A couple months ago a 2013 CLS came in after losing all it's coolant, and also complaining of oil leaks. M278 Bi-turbo V8. Main coolant leak was a broken turbo coolant line, but also had a badly leaking water pump. I looked it over and ended up quoting those and some oil leak repairs. Yeah it wasn't a cheap quote, but this is a complex engine very tightly packed into this engine bay. I could replace head gaskets on an old LR Disco faster than doing the repairs I quoted here. $5400.

Well, as the title says, they had it towed to their mechanic to get it done cheaper. When this happens you don't always get a chance to look back over the other guy's work. But I got lucky, they brought this back in for more diagnosis.

Towed in for oil and coolant leaks to be precise! This is where it gets fun. It did run though, so I checked oil level and went to pull it into my bay. Holy crap! That thing clattered so loud I thought it was going to explode! Any guesses?

Their mechanic didn't tighten the bolts on one of the high pressure fuel pumps, which caused it to break. The only things holding it in were the high pressure fuel lines going to the fuel rails. This thing rides on the camshaft with it's own follower/lifter so it was just hammering away! But those were the only bolts not tightened...

Two out of four bolts for the upper idler pulley bracket were only in by about two threads.

One of the water pump bolts was missing completely. Stripped out if I had to guess.

What's really interesting, is that they didn't even need repairs around the high pressure fuel pump. They also completely neglected other areas I quoted, and appear to have not replaced the oil filter housing gasket when they had it off to do all the work, so that's puking.

What did their mechanic charge you might be wondering? Surely couldn't have been more than half of what I quoted right? Considering their work quality and cheapness of the parts they put on...

$5398! Amazing deal! I am crook and feel shame for asking $5400.

They towed it back to their mechanic and paid me for my diagnosis. Their mechanic needs his wrenches taken away.

I just lost a co-worker. We're having an outbreak at work, just as we started getting vaccinated. 10-15% of us have gotten the first round. Last Monday, pretty normal. Tuesday, 1/3 of the building was sick. We're currently down 2/3. It took less than a week for this person to go from the time of showing symptoms. I don't need your sympathy, I need your focus.

Not blaming anyone, just reminding

Hate it with a burning passion.

Every function in this car is forced full of tech for the sake of being tech, at the expense of luxury. Every switch and button is now slower, more difficult to use, and less intuitive. They're all touch sensitive trash with alleged haptic feedback. I say alleged because I have yet to feel it. Which means they're trying to make a button operate like the touch screen on your phone, but feel like a traditional button. JUST MAKE A TRADITIONAL FUCKING BUTTON! All these switches feel super cheap too, like the buttons on a megatouch bar games machine from 2000, not like an S should.

Hey Mercedes, if you need to have five online classes to explain to technicians how to use the sunroof and outside door handles, with sizeable lists of system shortcomings, your design might just be shit.

Even in one of the training videos they show a guy using the seat heater switch, but he had to press it three times to register a single press. Because it's shit.

They've also got motion controls. Why? Every switch is within arms' reach already, why would I want to try a motion control that takes more energy even if it works on the first try (spoiler, it doesn't).

The outside door handles are too slow to react, so if you're faster than they are (flush mount, motor used to extend when you need to grab them), you'll pull against the motor and the door won't open until the motor catches up. If you pull too hard too fast you can damage it. You can feel and hear the motor operate and that feels cheap. The door closing sound is more similar to a 2003 Jetta than any non-G-wagen Mercedes.

I hate that the center display of at a different angle from the instrument display, even though I understand why, the design to me isn't cohesive.

I hate this car.

Engine and trans are great. It's got some good features. But it isn't worth the hassle of everything else.

There is only one thing I love in this car and that's the ambient lighting. You can set it to be different colors at the same time. As in fading from neon pink to light bluish/teal giving it a very 80's Miami vibe. There are plenty of others themes, but that vaporware color scheme has me dreaming of doing lines with rolled up Benjies right off the dash (not really but you get the point).

If you want a newer S-class, get a 222 that's newer than 2018 so it has the 176 hot V and 9 speed. That car is a winner. The 223 is a waste of materials and scourge on the planet.

