Sight Unseen Cheap E55 AMG: Risky, or Worth the Reward?
Five grand and a handshake. Sometimes an E55 shaped bucket of bolts can really pay off or cost you your sanity.
One car in particular that has a huge amount of love here on these forms is the W211 E 55 AMG. It’s not expensive to buy, relatively cheap to upgrade, and still blisteringly fast. There’s a lot to love. But not all of them are in good shape. The youngest E55 out there is still a 17 year old car. So as it happens, a lot of them are suffering mechanically.
Samcrac recently came across an E55 for $5,000. He’s had one before, and loved it, so why not have one again? The car has known brake issues, which was evidenced by the rotors that have seen better days. Changing rotors and pads was definitely in order. And to do this, the W211 SBC brake control should be unplugged. “When you open the doors, (the SBC unit) sends pressure to the calipers to close like a safety feature,” he explains. And that’s a problem if you have the calipers off as you would in any brake pad and rotor change.
It also needed an aux battery, which is just a small powersports battery. But more importantly, it is discovered this E-class AMG has a transmission that was slipping in gear. This has a silver lining, the strong engine is a blessing for this car. But then again the M113K is known for being quite strong. The 722.6 is known for being strong as well. So Samcrac took the “simple problem, simple solution approach. Fluid!
But it’s not always that simple. Because of the layout in the engine bay, and the red cap on what should be the oil dipstick tube, it’s possible that owners could have put transmission fluid in the oil fill. Because of that, the transmission would naturally be low on fluid. Run a gearbox low on fluid for an excessive amount of time and you turn a small problem into a big one.
Typically, the conductor plate is the item to go bad first. It’s a DIY job for the most part, and doesn’t need programming. But it needs an appropriate amount of fluid in order to work. For some reason Samcrac’s car was low on fluid. So it turns out he got lucky. But we think that if you come across a $5,000 E55, you’ll be spending several thousand dollars just to get it sorted.
https://youtu.be/Eznmlc1i0U8?si=T_vD7tXItNfJyV6b
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