Recent content by zslnk

The w211 OM648 is an adventure. The car is 'fun' when a Mk4 isn't and is not 'fun' when a Mk4 is. Around town it is large but it wafts around easily. The steering and brakes are heavy. This car rules the highway, the engine is ultra smooth and it is quiet and very comfortable. The torque...

It's a hard decision to sell. I made a similar move this year and sold my wagon for an OM648 MB. It's a highway locomotive. I kept an ALH car for winter use. Good luck.

I have installed a couple LUK 17-050 kits and they have been great.

I haven't put a tank of fuel through it yet. It's been the winter project to get it caught up on maintenance and sorted out. The car has very low miles (59k miles) and appears to have a bad injector that I need to repair. I can't imagine owning one of these with a Xentry/DAS setup.

I sold my BEW wagon with ~680k-km (I bought it new) due to rust issues from a bad VW rust warranty repair job. I kept an ALH sedan for winter service and bought a 2005 e320 CDI with 59,000miles. After years of highway commuting the noise gets to me so I wanted a quiet cruiser.

I had throw out bearing wear that caused this. The clutch fingers wore a groove in the bearing face that reduced the throw. My test was when the car was running I couldn't easily put it in 1st gear, if I turned the motor off, I could shift into gear and restart to proceed.

They set the ball joint during an alignment. When I install them at home prior to an alignment I torque them (minus the 1/4 turn to stretch) and deliver the car with instructions taped to the steering wheel with what I've done and what the final torque spec is. I go to a VW indy for alignment so...

The groove in the throw-out bearing is failure. It can't push the clutch fingers in.

GKN is the OE. They are good quality.

My intake carbon was hard. I started with picks, it wasn't effective.

The original link that shows the ALH head was performed in-situ. There is plenty of room. The best way to keep it clean was to use a sheet around everything in the engine compartment.

I'd look at an injector or injector harness fault. Check VagCOM for fault or bad balance numbers. There might be nothing there until it gets worse.

You can unplug the EGR electrical connection and see if the idle dipping is related to EGR cycle. You'll get a MIL but this is OK. Drive the car for a bit and see what it does with the EGR disconnected. With my BEW, since new, I could sense when EGR was active. As the car aged I ran into the...

The car doesn't make much boost under those conditions. Inspect turbo and charge air system.

Is your throttle flap sticky? The grease inside mine turned hard. The throttle flap is used to make a restriction to draw EGR flow in and during shutdown. I pried the back off the case, cleaned it and put it back together. Mine would cause idle dips and sometimes a low speed, off idle, driving...