Mercedes-Benz Forum banner

explosive compression/decompression?

1K views 7 replies 4 participants last post by  atmsmshr 
#1 ·
The auto close on the drivers door exploded loudly as t was closing followed by sound or air hissing in or out.

The auto close on driver's door no longer works, just hissing when engaged but if door is closed manually, no hissing.

I assume some suction/pressure device gave way.

What's involved in this fix?
 
#2 ·
The soft close pneumatic actuator is exposed and accessible on the bottom of the lock mechanism. You will need to pull the door panel. Some folks have managed to patch the actuator back together, others bought just the actuator housing on eBay, others went to one of our parts vendors, others to the dealer.

There are several videos on YouTube showing how to do this repair.
 
#4 ·
The driver of an older Mercedes basically has three choices:
- Learn how to maintain the car, and how to enjoy doing so.
- Find an honest, capable independent shop and pay them quite a bit of money to maintain the car.
- Take it to the dealer and pay them a lot of money to maintain the car.

Yes, there is an airbag in the door. The biggest risk is that you will get stupid and turn the ignition on with the airbag disconnected, which requires the STAR System to turn off the resulting warning. Don't ask me how I know this...

There is a stickypedia at the top of this forum and the other popular Mercedes forum. This is a series of past posts to the forums detailing how other folks have tackled the problems and joys of ownership. A bit of reading there, and a bit of searching on YouTube will give you quite a lot of info on your particular problem. You will find that most folks on here will be very happy to help a complete novice - for a few times. However, many responders will expect you to be willing and able to do research, able to give reasonably good descriptions of the problem, and both able and willing to follow directions.

You will be surprised at how easy the car is to work on in some respects. Much of the stuff that you have to remove to get the door panel off just snaps off and on. A set of plastic body tools (miniature pry bays, etc.) is available at Harbor Freight, and is very helpful.
 
#7 ·
The video on you-tube lays out the removal of the door panel well for your model. My earlier '01 model is slightly different but the WIS instructions cover those minor differences.

My front passenger side soft close has never worked since my purchase in 2012 and the drivers door just quit a month or so ago. You don't need the soft close for the door to shut and lock so I have been putting off looking into fixing the soft close. My window motor on the drivers door quit working recently so this gave me a good excuse to remove the door panel.

I purchased a used motor from eBay which oddly enough came out of a 2001 S430 with a vin number only 61 digits older than mine! Cars could have been sitting in the same lot waiting to get on the boat from Deutschland to the US!

The problem that I ran into was that I could not get the door panel off the door. I tried everything that I could think of to free it up to lift it out. I used a plastic panel removal tool to run along the length of the window seal and found that it was not stuck. I tried wiggling,pulling and pushing all to no avail. I must be missing something.

So short of tearing the panel off the door, I was able to get it bent up enough to access the window motor to change it out. With the panel bent up, I was able to look in and verify that the suction plunger and cup were hanging loose under the soft close/lock mechanism. My original goal was to see if I could figure out a way to re-set the cup and plunger then use a hose clamp to secure them as the second video shows.

Anyway, post back with your final solution and good luck with the door panel removal. You can shop around and buy a whole new assembly for around $500. If you can figure out a way to fix the original that would be great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UepxCXwGitY

Check out the parrot on his shoulder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF6R4MhBVsw
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top