Deleting problematic Active Body Control! CAR WIZARD shows a work around for a fraction of the cost!

welcome back to the wizard shop and today we're going to talk about this beautiful seal 55 AMG right after this [Music] thanks for stopping by and chillin in the wizard shop here again we've got this beautiful 2005 Co 55 AMG in the shop it's all the way from Texas guys this guy traveled quite a distance because he wants Omega auto clinic doing this major conversion for him these years of Mercedes some of the S Class especially the co class has a BC hydraulic suspension on it and they're frequently a plague in a nightmare that's actually what's going on here is that the ABC tandem pump is they call it it does power steering also it does the ABC hydraulic system all in one pump and it was leaking pretty heavily pretty bad and the customer said car wizard do you anticipate there'll be other problems after I get this fixed with the ABC system and I said you can bet on it you're gonna have struts leak you're gonna have file blocks fail are gonna have codes it never ends and it's not just 500 here or 800 there it's 2,000 one thousand four thousand it adds up really really fast the customer said he really really likes this car and he wants to keep it he doesn't want to just dump the car because it's got suspension problems and he actually suggested an idea of a conversion over to coil springs on this car and I kind of looked it up and I said yeah we can totally do that strut masters sells a kit that has all four struts a small electronic module that fools the computer and he eliminates the codes and warnings on the dash but there's a little bit more to it than that we're going to show you guys that first of all let's get Michael over here so you spent many years in a Mercedes dealership have you ever had a customer come in and say hey I've got ABC problems on my car can we throw it in the trash all the time all the time all the time everyone's these systems were really great when they first came out they work really well they're active body control it's a great system but as they get older they just get more and more expensive more and more expensive did you ever have anyone actually have cash ready to have to actually throw the stuff in the trash at at the dealership no not now right no they were usually willing to fix it whenever they were looking for retrofits they were usually going somewhere else it's very easy on this car if you had to fix everything it'd be as much as the value of the car even more than the value of the car easily very easily so Michaels actually been doing the work he has all the struts off and he's been doing all the work we're about halfway done we're actually just waiting on the parts right now but I'm gonna show you guys around what he's done and what the plans are going forward there's more to doing this conversion than just pulling the hydraulic struts off and throwing coil-spring struts on it there's way more to it than that this pump is a tandem pump half of it does your power steering and the other half of it does your ABC hydraulic system to separate reservoirs but one single pump so if you disabled the ABC system and you disconnect the lines to the half of this pump that does the ABC system it no longer will be circulating fluid and it could lock up because it's not being lubricated so you can't just delete the hoses off of this and still use the power steering pump that's where some of the magic comes in or doing research and finding out what will work on here let me show you guys this power steering pump is not out of a 2005 CL 55 it is out of a 2004 EE 500 and it bolts directly in place of the tandem pump it's even able to use the standard serpentine belt that goes to run the ABC pump so one really cool thing about Mercedes is that in different engines they use different applications but they don't redesign the whole drawing board they reuse bolt holes for other systems so we were able to put this pump in all the bolts line up perfectly we did have to have the power-steering pressure line lengthened about seven or eight inches and my friend in Halsted does hydraulic hose repair he was able to just he said no problem I gave him the hose he put crimped in an extension it's perfect now it reaches all the way forward to the e 500 power steering pump we are reusing the power steering reservoir from the CL 55 and we just ran a small length of an elbow shaped hose where the plastic reservoir used to push it on top of the power steering pump that plastic reservoir has been omitted and now it uses the co 55 reservoir in its place no the power steering pump that's on here is used on so many multiple models at Uslan III 50 E 500 ml 350 anything with this style motor would have that power steering pump Mercedes uses that across the board and that's basically what we're doing the power steering pump that's on the tandem pump that we removed doesn't do anything differently or provide any different pressures than what the e 500 pump does so it's it's not gonna change anything it's not going to mess up anything it'll make it able to retain power steering and no longer have to worry about the other half of the pump locking up because it's not having fluid circulate through it so one of the first things you have to delete and convert on this ABC conversion is get rid of the tandem pump and put a 350 or an e 500 power steering pump in this place lengthen the pressure line about seven or eight inches and reuse the reservoir the ABC reservoir will sit empty will not be used anymore all of the lines that go all to the wheels will be capped the little quick connects that's there will just be a cap and that system will sit idle and no longer be used so I'll get this thing raised up and I'll show what we've done so far at the struts themselves [Music] so at each of all four wheels Michael has removed these huge giant hydraulic strut assemblies these are going to get thrown in a pile and going scrap metal I could possibly resell them as good used equipment to somebody but these things fail so regularly I don't want to give somebody something in it last three months and then I get nasty emails so this right here is a quick disconnect hose that goes to that strut I just showed you it's very easy to just move the collar and undo it it's very simple that will receive a plug that's included in the kit so that you don't get dirt in there not that it really matters and there's a little caliper hanging by a bungee cord not by the hydraulic hose which is good I'm glad