Excellent R129 at Omega! The CAR WIZARD gets to drool over this 2000 SL500 Mercedes

welcome back to the wizard shop and today we're going to check out this really sweet r129 with very low miles let's take a look [Music] so this is a 2000 mercedes-benz r129 or sl500 it's actually probably my favorite mercedes-benz model it's up to date it's got modern conveniences but it's not so complicated like the one mrs wizard had the 2004 sl500 where it had so many gadgets and stuff on it these are still simple but yet they got modern conveniences and they look really really cool this one just came in for some oil leaks and also the air conditioner is not working we did connect our ac machine and verified it had full capacity freon so there was no reason why it shouldn't come on it was time to electrically dive into this thing i'll show you guys here in a minute what we did to get the codes there's actually codes you can get on these cars without hooking up a scan tool you can do it right there on the dash it's very interesting but first let's go ahead and open the hood okay guys we got a new gopro we're trying it out you can let us know in the comments did it turn out good or did it turn out bad so here we go so this one came in and actually we found the oil leak was missing its valve covers it just literally drove in here without any valve covers on it car wizard i'm just kidding guys he had you guys for a second didn't he the valve covers are actually over here the gaskets were leaking all over it was starting to drip on the exhaust it's kind of a common issue on these when they get aged this one doesn't have a lot of miles but it does have 21 years of age one thing that really impresses me is how clean the rocker arms are they're not stained with nasty tarnished old oil they actually still have their original aluminum color so that tells me this vehicle was serviced very well this is the m113 engine i believe is the five liter these are very very good engines they got good power they're reliable they're not too horrible on gas if you keep your foot out of it but most people can't with these cars and i don't blame them but you can see all the room around the engine even around the back everything is so easy to get to these cars are made to fit the s600 12 cylinder the v12 but when you don't have the v12 you have a nice big area you get all the way around all four sides of the engine one other feature on the hood of these cars it allows you to open it really really far there's that side that's one cool thing about the older mercedes is they are made to be worked on look back here guys you can see the transmission bell housing you can see everything i'm glad it's that way because the crankshaft position sensor is right back there those are common on these to fail and cause a no start condition and they're really easy to get to also as you can see we've already started on the job we've got the approval we're gonna do the valve cover gaskets to take care of the oil leak we're also going to do all 16 spark plugs while we're here and have everything apart yes that's right guys if you're looking for an sl500 of this year range it does not have eight spark plugs there are sixteen two for every cylinder i'll show you guys over here there's one two three four five six seven eight on one side of the engine there are eight more over here i've actually had people with dodge rams with the hemis which had two plugs per cylinder and also these cars some of my buddies that work in the auto parts business say every time a customer comes to get a set of plugs for one of these they think in their mind eight plugs and when they tell them it's going to be 140 in spark plugs the people go crazy they're like what like bro you better go recheck yourself there's 16 on these sure enough they always come back i guess you're right oh my goodness i never knew that a lot of people don't know that that's why i'm telling you guys so that's pretty much all we're doing under the hood everything else is like new condition it doesn't need anything else so the ac wasn't turning on and on these cars you don't even need a scan tool to get the codes to get a very quick answer of what's going on i'll turn the key on and our hvac control head will turn on right now it's on low and it's going to turn on the fan and do everything it's supposed to do but what you do is you hold rest and defrost for two seconds probably three seconds now we're in diagnostic mode dia and you can go through look at the different codes you can end it there's all kinds of different buttons and things you guys can google this and get more information actually list of codes and everything that could be wrong there's various buttons you can push and you go through and actually find the code what's wrong so based on the codes that we got on that control module we were able to verify that our evaporator core temperature sensor which is right here was bad this tells the control module how cold the evaporator core is getting if it should shut off if it's getting too cold or not cold enough or and when this goes bad the computer doesn't know which way to go so it just says screw it i'm not even going to turn on the ac you're not even allowed to have the ac right now i'm not going to give it to you all because of this that's our computer age stuff that goes on anymore it's actually right down there by the gas pedal it's very easy to get to it's up there in the hvac box it's actually not hard to do at all we'll get this replaced clear the codes out of the control head and we'll have ac again that's all it takes okay ladies gents here's the surprise it