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Key won´t turn following auto gearshift replacement

862 Views 9 Replies 6 Participants Last post by  Omi-wan, 
O
Hello,

My father has a 2002 S320 in which the car became stuck in Park. A recovery guy came and knocked it into neutral where it remained with the key in the ignition and he was told to leave it like that. I then found several videos showing this to be a common problem so I removed the shift mechanism and successfully removed the the broken plastic lever and ordered a new aluminum one from the States. Meanwhile I put the mechanism back in (without the over as shown on various Youtube videos as it would appear that some people don´t bother to maintain the Park lock) and the shifter moves freely into any gear (albeit at the moment without the safety of the Park feature/key removal disabled). The black release cable is correctly connected as it came out and I have manually pressed on this and can see the key wiggle slightly this confirms it is still correctly connected at the EIS.

I accidentally took the optical key out and now find that I cannot turn the key to turn on the power, ignition or crank the engine. I have tried all sorts of things but it will not turn. The battery became drained so I am using a jump charger each time to feed the battery with power. I also note that the steering wheel has not locked and I believe this may be related but I thought I would ask here in case I make things worse by trying to lock it and perhaps enabling a reset of the key turning facility.

Can anyone help?!!
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O
Thank you Dave. I have updated as you requested and read through the guidelines.

I assumed it had a steering lock so that is good news. It is possible that the key was taken out while it was in the neutral position at the gearbox end once the entire shifter unit had been disconnected and removed from the car. I
don´t know if this would make a difference although I did try to reverse my steps at replace it in the neutral position and it made no difference. I can´t imagine that there is any connection between the gearbox and the EIS anyway so I don´t think it is this. Could the EIS need some kind of resetting? Can it get stuck does anyone know?
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O
Thank you for all your input. I will do as suggested regarding the battery and get it to full charge and test it to eliminate that possibility. I will then try again with all the electrical connections plugged in (which to be honest, they have been).
With regard to the mechanical cable, I have removed it from the shifter end and can see that by pushing it in, the key wobbles in the EIS but does not turn to give ignition still. I will plug it back in and try again when the battery is charged. I am sure it something straight forward and so frustrating!
Thanks again all. Much appreciated.
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O
So it turned out to be a combination of a weak battery and a non working key fob. After all working fine except for the gear shift, the 'complicated' bit was done and after refitting, I would not have imagined that A, either of those be the cause, and B that both would fail simultaneously. Thank you for all those who helped me with the comments, all of which were valid.
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