nobodyknowsit

I have a 2005 e320 cdi dealer maintained by the previous owner. I purchased with 242,109 miles on it. Evidentally the dealer doesn't check for injector leakage. I discovered the black death on 5 of 6 cylinders. 4 cylinders you could not see the injector hold downs or bolts. I ordered the copper seals and stretch bolts from the dealership. The trick I learned was to loosen the injector hold downs and let the car run til it pops the injectors loose. Having the engine warm makes it easier to remove the injectors as well. Just be careful not to loosen the hold downs too much. After hours of scraping the black death, injector removal went easily, cleaning out the injector hold down bolt hole was a bit more difficult, trick is to clean em good and make sure they are 100% dry and clean inside. Where I live there was not a m6 thread chaser to be found to clean the threads so i used carburator cleaner, air compressor air gun, small drill bit to pick the hunks of crud out with. I reamed the injector bottom in the head with a reamer tool I got off ebay. Cleaned up the seat, put some antiseize on the injector body and installed it. Torqued the injector hold down to 5 ft pds and then 90 degrees and another 90 degrees. At operating temperature I had no more ticking or leakage. Hardest part of the job was cleaning the black death off the head. Gotta be careful because the valve cover is thin aluminum. I posted this to help any of those going through the same mess and hopefully some other guys will chime in with their ideas as well. Thanks again to everyone on here. I have used the advice from this forum for years. I added bluetooth, sirius radio, voice control just from the advice I have found here. Thanks again guys!

clvincent

that is interesting how you did the repair

thank you for posting about that

glad it is all fixed

boardboy330

Thanks for the heads up. Just popped the hood last night to see a huge mess on my 6th injector. Recently made a trip to NY and back. Was fine before we left.

nobodyknowsit

Ya I am a bit paranoid after driving it anymore. I bet my car leaked for a year or two with how bad it was. When i found my mess I poured water around the injectors and it shot the water 4 feet in the air. :-/ Please post if you plan to tackle the job or have someone do it. Id encourage you to fix it yourself. I was nervous but as long as your patient and careful the job is no biggie. The biggest pain for me was cleaning the black death. Naturally the insulation is not going back under the engine cover after I did my injector seals. Best of luck to you.

boardboy330

So you loosened the hold down bolt and ran the motor til the injectors popped?

nobodyknowsit

Yes sir. They recommend the engine being warm before injector removal anyways. So i loosed it a round or two and let her run. You could see it jumping as soon as it was jumping I shut her off and pulled the bolt, and walked the injector out. Believe it or not removal of the injectors wasn't that bad just be careful not to ruin the plastic upper part. Channellocks wiggling back and forth and slight upper prying of a prybar and mine came right out.

nobodyknowsit

I decided to add the pics of doing the injector seals.

Fatjoe4

I just bought a 05 320cdi (My second) with the worst case of the Black Death yet that I have seen! took me quite a while to get the injectors out.....But the main concern is I bought it non running due to the injector wires being burned/shorted on #1,2,3! I repaired the wires but am having problems building fuel pressure for starting! Has any one else had this happen? Is there a way to test the injector coils /harness to see if something is still fried. I am only getting around 130psi on cranking.

kajtek1

The high pressure fuel pumps on those engines seem to last forever, what leaves 2 possibilities for low rail pressure.
1 injector leaks
-injector not closing
- by flow.
2 pressure regulator on the end of the rail.

Fatjoe4

Ok I'll start with checking the leak down on the injectors. Is there a way to test the pressure regulators with a multimeter?

kajtek1

From what I read, the pressure regulators stuck mechanically. Would the coil be bad, the pressure would skyrocket.
I read from some owners, that tapping the regulator with butt of screwdriver helped.

Fatjoe4

OK, I got the equipment and did a leak down test over the weekend. Injector 1 was just squirting fuel thru the return so I went ahead and ordered a replacement. Is the programming of the injector required for the engine to start? Or can it be run and programmed later? It was a little unclear from the different posts I've read. Thanks for the help!

Maroc_Specops

Plug and play.

jettskiman

Hey I just discovered the #1 injector started leaking. I could smell it in the garage and knew something was up. Caught it pretty early as I smelled it just last week. I don't need to replace the entire injector do I? Just the copper seals I hope. I haven't had time to try and remove it yet but will try the method you used backing the lock down screw a little bit. Not to much build up to clean which is nice and I wont be driving it until I get it fixed.