Here's a photo of how I really feel:

Met up with @beefchips yesterday to ride some dirt. A bit of wayfinding was needed as the BDR route was wrong and wanted us to go down a steep slope that clearly has never been used as a trail and was littered with dead and fallen trees, and also use a hiking trail that's gated to motor vehicles. Even with that little snag early on we could see the trails were going to be great!

After finding our way onto the correct route, we stopped for lunch at a huge intersection/pull out area on a forest road. While eating, we heard what I at first thought was a Harley coming down the trail behind us! Well my ears might be broken because it was just a V-strom 1000 with a slip on. Chatted with the guy riding it for a few minutes and then we all headed our separate ways.

The trails were almost entirely easy forest service roads, with a few gnarlier sections here and there, but nothing crazy. Eventually we came to the Wolf Mountain fire lookout. At 108' tall is apparently the tallest inhabitable wooden structure in... the country? world? I can't remember. But the guy working that post invited us up, and told us all about it and even let us have a look through his telescope thing that he uses to look for fires! He was genuinely excited to have guests, so if you find yourself in the area, check it out and say hi!!

Continuing on, the trail remained easy forest roads except for small sections. Until we got to my favorite part of the ride so far. Legit double track jeep trails with large exposed roots, rocks, deep ruts, technical climbs and deep puddles! These would've been rated blue squares at a mountain bike park, which is a lot of terrain to handle on such big bikes (read: not dedicated dirt bikes). It was rad! And the Africa twin has no right to be as good off road as it is!

Then the real fun started. And by fun I mean the opposite. We came to a very long puddle that there was no way around. We grabbed a long stick to check depth, maybe about a foot, and used the stick to feel for any obstacles hiding under the brown water. Feeling that it looked worse than it actually was, we went for it.

I don't know if we missed something or if it was just the mud and ruts being thick and heavy, but beefchips bars kicked sideways, causing him to lose the clutch and pull too hard on the throttle and go full send. Mother nature told him half sends weren't allowed. I'm not gonna lie it looked pretty badass, huge rooster tail shooting up and water flying everywhere! But there's an inherent issue with bars turned really far and lots of throttle on a narrow trail. And let me tell you, trees don't take no shit. That KLR bounced right off that tree.

If you are squeamish, stop reading, jump to the end no pictures though

Beefchips was trying to stand up by the time I got to him. But he immediately told me his ankle was broken. He laid back down and as he did I could see his foot wasn't really moving like it should, just sort of flopping around. If you want to see what it looked like, look up videos of Dak Prescott's leg injury. I took a closer look at it, being careful not to move anything. It was bleeding, but not profusely. I knew it would be awhile before we were able to get help and I was unable to get a real close look because of his boots and riding pants. But it wasn't arterial, so that was good! I helped him, while doing my best to prevent further ankle and foot movement, to get it slightly elevated to slow blood loss. Then activated my emergency GPS beacon. Got him a couple aspirin and did my best to downplay the injury. Last thing he needed was to go into shock. But he was hanging in there, totally lucid, doing great really. No damage to the helmet or complaints of pain anywhere else.

I knew there was no way in hell an ambulance could get anywhere close, so I scouted the area and found a big open meadow nearby. We also tried calling 911, but there was no reception at all, we had been descending through thick forest for a few miles. After covering him with as many layers as I could and making sure the bleeding wasn't getting worse, I walked a half mile in either direction to see if I could get reception, but even in the meadow the was nothing, with either of our phones. At this point it had been an hour since he crashed and I activated the beacon, and still no sign of rescue. We both felt it would best for me to ride out to find signal. So off I went, back the way we came, up the hill. I had to go about a mile before getting the slightest hint of signal. But it was enough and I managed a 911 call.

I had made a note of GPS coordinates from the beacon and relayed those to the dispatcher. Unfortunately, service was cutting out, there were dropped calls, and also some figuring out which emergency services department would be closest. My phone was only pinging off of one tower so they couldn't get a solid read on my location. Then I had to do some more scouting to find a sign to indicate which road we were on. I hadn't seen any in quite a while, but it turned out there was a nearby one, just fallen over. All in all, it was about 30-40 minutes of minutes of phone tag with emergency services to get a tag on location. Then another agonizing 10-15 minutes where I didn't hear anything from anyone and reception had gotten worse. I hated leaving him lay there, but figured if I went back to him I wouldn't be able to use my phone or lead anyone to him.

