Ever since I have owned my white 190, one of the pulleys that the fan belt wraps round has been slightly wonky, causing the belt to wear and make a slight noise when the weather is dry. On sunny days, it was a bit like a bird twittering. A replacement part was hard to source, so I had left it like that, until a second-hand pulley came my way recently.
I needed to replace the water pump and I changed the pulley at the same time. It is now nice and straight and if I want to hear twittering, I'll have to open the window and listen to the birds :-)
I've also recently changed the switch for the blower. This was causing problems as without the blower, the windscreen would steam up and I couldn't see where I was going.
These kind of things are to be expected as the car is now 23 years old, and these repairs are not related to the fact I run the car on vegetable oil.
A warning light has just started coming up, showing me that I need to change the glowplugs - a job for the weekend, I think. It will give me a chance to try out the new tool set I got for Christmas.
Follow our antics as we run our Mercedes 190d (and now 300td) on straight and waste vegetable oil across Europe to demonstrate the use of vegetable oil as a carbon neutral fuel for cars. Of course new oil is far from carbon neutral but in their daily lives they are run off filtered waste oil, we don't even use pumps its gravity fed only. Unfortunately the laws across europe mean using waste oil is not always possible. See our other blog in the links section for details of the laws.
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Introduction
The project is conceived by the two owners and founders of www.thepayrollsite.co.uk
The cars used are a 1989 Mercedes 190d 2.5l. Bought for £200
The cars used are a 1989 Mercedes 190d 2.5l. Bought for £200
and a 1989 Mercedes 300TD Bought for £450.