so here we go with the engine tear down and reseal, i pulled the engine from the e300 and powerwashed it, it came out amazingly well.
before
after
got it stripped down to a long block and as you can see it has the old style vacuum pump. the early style vacuum pumps explode, its not a matter of if, its a matter of when. and when these puppies go they barf the guts straight into the timing chain and pretty much destroy the engine. so its a good idea if you have one of these early ones to just replace it right away if you dont know the history. considering ive parted a few 606s i had a new style timing cover, vacuum pump and oil jet which i will show how to replace here.
ass you can see the injection pump gear has a wave too it. thats where the original vacuum pump bearing rides on and its just a roller bearing. the updated old style ones are sealed and tend to last longer.
the stud next to it has a oil squirter to lubricate the bearing, when doing this swap you need to replace the oil squirter with the late style squirter that only has one oil jet out the side to lubricate the chain and slider. i have found on these the easiest way to get them out is with a slide hammer and some vice grips. you could easily get a dowel puller for it as well but since its not going to be reused you can just gorilla it out.
the updated oil jet seals to the front cover via a o ring so as i said you need to install the new front cover from a 97+
also this is a good time to verify your timing. you can do that with the cams and crank pretty easily these chains do stretch about 5-6 degrees but you can actually work around that by basically retiming the engine and getting the slack in the right spots i have found. but you really should line everything up and lock the motor before doing this because you have to transfer the timing pointer over to the new cover.
i found on these older engines they actually have a om603 crankshaft in them and use a actual woodruff key instead of the spring steel for the crank gear and balancer. much more robust because there are horror stories of people chucking the balancer off with moderate power and a stick shift.
this is the 96+ style
crank molt torque is extremely crucial on this style, people say that the 05-06 cdi bolt is stronger which it is by grade but if you torque it right im sure its fine.
i put the newer style non bolt together balancer on and got the timing pointer situated and pulled the head off. the head and prechambers looked good. the glow plugs were completely siezed so that was interesting removing them, i just used my 3/8 impact to break them loose and get the carbon off of them
the head was in extremely good shape, i cleaned all the carbon out of the ports and removed all the prechambers and gave them a good cleaning and reinstalled them.
after that i copper sprayed the turbo headgasket and installed it and addressed the injection pump.
the car was a one year only mechanical 606 so the cam profile in the pump is very sought after, so i set the timing at 14 degrees ATDC and removed the cruise control motor and removed the rs203 pump to send to diesemeken.
i installed a spare 603 turbo pump from a 3.0, due to the 5.5 elements its not going to make the power a stock 606 makes but for now it will be fine just to get it going
i got a dsl1 on order too, they are pretty cheap and i do want to get into tuning on one, you can squeeze good power out of a stock edc 6mm pump and the drivability is alot better at higher power levels. so we will see what the meken pump ends up on but for now i just have to reshim the injectors and fire it up.
