87 300 turbo 6 bad trans...what to do?
87 300 turbo 6 bad trans...what to do?
Have a shot at a 1987 300 turbo 6 cylinder.
Car is pretty nice, 120,000 documented, garaged and grannie driven one owner.
I have a couple of questions for you guys in the know.
1. How hard is it to find a used trans to buy from one of you guys? How hard are they to rebuild...as in...with a GM 700-R4 for example, you can rebuild the thing very cheap because the "hard parts" are usually still fine.
Can you get the cheap kits for the Benz transmissions also?
(I am sorry that question #1 is really like 3 or 4 questions.)
2. What should I be looking for on the car? Is there something pricey that they all do or something that is often a deal breaker? (Like certain 700 series BMW dashboards/ECM's fry with age and make the car not worth using sometime.)
I L-U-S-T after the ride and the fuel economy my friends 87 has. It has enough balls as it is (meaning it pulls hills with 4 fat guys in it without shifting @ 75MPH) and it is VERY comfortable.
Few cars I have ever driven put me in touch with the road like that...yet ride very nice on top of it. Usually, it is Lincoln smooth with marshmallow handling or Z28 Handling with buck-spring-rodeo-ride-ZERO comfort...(like recent Maximas. Do not run over a pebble...you will feel it.)
The 300D is amazing in this regard.
I find it quiet, heavy, solid, comfy and even the people in the back seat seem to like it.
I cannot afford, in the interest of being practical, to spend a ton on a transmission for it. Any suggestions?
Is there a online manual like they have put up for the Camrys and some other cars?
Any help would be appreciated.
I'm not entirely positive but likely th 87 300D is running some 722.3 variant. Find out which transmissions from which years will work (and you want to make damn sure, there are a few models that can only handle ~150lb-ft), and for the most part as long as it's more or less the same trans (four speed auto and not a 6 speed) it should bolt in. The transmissions are fairly robust as far as I know and most of the Mercedes in a yard near you should have something compatible.
The car is certainly worth throwing a used transmission in, probably worth rebuilding if you've got the coin.
hard parts dont generally fail on these, usually a seal or clutches from low fluid level operation. Hard to say without inspecting it, everyone has different driving habbits and ways of taking care of there vehicle = way too many variables on what actually went wrong.