FCSmthree

First off, yes, I've already searched

I recently bought a 95 C36 which I am very happy with, I've always wanted one.

Issue is that I believe the throttle body needs replacing, the previous owner disclosed it, the car will not accelerate/move until the gas pedal is depressed at least halfway, the ASR light is illuminated. etc. He also mentioned the breaks up at around the 3800-4200 rpm range.

So, there are obviously two options here, either buy a brand new unit and from my understanding is just north of a grand from the stealership or get it rebuilt.

Btw, does anyone have the part # for this? I would like to see how much parts.com would have it listed for.

Second option would be having it rebuilt, from my understanding the harness of the throttle body actuator suffers from the same illness as the engine harness over time. Has anyone had this done? Where and how much, and how are the results?

Here's a website I found of a guy in NY, based on his description and vids, he seems knows his stuff and a TB rebuild/rewire price from him seems reasonable.

http://restoreyourmercedes.com/Merce...%20rewire.html

Thanks in advance, I've been reading through the W202 AMG forum for the last week learning more and more about these temperamental, yet rewarding cars to drive. Hoping to get this issue resolved and see how quick it is

503C43 ////AMG

PM Jumph4x, he is the resident expert on the C36 and its wiring issues.

jumph4x

Heyyo,

Advice from someone with extremely limited electrical knowledge: do it yourself. Takes an hour or two to take out of the car, another two or three to rebuild and one to put it back in.

Thats a very conservative estimate, doing it first time and working slowly.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jumph4x...7623222462932/

You will see pictures in there I snapped while rebuilding mine. All it is, is wires shorting out.

FCSmthree

Thanks for the advice and the pics!

Actually looking at it yesterday with my Dad, found a vacuum hose that was loose, connected it and idle was definitely smoother, still will not start revving until after depressing gas pedal at least halfway however. Will take the TB out this week and take a look at the wiring...

On another interesting note, have a 94 E320 donor, looked at the TB and it has the same exact part no. as the TB in the C36. Are they in fact the same part? I thought the C36 had it's own specific TB....

jumph4x

C36's share throttle bodies with other ASR enabled Mercs, I think the E might be one of them.

Definitely DO NOT have a special P/N there, you can easily confirm this through StarTek. Use it.

FCSmthree

Awesome! Will pull the TB from the E320 and take a look at the wires, if they're good, will swap out and see what happens...

I'm more familiar with W124s, I've never heard of the TB's on the 124s breaking down, if both chassis use the same part, why do the W202 harnesses breakdown and the W124s do not?

The only thing I can think of is the W124 has a larger engine bay therefore trapping less heat, but that's just my best guess....

Thanks again for the quick reply

DRBC43AMG

I believe MB had a not so brilliant idea to use degradable wiring covering in their harnesses. True to the word the wire protection falls to pieces and dust. The MD engineers quickly came back to the traditional method of making harnesses. No major problems since.

FCSmthree

WORKED!!

Swapped the throttle body actuator from the 94 E320 donor car that I have and now no more issues, ASR light is off, no more hesitation, no more revving at half throttle only.

Car is very responsive and strong, pulls hard

Funny thing is the donor car has 180k on it, checked the wiring of the actuator and looks intact and the wires look good, re-taped it for protection.

Thanks for all of your help guys , this is why I love this forum.

thundercles

weird, I found a 94 e320 at a local salvage yard that I have been snagging parts from for my c36 periodically, this one was non-ASR, I was going to try and grab the throttle body off it on the day that I pulled the wire harness off it. I ran outta time before the place closed while I wrestled with the intake, the problem is I was trying way to hard to preserve that ETA boot since mine got totally shredded. In the end I found the best solution for that ETA boot is just get a new one, I called the carquest down the street, gave them the part number for the ETA boot, they said they'd have it in a couple hours, and shot down there and was well worth the 26 bucks, I didn't realize how shot out and brittle mine was in comparison with how it is supposed to be, so that's my two cents off topic a little bit on pulling the ETA, don't be **** about keeping that boot in tact on top of it if you are gonna wind up wasting a ton of time...

