This thread is in the same vein as "What did you do to your Crossfire today?", but allows me to keep all my little piddling jobs which don't warrant their own dedicated thread grouped together. It is in essence, my scrapbook.

I had a slow leak in my LF tire but there was not a foreign object in the tire. It would lose maybe 3psi of pressure in a week, on average. I bought a set of valve cores and the little 4-way tool to service same and swapped out the valve core on the problem tire. It has been almost a week now and the pressure has not gone down at all, so it appears I have fixed the problem. Swapping out a valve core, if you've never done it, takes all of 2 minutes, if that long. Once you remove the core the air will escape in well under 10 seconds. And the parts are dirt cheap. Everything here was less than 5 bucks.


Old (removed) core with black rubber.


valve core removed

 

Because I'm so perfect I left the dome light on overnight. Figured I'd top up the battery but the previous owner was a genius and had coated the terminals with some kind of anti-corrosion protectant. It made me unsure whether I was getting a good electrical contact with the battery charger, so I decided to connect the charger directly to the battery posts. When I removed the cables I was shocked at the amount of corrosion that had been hidden from view. So I got my Dremel out and used up one of the sandpaper-wheels making everything shiny again. I don't think it's just my imagination that the car seems to fire right up now without hardly cranking at all. NOW I need to find the 'HOW TO' instructions for turning off the super-annoying seatbelt chime, as disconnecting the battery resets it to the default of (seatbelt chime) 'ON'.


Negative


Positive

 

Better late than never. The How To Reset list. CLICK

 

Thanks. I did it shortly after my post. I had the list you linked to printed out from before (from like, 3 years ago!).

 

On Friday I changed the fuel filter and all the rubber fuel hoses except for one; the big fat hose from the fuel tank to the pump. When I changed the much thinner hose from the fuel-tank to the fuel-filter I had gasoline run down my arm, which was all the pleasantry I desired. Besides, that hose showed signs of surface-cracking (dry-rot beginning) whereas the big fat hose seemed very pliable and not in any state of degradation. I was 'Johnny on the spot' with caps & plugs. Whenever one hand removed a component the other hand held a cap or plug ready to stop a potential gusher! You can see in the aluminum 'turkey' tin how much petrol I lost, and well over half of that is from pouring out the contents of the old fuel-filter after removing it.

These pictures represent the job from start to finish.

 

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Hey WD40, is it just the camera/color filtering or is that really fuel you have in that aluminum pan? That is the funkiest fuel I have ever seen (it MUST be the light/camera), right?


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Yeah the picture is darker than in reality. It's fresh. Until Friday night I hadn't put more than 3 gallons in the car for months (trying to keep the fuel-level low in anticipation of doing this!).

 

Then Padawan, it is a good you did, yes, good we think. The fuel we know, good it is. Filter bad, must have been... LOL


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I EDITED MY RESPONSE after I actually LOOKED AT THE PICTURE!

 

I put on a new Idler Pulley. It's SOOOO quiet now after the air-pump shuts off. I just wanna sit there and listen to the engine run!!! BTW I bought a mechanic's stethoscope, which eliminated the alternator as the noisemaker. But the idler pulley & water-pump were close enough together that I heard nearly the same noise through the stethoscope. Only by putting a 17mm socket on my breaker bar and twisting the belt-tensioner counter-clockwise did I solve the riddle. That let me slip the belt off the idler-pulley, the water pump AND the alternator. There was no doubt at all once I was able to turn the 3 items by hand... NONE.

I found out something that really surprises me. The pulley I removed was the original Mercedes-Benz part with the 3-pointed-star & OE part number on it (it lasted 43,540 miles). Anyway, it's a cheap little INA part. This one right here (if you click on the $7.50 INA part down below!): https://www.pelicanparts.com/catalog/SuperCat/4098/MBZ_4098_ELCHRG_pg4_drive-belt-tensioners.htm?highlight_part=000-202-09-19-M40 As you can see it says OEM (original equipment manufacturer). But at $7.50 VS $53.25 for the OE Mercedes part that's a big premium to have the little Mercedes logo printed on it! The Mercedes part number is A 0002020019 Not knowing any of that before I removed the pulley I ordered a URO part (also German!) off of Amazon as I get free, fast shipping and when I can't bundle parts it just makes sense to order that way. I got this:

Amazon

Amazon

which works beautifully except that the dust cap is just big enough that it won't "SNAP/click/grab-onto" the URO pulley so you'll have to dab a little RTV on it if you want to reinstall the dust-cap. It says it's a sealed bearing (a Timkin! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timken...earing_Company) so maybe it'll outlast what in actuality is a rather cheap OE part.