Smaug6

To loosen the injector from the carbon soak the injector with brake cleaner by getting enough off to access the sides! Soak repeatedly for a day or two! It will help tremendously! The pumps don’t last forever and the valve seats can go bad! Buy a sprinter rebuild from Tampa Bay Diesel imho sprinter fuel injector works but you will need program

Texas Skeptic

I have an '06 e320 CDI with 263k mi that we bought new. Still runs like a top and gets 40mpg on the road. Also looks great since it was garage kept it's whole life. And garage kept in Texas, it almost never had to start in the cold, We took it to New Mexico last week and it was in the low 20's (Deg F) at night. It really, really did not want to start. It would crank fine, catch and run for 1-2 sec then quit. Had to repeat this 10-12 times for it to stay running, spewing smoke and running rough for 30 seconds before it settled down. All was fine the rest of the day. Rinse and repeat each morning. Sounds like a glow plug problem, one or more gone out or a GP control box issue.
When I got it home and started to troubleshoot the GP fault, I discovered the mess known as the Black Death. The #1 injector was buried up to the cover in the junk, and the mess had eaten through the injector wires insulation, discovered after a couple hours of digging out the black mess. I actually think the wires were not shorting with the hard carbonized encasement protecting them, but the cleanup has left them totally shorted. And no, I have not attempted to start the engine with these exposed. Once I repair with heat shrink tubing, then I'll give it a try to see if the injector, or others, is still leaking, then start intensive cleanup efforts.
My independent mechanic spotted this mess 6 months ago at a regular servicing. He found the oil filler cap totally loose and assumed this was baked on oil splashed out of the cap, guess he's never encountered the black death before, despite them being almost exclusively a Mercedes shop that does refurb and resale of older models. I'm not sure if I should have him do the repair work since he didn't know what it was to start with. I also hate to take it to the dealer because, well, $$$$$.
As an aside, I started using this shop 7-8 years ago when the dealer found I had one glow plug out, but recommended replacing them all for an outrageous price. Their rational was if one went out, more would too. This guy changed out just the one, for 1/4 the price per GP. and that's been well over 100k mi ago. If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
I've orderd the parts and tools to fix this, the only challenge is cleaning all the junk out before pulling the injector. Any advice on cleaning methods, products etc?

jettskiman

Ya that number 1 did get pretty bad. Looks like your off to a good start cleaning it though. I was lucky enough to smell mine start to leak and didnt drive it very much so it wasn't that bad as you can see in the pic that I put up above in this thread. I kind of chipped away at it with screwdrivers, popsicle sticks and other tools then taped 1/2 inch piece of pex pipe to my shop vac hose so I could get in to smaller spaces to vacuum bits out. I had really good luck just using carb cleaner and lots of paper towels, Carb cleaner melted the stuff away really nice. I did drive mine and let it get hot because I wanted to loosen the hold down bolt and see if the injector would come out. Mine did with little effort. You want the engine to be hot when you try and pull it so the black death is gooey. When it was hotter the carbon was kind of like tar and cleaned easier I think. You'll have to un-twist those wires for that injector first though and separate them. I think you can get liquid wire insolation now to cover those exposed wires. Will have to be hi temp though. Not sure if that harness is just a short smaller one or part of a bigger one that would be expensive. I laid a piece of tinfoil and a rag over my leak when I took it out to heat it up just so it didnt spray tar everywhere.
I also ordered this cleaning kit off amazon that someone else had suggested
The different size Q-tips were awesome for cleaning around and in the injector hole once you take it out. I sprayed carb cleaner on the Q-tip and ran them in and out of the hole until it was clean. The bolt hole was smaller so I had to use a regular sized Q-tip for it. You can spray carb cleaner in the bolt hole with a rag wrapped around the spray stem so it doesnt spray black crap all over. The Q-tips in that kit have wood sticks so they worked pretty good to clean the bolt hole.
One caution I'll warn you about was when cleaning the injector hole after the injector was removed I dropped one of the smaller tipped cotton swabs down into the cylinder cleaning the very bottom of the hole. The piston must have been pretty far down but luckily the stick was long enough and it didn't drop all the way in. I was able to grab it with a small clamping pliers down in the bigger part of the injector port and get it out. I did show a lot of paper towels in the injector hole once clean to keep other bits from falling in. I never had to use the stainless wire cleaning brushes in mine because it came clean without. I was kind of afraid Id get bristles of stainless down in the cylinder so really I paid 100 bucks for a bunch of oversized cotton swabs but still cheaper than taking it in to someone.
Anyway good luck.