Then I heard sirens!!! And a few minutes later a lifted Tahoe and Silverado on mud tires and sheriff's dept decals came blasting up the trail right to me! I lead them back to the accident site. They also immediately knew it would take a helicopter to get him out. So one of the guys started working on that and went to pick up the ambulance crew that was parked at the nearest trailhead, an hour roundtrip. So the other officer and I worked on stabilizing the leg and removing the boot. Moto boots do not like to be cut off, they are tough! I can't imagine the pain he was in, but he stayed with us the whole time and was a champ about all the shit we were doing.

Once the boot was off and pants were cut to halfway up the thigh we were finally able to fully assess the damage. Multiple breaks to the tibia, multiple breaks to the ankle area with bones protruding, but he was able to wiggle his toes and could feel them when pinched, apparently no sensation lost anywhere which is a very good sign.

Ambulance crew then showed up. And I don't mean like what you see in movies. This was two (clearly trained) locals in their normal clothes. I don't say this to diminish their knowledge or abilities. They were called out of their homes at dinner time to help us out. They were fantastic. It's just a rural area with a town that barely has a gas station, they can't have a full time team of paramedics on staff.

One of the medics and I worked on moving the KLR as it was still right next to him preventing more than one person from really comfortably working next his leg. Bike was still tipped over and back of it partially submerged.

Anyways, they went to work stabilizing the leg for real with actual medical things, the other officer got back on the radio and set up beacons to help the chopper find us. Then the rest of us loaded him onto a backboard and strapped him down. Helicopter arrived and we got him loaded into it and on his way to the hospital.

From time of crash to liftoff, it was probably about 4 hours. Four hours of laying there in agony, shivering from trauma, being completely alone for at least an hour while I was getting a hold of emergency services. Can't imagine this from his perspective. What a badass.

TLDR/for the squeamish; basket broken ankle I'm the middle of nowhere on difficult trails. Helicopter evacuation needed.

We were over two hours from the hospital he went to, so I haven't been there yet. I found my way to a hotel as I was in no mood or frame of mind to set up camp for the night. I'm going to call the hospital in a bit and see if I can get an update.

Oh, and we got all of his stuff off the bike, and the officers took it back for him. I was able to ride(!) The largely undamaged KLR out of the soup it was in and parked it in the meadow for now. We will have to figure out how to retrieve it later, or it gets stolen and insurance pays out. I don't know.

Stay safe oppo.

@huzer laziness towards the process of getting rid of them

It's been a while since I've been on oppo, and even longer since I've posted some of the things I work on. So I guess this is me diving back in. Or at least dipping my toes. How's everyone been? What have I missed?

This brand new (like 3k miles) 2021 GLE came in back in December from our body shop after having minor cosmetic damage. It had some warning lights on the dash that the body shop thought was related to a radar sensor in a bummer getting damaged.

This is a very normal occurrence and it's easy for us to fix. Typically they've already replaced the parts and just need the new one calibrated and codes cleared. Tech collects an easy hour of labor. So I was going to do this right at the end of a work day so we wouldn't be starting out behind the next morning, just wanted to clear out the queue real quick.

I was in for a surprise because in actuality it was a telematics (OnStar type stuff) malfunction. Turns out there was no communication with HERMES (which is our internal designation for the telematics control unit, that's how it shows up on the diagnostic computer) and telematics CAN was not happy with life. Looked around a bit and figured out HERMES is located under the false floor under the passenger seat. Great.

Don't want to go there if I don't have to. Checked some fuses. Checked some CAN connectors that were much easier to access. But all I could do was further verify that CAN had issues, voltage and resistance were way off. Time to start digging.

