The Family Truckster, aka the 2002 VW Passat with a deathwish, has reached the stage where its biodegradable wiring harness appears to be biodegrading with a vengeance. My attempt to replace a parking light bulb in one of the headlight pods shed all kinds of wire insulation, and rather than pull pins and set new wires in place one by one, I figured it would be faster/easier to simply replace the entire headlight pod and then try to squeak the Truckster through one final mandatory state safety inspection....
So, I fired up Tubby, Son's 1984 300SD, loaded it with rakes and other implements of destruction, loaded in Son, and headed out to the U-Pull-It junkyard, which was loaded with 2001-2005 B5.5 Passats, according to the online inventory.
It turns out that all of those Passats had their headlight pods already plucked out, probably minutes after the lot photos were taken. So that was a big bust--until I happened to literally trip over a correct driver's side pod, not too yellowed, sitting on the ground under a particularly unhappy 2001 ex-Passat where someone had sliced the front off with a sawzall. Easiest u-pull-it experience I've ever had....
So, with that out of the way, it was time for a visit to the two resident MB diesels in the lot--a very, very stripped 240D and an increasingly stripped 300SD. There's not much left to grab on the SD--in addition to the usual easy to remove trim and other bits, people have taken the back half of the exhaust system, the driveshaft, the axle shafts, the interior, and increasingly random bits of the motor. We, of course, picked seats, door panels, window bits, and many other helpful tidbits from the car in the Spring, back when we were trying to give Tubby a new lease on life. This time, I was particularly peeved that someone had pulled the output covers off the injection pump, leaving the cylinders inside to fill with water and rust. I'd had my eyes on pulling the pump complete for some time, but had never brought the right combination of sockets to muscle it loose. That was also probably the same person who yanked the valve cover gasket, leaving the rest of the engine to rust up nicely (except for the timing chain, which looked like new).
One thing that this poor SD carcass did still have was a starter, and since Tubby's starter is starting to go, Son thought this would be a great and important thing to pull for his own vehicle....
About two hours into this project, I started dimly remembering a discussion on this list years ago about the pain and agony of changing a starter on a turbo OM617 motor. But, at that point, we were committed, and it was too late.
To get sufficient leverage to break free the rear 10mm bolt holding the starter in place, Son ended up removing the remainder of the exhaust pipe from the flex pipe down (honestly, it just broke off when we tried to move it out of the way). He also told me that the automatic transmission dipstick tube probably received a fatal kink in it, too (which was fine by me, as some kind soul had removed the transmission pan, exposing the transmission to the elements--and then placed the pan inside the car?). There was much swearing, a steady rainfall of rust bits and oily sludge onto Son, and in general, painfully slow progress.
What would have been a relatively straightforward job on many other cars took us about 3.5 hours, and that was with large parts of the car missing so that there was a lot more room to work than would be in a normal situation. But hey, the starter was only $20 once it was out, and Son had a huge grin on his face for having managed to extract it. Now, of course, we should probably have it tested before attempting this job on Tubby.
Tomorrow, I think Tubby gets an oil change and I hopefully get to spend some quality time with my W123, which has developed a Digby-style idle in the past couple of years. I have thought for some time that it's a bad injector, because the motor smooths out nicely above idle and runs better when it's fully warmed up (and spray patterns aren't quite as necessary). Until then, though, I have started doing an unfortunately effective job of smoking up the neighborhood when I first start the car.
--Conrad J.