So anyways, I ran outta time while I was trying to rip that ETA out even though it was non ASR I figured it would still come in handy, pull-a-parts places are extremely cheap you just gotta find the right car and be the first one to yank the part you want out. I discovered that the hard way as the next time I went to that salvage yard someone else had grabbed the entire ETA/ETA boot and just about anything else they could get out of there that connected to the ETA (must have figured out that this place tends to count just about anything that attaches to the part you are buying as part of it like I had)

But anyways I actually had a real point, and that is from my experience accumulating cheap replacements over time reguardless of whether or not I needed them at the time (think I'm gonna pass up basically free spare relays by tacking it on with a part I'm pulling that I need, ya right those things are expensive. Every time I grab something off that car I grab about anything expensive I can quickly detach from the engine and have developed quite a little pile of spare components for the future.) is be a little cautious swapping parts between the e320 and the c36 (and probably the c280 as well) it does have the m104 but I noticed some slight differences some of which one wont catch unless they scrutinize all the parts from the 320 carefully before considering them the same as the c36 parts. I grabbed a spare chain tensioner from that 320 that looked damn near identical, in fact I thought it pretty much was identical except that the top part didn't screw in flush. I borrowed seals off the 320 tensioner and was even thinking of mixing and matching parts from each, but I had a huge pressurized oil leak after I did this and when I got that tensioner back out I realized that the parts are very very slightly different, but different enough that the seal from the 320 tensioner did not work effectively on the c36 tensioner. After noticing that I took both apart and did a side by side on the individual components and found that pretty much all the parts of the tensioner were identically designed but slightly different in size by just a few millimeters in each case. They totally looked like they were composed of at least some of the same parts at first glance, but it was not so and I had to wrestle that goddamn tensioner again as a result (I still think getting that back bottom bolt off the fuel rail is the most ridiculously tedious c36 task, but the tensioner is probably a close second in my book. Anyone who finds themselves cussing at either of these two parts should realize there pretty much is no good or easy way to do it that you are somehow missing, we all cuss at those tasks. I don't even put a bolt in the back bottom on the fuel rail cause it took me more time to get that one out then the rest of the bolts holding the fuel rail and intake manifold combined. I got it out with a small allen wrench about an eigth or quarter turn at a time havingt to reseat the allen wrench between each turn.) anyways I digressed again, the point is I've replaced a lot of parts in my c36 with parts from a 320 and they are usaully the same but every now and then you get thrown a curve ball so if there isn't a part number printed on the parts at least compare them to each other closely.

On another note, those who were very perceptive noticed that I said I specifically set out to the scrap yard to pull the harness out of that 94 320, yet I said I have a 95 c36. Well I don't know if 95 was the beginning of the treehugger wiring or if this car in the scrapyard had already had the harness replaced, but there was a spectacular harness in this car, spectacular enough that it was worth pulling and modifying to go into the c36. It was actually a lot easier then you'd think, the harnesses were once again nearly identical except it was longer so I had to fold and tuck when putting it in the compartment. There were also a couple connectors that were different, I just cut those off the old harness and spliced them onto the 320 one. There was one bundle of wires that was completely absent from the 320 harness, which was that one that comes out with the front cover group but keeps going and pops down under the alternator. The 320 harness did not run independent wiring to this so I just cut that whole wire with connecter clear out of the old harness and spliced it right into the car's wiring. I feel I made at least one very big improvement on the original harness design in that I decided not to have my harness pop down under the intake manifold and snake around down there simply to get the grounds for the fuel injectors over to the grounding boxes on the driver's side. I have not clue what kind of sadist decided that was a good idea, but I just ran those grounds directly across the top to that grouding box. Due to this the harness basically sits completely on top of the engine and never goes down to the bottom and snakes around. There are only four wires that connect between the top and bottom parts of the harness (I left the bottom part of the wire harness alone apart from bridging these four wires) so I now keep the top and bottom engine harnesses seperate and snagged a hard drive power plug extension (cause it had both the male and female connectors) and made a snazzy little new connector for those for wires between the top and bottom harnesses. Now I can remove the entire main engine harness from my c36 in about 10-15 mins, wheras the original wiring harness design was nearly impossible to fully remove without cutting wires at some point. I tried to fully remove it, hit a pretty big barrier when I noticed the last wire I needed to disconnect (I was deep under the car at this point) turned and ran right up next to the transmission connecting somewhere on top of it, impossible to get to without dropping the transmission. So that's another of my two cents, if you decide to do the harness replacement yourself, do yourself a big favor and seperate the top and bottom parts of the harness from each other and fasion a connector to attach them, as I said if you just reroute all those injector and other assorted grounds directly across the top this can be handled with connection of only 4 wires. The e320 harness I pulled is absolutely fantastic once I updated a couple of the connectors that were different, the wiring that goes to the coils has all kinds of crazy reinforcement which leads me to think this harness was a replacement in the salvage car. Basically all the extremely weak design points I noticed in the old harness over my many attempts to just repair it rather then replace it seemed to be compensated for on this new one. I took a lot of photographs while I made the c36 harness from the e320 one intending to do a guide. I still have the photos I just have to write the guide to go with them.

richut92

I have the same issue with a 96 c36 with asr can I do the same?

The_mabman_20

Glad you got it sorted out without breaking the bank!