he did that as you see in this picture the strut masters kit comes with all the struts a module and the plugs if we were just to rip all this stuff out and put springs in it you're gonna have warnings and all kinds of things on your dash the car is not going to be happy at all it's gonna be really angry with you but once you plug in this little module the lights go away it's as if the system is fully functional even though it's not so we've got all four struts removed we'll be replacing them with the strut masters coil over struts depending on the module and we've already done the power steering so this guy will get taken care of he'll be able to drive his car it'll be comfortable tools still have a nice soft ride I've read people that have done this and it's still a comfortable ride but he can enjoy this car from here on out without now this struts leak and now that struts leak and now I've got a code for the valve block over and over and over again if a strut leaks especially at a dealership it's $2,000 per wheel most of that is to cost it apart and the labor everything involved if we had to replace all four struts and the tandem pump the ten of pumps at a dealership is $1,700 just for the pump we could quickly exceed 10 dollars to fix his ABC system completely renovated that is and I agree with this customer with the idea that we don't like to take cash and light it on fire so that's not what we're going to do here we're going to spend the money it's gonna be around four grand to do this job but then he's done he can enjoy the car for many years to come and in about two or three years he'll get his money back because that'll be about what he would have had to spend to keep this ABC system running after that it's he's free and clear so let's take a look at the parts pile here on the floor so here we have the pile of parts that are going in a scrap-metal bin there's the tandem pump which was leaking very very heavily leaking from the front input seal it's just some sort of resonant chamber or some kind of a chamber there some hoses and then we have the struts here all four struts the struts didn't currently have any issues but they will they'll start leaking fluid out and that will be all she wrote 2,000 bucks aside per wheel per wheel that's not per side while we got the car on the lift let's take a look underneath and see if there's any other leaks under there where CDs do have a tendency to have some leaks here there as you can probably watch some of who V's garage there's a lot of his Mercedes this was leaked that's leaking but they're really not that bad compared to a BMW or an Audi or something but there might be a little bit of drip it's here where Michael has been working but let's check to see if there's any other leaks going on oil pan looks nice and clean transmissions nice and dry not too much going on there back here differentials nice and clean nice and dry driveshaft looks okay at some point he may need a new flex disc but it's okay for now so as you can see there's not a whole lot wrong with this car he just wants to get the suspension taken care of and you can really start to enjoy this car and it is a cool car very fast supercharged v8 very very fast [Music] so I'm glad you guys could follow along and show you what's all involved in doing this conversion we're also getting new supercharge of serpentine belt and also the Maine serpentine belt and this guy will be back on the road there are times with certain cars when you want to keep everything all numbers matching original but he wants to enjoy this car without shelling out ten and twelve and fifteen thousand dollars by the time it's all said and done when you get to a point on one of these cars where they're worth six thousand or eight thousand bucks and you were going to put that much into getting the suspension done it doesn't it don't really doesn't make sense it's not a good idea it's not a wise investment what the customer is doing however is a wise investment it will be a lot of money up front to get this done that he will be able to drive his car and have fun with it I don't wanna do any of it and just left the old ones on there his tandem pump will eventually start leaking really bad worse and worse and worse it actually had some codes in it for insufficient pressure being built it was just it was getting a week it would eventually just go flat and the system would have failed then if he tried to sell the car it would be a drastic loss and the next guy would have a huge bill to try to get this thing back on the road again there's many cars that have air suspension especially Range Rovers or there's AIRMATIC on mercedes-benz and I for one champion keeping those systems running and not deleting them because you can get now airbags or different things for a fairly decent price and they're not hard to change out I actually had a white Range Rover that I converted it to Springs because I got tired of the suspension system having errors and I thought it would be good to go but the truth of the matter is is it rode pretty stiff it rode kind of like a truck a pickup truck or something it was pretty rough for being a Range Rover I was never really happy with it and I am I would champion on a Range Rover especially it's worth getting the system working new air compressor bags or checking for leaks things of that nature and getting it working again because it right so nice when they're working this system however is not worth the effort because we're an airbag on a Range Rover you can get them now after market a couple hundred bucks these things are twelve and fourteen hundred dollars per strut an almost two grand for the tandem pump it's just way overkill when it comes to keeping these things on the road with the suspension system repairs so thanks for coming along and chillin in the shop with me checking out the CL 55 don't forget to check the links below there's all kinds of really cool links and kind of tools I use if you haven't subscribed already go ahead and hit the subscribe button we got many more cool videos to come thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Car Wizard

Views: 170,558

Keywords: car wizard, david long, hoovies garage, tyler hoover, car issues with tyler hoover, omega auto clinic, scotty kilmer, car repair, car maintenance, tavarish, Doug DeMuro, samcrac, vinwiki, Hoovie, mechanic, Car issues, BendPak, Active Body Control, ABC, mercedes, benz, CL55, AMG, suspension

Id: uO4-maGqnWM

Length: 14min 27sec (867 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020