New brake pads & shoes

PART FOUR: Rob Hawkins ticks off several jobs this month, but soon discovers more to add to the list.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the same applies to fixing a project car. Apparently simple and straightforward jobs can get drawn out once you start work, and investigating one problem often leads to a whole string of other issues. For instance, we initially thought the brakes on our Mercedes were in good shape, only to discover the front pads were worn and the rear handbrake shoes were cracked, so we’ve now renewed them at our local specialist, Tasker and Lacy of Leeds. The rust around the wiper surround of the rear tailgate could have been fixed with a secondhand tailgate for around £125, but we decided to try a cheaper solution by simply removing the rust, treating the bare metal and painting over it with Frost’s POR15.

The smelly interior has been cured with an air-conditioning bomb and a scrub of the carpets with a cleaning solution. We also loaded the rear with conifers that needed transporting to the tip, but they didn’t refresh the interior as well as the bomb!

So we had been feeling confident that the jobs list for our Mercedes was getting shorter as more items were ticked off. That was until we discovered a worrying problem… It first emerged when flooring the throttle – the gearbox would kick down a gear, but the engine wouldn’t accelerate smoothly. Instead it seemed to lurch like a kangaroo and hesitate. We’ve explored this problem a little further by plugging in diagnostic equipment, which is outlined in detail this month. Hopefully we’ll be able to resolve it, but need some more miles and fault code logging first. And talking of more miles, the magic 200,000 has just appeared on the odometer.