details might have been lost to time or that Mercedes can't support some of the part supply.
Older cars like this are very cool but maintaining them and parts supply problems are not things that you often hear about in media articles when they are waxing lyrical about how wonderful they are.
The right thing to do (before they charge the owner) is to track down the source of the fault, which may have been introduced during their work with the car.
Instead, they seem to have gone on a parts replacing mission, choosing to spend the owner's money replacing electronic items which aren't broken. When that failed, they pulled the head (incurring a whole load of cost for coolant, oil and belts) to discover bore-scoring that is likely unrelated to the poor running. So now the owner is in the hole for head removal/refit and probably a re-bore as well.
The poor running described is almost certainly nothing to do with bore scoring! Why is this so-called reputable garage continuing down a rabbit-hole of problems that aren't there?
Proper bent after £3k worth of paint.
The only ingredients capable of fixing the chassis (£800 worth of jig brackets)
Titivation (brass bushings for the shifters)
The motor
Motor and 'box dropped in the car next Friday hopefully.
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