Insert spongebob gif three years later

By this point I had the passenger seat, part of the carpet, and entire center console out so I could track down wiring issues. Remember that false floor I was telling you about? Well there are actually four false floor panels, two under each front seat. This is a very normal thing for us, lots of space under the seats in the floor for control units, wiring, batteries, etc. It's generally a great use of space, unless the vehicle has a water leak. Well anyways, turned out that the wiring harness with the CAN wires was not routed very well, and was crushed beneath one of those false floor panels. 6 wires and 3 coax cables if memory serves.

I fixed the wires no problem. But these are small diameter coax cables that we can't fix and aren't available to order. And that meant I would need to replace...

Any guesses?

Come on...

Somebody had to know where this is going...

That's right! The whole damn body harness would need to be replaced. They're built to order per VIN. And usually take 6-8 weeks to arrive. So I put the car back together and gave it back to the client. They would return once parts arrived.

Two months later

Harness arrived without shipping damage (yay!) So the apprentice and I dove in and started gutting this pig. It took the two of us just under a week to replace. Every single interior panel came out. Fuel tank lowered. Brake booster and wiper assembly. Dash and heater box.

The job went well, no rattles, everything works. So here, enjoy some photos!

Shafer trail, canyonlands. The wranglers and land cruisers were gawking like we were stupid. It was stupid fun!

Like a dumbass, I left some full cans of beer in my top case while we were riding, unprotected and unsecured. Two of them punctured and soaked everything else in there! Party foul. I'm sorry everyone. It was good beer too. No helicopters this time, so that's a win.

Someone left some jack-o'-lanterns at this remote lake, so we posed out bikes with them. Fun trip, can't wait for more!

I'm not a real big fan of camping and definitely don't do it for the sake of camping. I love getting outdoors though, so camping is a way to get further out in the same amount of time (i.e. not day trips). At the same time, RV's are dumb to me and I don't like sprinters. So anything I can do to otherwise make the camping experience easier and I'm all about it.

Enter the rooftop tent. Undo like 6 clips and it pops open. Takes less than a minute including ladder so. Way easier than a softshell rooftop tent. Plenty of space and pretty comfy, though the mattress could stand to be slightly softer.

The heat dome thing made this weekend a perfect time to try it out, so we went up to a high elevation lake and relaxed on the water yesterday. Which apparently effectively was the same as marinating ourselves for the mosquitos. I am now a walking mosquito bite, despite bug spray.

LASER EYES!

Or lasers to my eyes anyways. Procedure done at 2pm Thursday. They gave me a Vicodin, a Valium, and a Tylenol PM. Could immediately see better after it was done, though it was smoky looking like when we had 600+ air quality last summer. Went straight home and slept for 4 hours, through mildly painful, sandy feeling eyes, with protective goggles on. But that's what the drugs were for!

When I woke up, everything was already pretty hunky-dory aside from a little haziness, and that's been steadily decreasing since. No redness, no pain since that initial nap. Sometimes it feels like a slightly shifted or dirty contact lens, but that's it. I was able to drive already next morning and have been living life like normal! Went from 20/40 to 20/15.

I did not go to one of the chain places, but a local guy with a 4.9 rating on Google who's been in the same location for over 20 years. I had an experience with a chain place previously that left a bad taste in my mouth and made me walk away. And I'm glad I did because they made no mention of certain guidelines that my local guy said we're industry best practices. He was shocked and worried when I mentioned this to him.

For anyone curious, my exact procedure was custom wavefront intralase lasik and cost $4200.

@hfv the mods ruined the eclipse. I like those a lot, but that one is hideous and I have no idea if parts are available to bring it back to stock, or how poorly the car has been treated beneath that trash. Atrocious mods almost always equate to atrocious maintenance and repairs.

@benjrblant how bad are the bends? They may not actually affect balance or ride. Some mobile wheel repair companies are able to straighten wheels with a hydraulic ram and round dies. Alloy wheel repair specialists and wheelkraft are two such complaints that may be capable, or they may be able to point you in the direction of someone who is capable.

