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My 1st Benz - Maybe??

854 views 8 replies 6 participants last post by  rondor2 
#1 ·
Local man (Atlanta, GA) is selling his '76 450 SL which he has owned for the past 5 years. The car has 74,000 original miles with supporting doct.'s. The car has been sitting & not started for the past 18 months in an open carport. The owner advised that the car has not been tuned in 3+ plus years.
First ground up look; it is extra nice in & out. I did not inspect the under carriage for possible rust problems.

My snag is; the motor has a steady skip from idle thru static accelaration. I realize that in addition to gas the car gas The owner says it's due to it sitting and having old gas. My first look at the car was also the first time the car had been started in 18 months; according to the owner.

O.K. let's say that the skip is caused by a combo of gas & tuning what else could be causing the car to skip? I do understand the general mechanics of auto motor operations but i have absolutely zero knowledge of gremlins in this Benz model or for that matter any Benz model. I want to avoid buying a car that may have multi $-K problems. Thank you for reading & replying to my topic.
 
#2 ·
All depends

Is the price reasonable? The skip could be a lot of things. Acompression check would eleminate some of the more expensive possabilities. I would guess the odds are in your favor but still a gamble. A major tune up is a certain and could produce wondorous results. I would take mechanical problems over major body and interior ones any day. How hard was it to start after sitting outside for 18 months?
 
#3 ·
18months is not really that long for it to be sitting, by skip do u mean missfire as this is fairly common with the old 450 ironblocks and will usually just be a fouled spark plug.

Or is the skip where it starts about about 1000rpm and without touching the accellerator it goes up to 2000 and then "skips" and drops back to 1000 to do it all again? That is another common problem and is just a vacum leak causing it to idle to high and the ECU cutting fuel thinking your driving and its over run cutting to save you fuel.

Other then that the ironblocks are bullet proof and i can say with almost 100% certainty that there will be nothing wrong with the car after 74,000 miles, most will still be running strong after 500k miles with only general maintenance.
 
#4 ·
Thanks for the input been out of town. Honestly his first offer price (no counter offer by me) of $4.5-k was surprising so i did put a small hold deposit b4 going out of town which is good until the end of the month.
The body is near flawless and even though the car was very very dirty i cleaned a couple of spots on the body and the silver paint was in first class condition. The interior was like new; the dash pad including wood inserts looked new, all the instruments worked & the lens were without scratches, no heavy wear showing on the driver or pass. seat, the carpet was near perfect under the original floor mats. The only body flaw is the rubber on the bumpers.
The car was no so hard to start but it took several trys b4 the engine would idle and even then the engine needed an little added throttle to stay running; not full time throttle but from time to time it was needed otherwise the idle would become rough and the motor would shut down. The idle never jumped up/down as you described. The idle problem went away after the engine came up to operating temp or what i guessed to be the right temp. By the way what is the consider an acceptable rpm's @ idle? But the skip did not go away. I plan on going back for another look and more in depth inspection on sunday. I don't want to put your feet to the fire but based on what i have told you do you thinks his offer price is; high, low or market correct? I will post my on going findings and i am sure more questions so please stay tuned. Thanks again
 
#5 ·
Additional note on skip/misfire: the way i would describle the skip would be as if there were alternating bubbles of something foul or bad running in or thru the engine let's just use gas as an example; it's bad gas, good gas bad gas, good gas. I am not saying it's the gas but one thing for sure the skip or misfire was steady and unchanging in it's rhythm. I hope this makes sense.
 
#9 ·
From all you have said it sounds like a decent deal to me. Normally people have an amounti n mind below their first asking price that they would accept. Odds are pretty good a tune up would make the car pretty decent. I personally like to look at dirty cars because the owner is not trying to cover something or distract you with a bright shine
Ron
 
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