As outlined in a previous post, the 450SLC broke down a week and a half ago and the NRMA helped me diagnose it down to a bad coil. Yesterday, my new coil, cap and rotor arrived so I got down to getting fitting them t the car.
A quick test of the new coil had the car roaring back to life, so I swapped the new coil in properly. This job can be done with the tools found in the Mercedes tool roll (screwdriver, 8mm and 10mm spanner), which helped as the car was not near my tools.
I also replaced my distributor cap and rotor while I was there, as the united fitted to the car looked rather worn out. Both ballast resistors seemed fine, so I left them alone. I went with Bosch parts. They have probably been on the car for years.
The end result is a car that starts more easily, has fixed some of the poor running and hesitation I was having with the car. More importantly, it runs! At some point it might also make sense to replace the leads as they seem fine, but a bit old.
Total time was less than one hour and the car is transformed. The last few months I had not been enjoying driving the car as much. Now the car is back to normal it reminds me what a nice car do drive it is. I should have realized something was amiss.
[…] been idling rather roughly and stumbling when taking off from stop. This got a bit better when I changed the coil, cap and rotor – and at that time I noticed that the leads were not in great shape, especially the one to […]