@manwich as far as lazy I only meant the dealer. Incompetent refers to owner and dealer. With stuff like this, indies aren't often the way to go. They absolutely can be, but many don't have a clue or experience on stuff like this even if they do specialize in Mercedes. These cost what they cost, dealer vs indie won't be drastically different of those building the quotes know what they're doing. There aren't a bunch of options for parts, but the YouTube that exist are all very similarly priced. Labor is what it is. I've had people from other states come in asking to have me work on their stuff, because they talked to someone on a message board who had me work on their stuff. Sometimes asking around from other owners is the way to go to get a good ship recommendation; not just jumping right into dealers bad indies good.

@aestheticsinmotion my E55 is basically sold, might put some of that money towards crash bars on the Honda

@pip-bip cheap means they'll pay someone to take it, right?

@manwich it's been a long time, and I'm not about to relive the idiocy involved, but here's what I recall;

Zero research about this vehicle before buying. Two minutes on Google would've warned him about head bolts and cams.

Terrible dealer quoting a new engine. These are very rebuildable. All internal parts are readily available and have been since shortly after this engine came out. Even if, worst case scenario, some connecting rods were bent, it could be rebuilt. But I would bet my next paycheck it may have only needed some bearings and a good cleaning if it even needed anything beyond head gaskets. Shame on that dealer.

I don't think they bothered to get a second opinion on "needed" repairs. With a quote like that, that's just dumb.

Dude disassembled half the car to get the engine out! I don't have the slightest clue why. Completely unnecessary to completely rip off the front end, and opens you up to new issues during reassembly, especially if you're a DIY'er with basically zero experience.

Since I'm fairly certain it only needed head gaskets and a good flush or two, the engine could have stayed in the car without taking any of the body off. It doesn't look like it, but there's actually a ton of room in the engine bay once you remove a big metal plate that goes over the top that's only held in by five easy bolts.

I've personally never seen a head bolt failure on one of these engines that required engines removal to fix. I know some have been killed, but it's actually not common. People just don't feel like putting the effort in to rebuild them even though they're actually a very easy engine to work on. I'm having my apprentice do about a quarter of the work on the S63, and he's been working on cars professionally for about two weeks. Obviously I'm overseeing and double-checking everything he does, but I wouldn't even consider that on an M157 engine because it's SOOO much more difficult.

This particular R63 story was born from laziness and incompetence and everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves.

@manwich said in What level of the insanity scale,:

@vondon302 said in What level of the insanity scale,:

@snakesm13 I know @AMGtech hates this thread but it's all I think about when I see one of these.

https://www.roadandtrack.com/car-culture/buying-maintenance/a9949059/mercedes-r63-amg-owner-completes-diy-engine-rebuild-dealer-said-it-would-cost-dollar57000/

And it all started when he discovered coolant in his oil one day
https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/build-projects-and-project-cars/r63-amg-the-unicorn-of-my-destruction/110824/page7/

This thread needs to stop existing. It's so fucking bad in so many ways.

@exage03040 anyone choosing the Lincoln had probably never driven a J30. Underrated car that is very comfortable, very reliable, faster and better handler than the Lincoln.

@nth256 said in What level of the insanity scale,:

@snakesm13 - As I recall, engine repairs total about $10-12k, and internal engine failures were incredibly common around 7000 miles. I think @AMGtech had a thread on old Oppo where he fixed one.

EDIT: wrong, wrong, wrong, all of my info was wrong

I fix a few of these every year still. Used to do more. I've personally never seen failed head bolts kill one of these engines. The bottom ends are extremely robust. The low mileage internal failure was not related to head bolts or cams, it was a timing chain idler sprocket. Head bolts alone, without failure, are around $2k, cams and lifters are $5-6k, and adjusters are maybe another $2k; so yeah about $10k for bolts, cams, lifters, adjusters.

@snakesm13 at that price I would the shit out of that thing, especially with all the common stuff taken care of already. I didn't go over the photos much, but if it's nice, final price might end up around $40-50k.

Checking the head bolts is a simple matter of popping off a valve cover. Takes 15 minutes for me. But honestly, they're easy, so even if the seller is mistaken about the bolts, I wouldn't worry about it and just do them. $2k is about right if they haven't failed.

Coincidentally, I'm doing head bolts, cams, and lifters on an S63 right now