Hey, I'm a newbie here. Thanks for letting me in.

I have an '03 C230K, sedan, automatic, and bone stock with about 190,000km on it. It was running top notch up until recently when it developed an intermittent shuddering at cruising speeds on the highway. Low speed drivability was unchanged. I have done quite a but of searching online and it seems this issue could be a torque converter problem. I recently bought a new conductor plate along with an adapter plug as well as fluid and filter and was going to do that work, hoping that a fresh fluid change and the plate and plug might cure the problem, however after reading about this quite a bit it seems like this may not solve the problem. The car pulls/accelerates very well with no slippage in the transmission being detectable.

Of course before I got around to tearing into the transmission I did have another issue crop up. Something with the wiring to the starter caused a small fire that melted the wiring harness near the starter, so I have to repair the harness, and am in the process of doing that. Once up and running then I have to tackle the transmission.

Anyway, has anybody had similar issues with the transmission? Is the shuddering symptomatic of torque converter problems (lock-up solenoid maybe??)? I always though that when the torque converter was failing, slippage would be the tell tail sign.

Thoughts and/or suggestions? (Besides an LS swap....LOL)

Thx in advance.

J