Help!need engine rebuild on e320 cdi

[louis1]

Hi
I am new to this forum, and need some advice.

I have had 3 mercs now a c240 for a year, then an e220 cdi for a year and now an e320 cdi 2001 which I have had for 2 years now.

The car has full service history and is used for motorway miles mostly.

The car has now done 127,000 miles and the timing chain has broken, I have stripped down the engine to find both cams have broken in 5 peices 24 bent valves and 24 damaged tappets.

My local merc dealer said that they have no interest in rebuilding they will only replace the engine and they want £13,000 to do this.

What do you think I should do?

Thanks Louis

 

[bigasotonuk]

Hi, welcome to the forum
Have you checked the bottom end for damage yet?
As this will be the deciding factor on whether a new engine is needed
I would start checking the availability of a 2nd hand engine or if the bottom end is ok a cylinder head.
Try using this find-a-part web site i can recommend it,

https://www.partsgateway.co.uk

Hope this of some help, best of luck

 

[Bolide]

Throw a secondhand engine in there and keep driving it. Then sell the broken engine for someone else to rebuild

Nick Froome
www.w124.co.uk

 

[Jacko918]

Hi

My local merc dealer said that they have no interest in rebuilding they will only replace the engine and they want £13,000 to do this.

Blimey! £13,000 is ridiculous! You could try and source a second hand engine or If there is no damage to the piston's etc a second hand complete cylinder head. The only other alternative is to Buy the bits needed to repair the engine yourself. try to use a specialist rather than a dealer it help keep the costs down. It's probably not going to be cheap but cheaper than £13,000!

Why has the timing chain failed? Is this common? 127,000 miles seem's quite low for a chain to go, particularly if it's had regular oil changes.

 

[Richard Moakes]

The sad truth is that I doubt they have any mechanics capable of rebuilding the engine!

I agree with the others, find an engine from a scrapyard, bound to be a written off car with a good engine somewhere.

Good Luck,

 

[hmang]

mate , look on auto trader....e 320 cdi's start at £5,495...time to do your sums.

 

[gazzab]

Personally I would sell it as is on ebay and buy another. My 02 E320CDI eleance estate is only worth £7K.

 

[Parrot of Doom]

What were the circumstances surrounding the timing chain breaking? Random chance, or poor maintenance (by previous owner)?

Any chances of piccies?

As others have said, buy a second hand engine and swap them. Then I'd rebuild the damaged one, or sell it.

 

[maddog]

This is the second failure of this type i have heard off in as many months , the problem is its often hard to work out whether the timing chain broke first and then damaged the valve train or the camshaft broke and snapped the timing chain.

Either way its terminal , i would hazard the engine is scrap, valve to piston contact would mean its not even worth taking the heads off imo.

 

[louis1]

Thanks for your replys.

I will get some pics later today.

I dont know the cause for this but I bought the car with full merc history at 70,000 miles, and i have serviced the car with mobil 1 fully synthetic oil every 10,000miles sometimes Ive even done it a few thousand mile early, and I always use mercedes parts.

Where would I find a second hand engine?

 

[carabind]

there are a few options - ebay is one, there are a couple of E320cdi engines for around £800, but these are V6s - is yours the same? Otherwise a good reconditioner (try yell)will sell you one, and may well take yours in exchange as long as the block isn't scrap

 

[daz250]

hello mate you can try these two www.mercman.net or www.dronesfield.com. good luck.

 

[bigasotonuk]

Hi,
This guy has 2

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/MERCEDES-ENGI...ryZ10398QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

 

[OlafMaxwell]

This is interesting. I just had a service before Christmas at a main dealer. With 131500 up on it from new I asked about replacing the timing chain and tensioner. He advised against it although I was willing to meet the cost of this. There is no advice from MB and he knew of no failures and to be honest I have not heard of any either until now. The mechanic in the garage said he has cars gone over 200k without any problems. My worry was more if there is a plastic tensioner in the system which is a known MB problem on some of the MB petrol V8 engines. If you do end up stripping the engine to find what went wrong I would be interested in knowing about the tensioner material and condition and also of any more occurrences of this nature. A lot of these cars are now being used as taxis and i have not so far heard of failures there either.

We used have a major problem with tensioners on Japanese motor cycles whern timing chains were common.

I would not fancy rebuilding the 320 cdi engine but I imagine a rebuilt one would be a good bet but very expensive. The ideal would be to either get a second hand engine buy another car and swap whatever parts you want, eg leather interior cd units etc etc and then sell off your own one. £13,000 seems very very expensive though. I find it hard to believe the parts and labour would add to this.

I had a timing belt failure [caused by tensioner] on my Peugot 405 about 7 years back and it was covered by the garage but the cost at the time would have been about £3,000 sterling and that was for head, camshaft, valves and all the other items that go with them. But, you get a service eliminated too which is worth money in the Merc.

How good is the rest of the car, are you 100% satisfied with the mileage?

 

[jibcl500]

Why not give the car to Nick for an assement of the damage and cost to fix, if agreeable let him fix it.


jib