 

Here's the 3 pointed star you can add to any auto part that'll allow you to mark it up by 610% ($7.50 to $53.25).

Would anyone like to make me an offer on this lightly used, finely-crafted Mercedes-Benz work of art? C'mon!! After all, that's not a MASSIVE AMOUNT of grease being flung out from the bearing. There's gotta be at least 5 or 10,000 miles left in it. I'll even install it for ya. Come on by anytime.

 

Because I'm a terribly busy man with many important things to do I cleaned the embedded dirt & grease out of the imprinted part number on the original equipment pulley so it's more legible.

 

(trying to catch up on posting things I did well over a month ago)
Cleaned & lubed F&R brakes and installed new AKEBONO front pads


Cleaned & lubed all the sliding contact surfaces


Amount of old pad material remaining VS the new AKEBONO pads


Front brakes: cleaned & re-lubed plus installed new wear-sensors & AKEBONO pads


Rear brakes cleaned, lubed & rust-protected

I was tired of how fast the original pads (truly the pads from 2005!!) re-coated the front wheels with thick, black brake dust. Thanks to Scotty Kilmer's constant praise of AKEBONO pads I decided to install a set even though the OE pads didn't need to be changed yet. The AKEBONOs do produce significantly less dust that any spray-on wheel cleaner can now remove, meaning I don't have to clean my wheels by hand anymore unless I just want to. They don't 'bite' as fast as the factory pads, which had me concerned about their stopping power; but when you really clamp-down on the brake-pedal the car comes to a stop just as quickly as ever. It just takes a little while to reacclimate yourself to pressing the brake-pedal harder when you have to stop really fast.

 

Flushed braking system & bled-brakes

They say you should completely renew your brake fluid every 2 years if you want all the components to last as long as possible. Also I had never used my ARES pressure-bleeder, so onward ho!


Pressure Bleeder and new DOT 4 fluid


Old dirty brake fluid


ARES pressure bleeder attached to master-cylinder reservoir


Pressure-bleeder pushes fluid through the entire system... (see next picture)


...leaving only clean fresh fluid

I can highly recommend the ARES bleeder even though (like everything!) it sure has shot up in price since I bought mine just over a year ago: I was able to bleed & flush the entire system with just a single liter of fluid, BTW. But better safe than sorry. I didn't want to be stuck without enough fluid halfway through the job, ya feel me? If you don't have a helper or else she hates doing the tedious job of being "master of the brake pedal", then do yourself a favor & buy this!

 

I like that this 'bleeder' has that pressure gauge on it, it helps to not have too high a pressure on the non-pressurized side of the brake system. Thanks for the pictures!



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I went into this with the intention of only re-doing the area beneath the glove-compartment lock that your fingernails hit when reaching for the latch... an action which chips away the paint over time. Well it was so easy to apply this paint that I ended up touching-up a rather large amount of the passenger side & it turned out great! However, when I take pictures I always shoot 3 to 4 images of the same location as 2/3rds of the shots I take are blurry, and so I hope 1 out of 4 won't be and I can post 1 half-way decent image. Well this time I was multi-tasking (bad idea) while I was deleting the "blurriest" and deleted more than I intended, so there's only 1 after-shot. Sorry.


The years, they take their toll


The sight which spurred me to action. Notice the nail-chips extended up even on the pull-out portion.


Which you can see more clearly by looking at an enlarged view of this shot.


The latch is held on by two T15 screws accessed from the back-side.


I applied this product with foam brushes I bought at Harbor Freight Tools, but a selection of small, 'normal' brushes would have worked just as well.


And the final product, muy bien! Time well spent. (I uploaded this as a large image so you can get a closer look)

 

Hmm. Well apparently the Crossfire Forum "downsizes" large images when it saves them, so uploading a large image is a waste of time. Oh well, at least I tried!

 

I am not sure what you mean, the photos are the width of the screen so how can they be bigger?

 

WD40, when you click on the picture it opens the photo in a new window which then can be magnified.

 

OK, I see. It's still not nearly as large as the photo I uploaded but it's an improvement. Thanks.