Thermostat Nightmare
03-21-2021, 02:05 AM
#1
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Thread Starter
Thermostat Nightmare
So recently my car has not been getting to temperature, (2010 E350 Coupe) it would but then as soon as I reached a highway cruising speed the temperature would drop from the normal 88C° to about 80, and it would fluctuate from there to 88 depending on driving actions. My friend has a B7 A4, which never reaches temp, all because of thermostat. Mercedes quoted me $530 for it, it was $65 online, so let’s go. They also quoted me $650 for spark plugs which I managed to do in about an hour. How hard can it be? Absolute nightmare, a literal, seeming endless, nightmare. I went ahead and bought new idler pulleys as well as a new tensioner and belt because if I have to mess with it I might as well replace it, it’s due anyways. The tensioner was some kind of sick joke having to jam a hex key to keep it in the open position, the thermostat is placed perfectly if you’ll never have to remove it, but with some type of fan in the way, it took me hours of yelling obscenities before I finally got two tiny little bolts off. I get everything done, everything is torqued to spec, the belt is on, car looks great, now it’s just time to pour some coolant in and start the car up and make sure it doesn’t explode. It’s going fine, then about 2 minutes later coolant starts POURING out of the thermostat, the gasket was off by about 2mm, had to redo everything. I’m basically just writing this to vent because instead of being able to watch march madness I got to spend 6 hours replacing something that was only held on by two screws and a sensor. I also changed blower motor, that took about 10 minutes and I was done with replacing everything that needed to be done. If anyone reads this, please, make sure the gasket is perfect, double, even triple, possibly QUADRUPLE, check your work so you don’t make the same mistake I did. Thankyou, MB.
