Willmkent

When looking at the engine from the hood open where can I find this water bypass 16356 part?

Willmkent

so what we found is that the coolant that was originally drained from the car after my neighbor bought it was red. we are thinking that there was stop leak added to the cooling system because a professional mercedes tech found a small pin hole leak in underneath the intake manifold. he found this leak because he located a big wad of like white cotton stuffed underneath the intake manifold and that is where the leak was coming from and then leaking down the back.....

WTF, this car was setup and sold to him with all of this hidden

RA40

iTrader: (6)

That is one heck of a gasket.
If the prior owner had some hack job like this, I would be very concerned about this car's mechanical history.

LScowboyLS

If you are forced to remove the intake in order to fix this (and God help you if you are) then please do the starter contacts job at the same time, it is easy as pie with the intake out, and you surely don't want to have to do this nightmare pain in the rear job again in 6 months!

I would even consider doing the knock sensors and their pigtails as well.

truer words were never spoken! - your friend got scammed, he needs to go back and get a couple of thousand back from the seller, this manifold fix alone would cost over $1000 in a shop, just for the labor!

Willmkent

Yea this situation is no good, he doesn't want to sell the car and pass it off to someone else, so I think we are going to try and fix it. Is it possible to tig weld the pinhole leak on the aluminum block?

LScowboyLS

Sure, the welding/repair is the easy part - getting it off and back on with all of the crap on top of it, that is the fun part!

please don't forget to do the starter contacts while you are in there, look at some of billydpowe's posts

JohnNoble

Hi all

Thank you for all of the great info that is shared here. I have learned lots about possible diagnoses and just switched off the "Check VSC" lights with the paper clip. How easy!

I have a coolant leak which is visible in the REAR WATER BYPASS JOINT assembly. The part is not much ($123) but it looks like the manifold has to be removed to replace this joint. I was wondering if anyone might know that answer?

Thank you very much!