yupyup

Hi Guys,
Here us one that I been searching the boards for with little results. I have a 2000 CLK320 and the head rest (roll bar) are stuck in the up position and the top has stopped working. I was praying that it was a bad relay-but after removing the 10,000 bolts to get at the pump-I found oil. It had leaked out was at the base of the pump. The pump reservoir was bone dry. I looked all over and couldn't see any obvious signs of were the leak was coming from.

Do I refill and try and nail it down? Do attempt to remove the whole pump and try and get it serviced/rebuilt?

Anyone have experience with this?

Klinh

I think the headrest roll bar can be manually reset. As for the pump, it a well known problematic seal on the pump. Since you already saw fluid under the pump then it got to be the pump seal went bad. Depending how slow it leak, you can still add fluid and make it work to check for leak or to put the top up.

yupyup

I think your right. I am betting it is the plastic reservoir connection or other pump connection. I think i will pick up a quart of oil and wrap the connections with a white towel and see if I can detect the leak. I think the rollbars are part of the pump being dry but I will see what happend when i add the fluid.

I will update the thread when I have news.

Klinh

Hmmmmm........sound like a very good safety feature to prevent the owner from using the top cause over heat to the pump when no fluid inside. But mine roll bar did pop up when my pump were dry out due one top cylinder busted. Good luck

yupyup

Turned out to be two bad cylinders...$300 in parts...$600 labor.

I but more fluid in the pump only to find the lid cylinder hydraulic was leaking oil and one other.

I found a independent shop that was willing to take it on. I never would have started in on this if I thought it would grow to $1000 bucks. oh well.

Top Hydraulics

yupyup,

sorry to hear you had to spend so much money on the failure. With your W208, you are actually in the wrong forum, but the solution applies to all CLKs.

In your W208, the first cylinders to go bad are the rear bow lock and the storage cover lock cylinder. It is common that these cylinders fail, as will all the others in your car with time. Unfortunately, Mercedes' suppliers used seal material in these cylinders that will decay with time. The decay is accelerated with higher temperatures (it's a chemical reaction), and humidity and ozone accelerate the decay as well.

Top Hydraulics has developed seals that far outlast the original ones, hence we call our rebuilds "upgrades". You can send in your leaking cylinders first, or use our "core exchange" program, where we ship from our stock and issue a core deposit refund once we receive your core.

W208s and W209s have seven hydraulic cylinders in the convertible top system, excluding the roll bar cylinders. Unfortunately, the problem with leaking seals got compounded in W209s (starting in 2003), where the same material was used with a smaller cross section. That results in the W209 cylinder seals failing at a high rate already.

Again, the good news is that the problem can be fixed, and it is a feasible DIY to remove and re-install cylinders. I am attaching below some pics of W209 cylinders and a diagram with W209 cylinder locations. There are some step-by-step DIYs in the works.

-Klaus

klaus@tophydraulicsinc.com