has 57 000 miles on it that's it that's just crazy for as low of miles as this is and of course it has classic mercedes gauges up there if you look at the dash again another garage princess she is living inside again nice wood interior just classic classic mercedes mercedes doesn't change what they do very often and that's what gives them that classic design of being you know a mercedes it does have nice leather seats it does have nice leather on the door and it does have some nice wood accents the back seat which is actually bigger than what it was in my sl500 but again no place to actually you know put a person not meant to but does have some nice space back there so you could definitely pop some packages back there the one thing that is different from the one i had is that mine had tiny little baby seat belts to keep whatever your packages were from you know blowing around if the top was down the back deck looks really good mine did have some issues where it started to curl and peel off of that back lid but not in this case this is actually a true headliner it is a hard top convertible so when you want the top off this whole baby comes off and you have to store it in the garage so can't just go topped off on the fly so as always ending up that steering wheel it's looking really good classic mercedes all the way around on this package let's get this up in the air one other thing we're going to replace under the hood while we're there is the heater valve this is a mono valve that doesn't have dual climate control but there was a code also in the hvac control head for this being faulty it was currently working but the customer said if there's a code there's been an error in the past he said just do it to replace it let's just go ahead and get it done it's here let's get it over with so we're going to be replacing this as well a little heater valve as you can imagine magic mike is actually doing the work on this he's a very good mercedes mechanic he did it for seven or eight years at the dealership but even he remarked when working on this car that a lot of the bolts even still have their cad plating on them it's like it's brand new from the factory this is really a top-notch r129 and like i said it's my favorite mercedes model of all of them it's just a really clean classic design let's go ahead and get this thing in the air and let you guys see how nice it is on the bottom [Music] so let's see if the theme up above of spotlessly clean also applies on the bottom we do have the belly pan and everything off so we can take a look the serpentine belt looks good not a drop of oil anywhere it's been cleaned up from the little drips it did have from the valve covers but it wasn't dripping all the way down here it was just starting to leak check our thermal clutch fan feels good our radiator is nice and dry the condenser is not leaking uv dye out which is good go ahead and move over to this wheel the brakes are about 60 to 70 percent remaining nice and tight go to this side brakes are the same everything looks good there sway bars are not loose if we look up in here where the you can see there's a little bit of wetness on the exhaust manifold flange there that's where our valve covers were starting to leak can cause kind of a smell and oily smell that will be solved with the new gaskets we'll move back here to the transmission again it's not a drop of anything perfectly dry transmission pan perfectly dry even the motor mounts look good they're sitting up nice and high i can always look at these heat shields if they're sunk right there we're starting to touch the mount then i know they've sunk but it's not here's our catalytic converters stock exhaust our transmission mount is also good it's not sunken down like so many of these are with with age on them the flex disc looks good things nice and new looking our exhaust goes back two into one right here our flex disc here also looks good nothing dripping on the differential the cv boots look good our brakes are also about 60 back here everything's good sway bar links bushings are tight everything's good over here same thing on the brakes sway bar's tight the shocks are not wet leaking any fluid and nothing loose there there's a spare tire a big heavy muffler i've actually taken these off of some of these cars where customers wanted a different muffler and these mufflers are so heavy i mean they're like 40 pounds or something it's crazy check the tires real quick so these tires are from 2010. you can see right there it says zero 710 so i will let the customer know that although the tires have tread life left in them they are 11 years old i'll leave the discretion up to the customer whether he wants new tires but i would recommend that he gets a new set of four let's go ahead and get this thing on the ground [Music] so let us know in the comments how we did on the gopro camera we're trying it out see how well it does and based on how well it does is whether or not we'll keep it around but this car didn't have a whole lot to do because of the low miles it's been serviced it's in very very good condition it's going to be right around 1500 bucks will take care of valve cover gaskets all four of them because there's two main ones and then on the valve covers themselves there's two small pcv style covers that get silicone those also have to be resealed that takes time all 16 spark plugs a heater mono valve also the evaporator temperature sensor and the inspection it all adds up really fast and the parts are not 50 dollar parts they're kind of expensive so 1500 bucks and get this thing sorted it's totally totally worth it on this car i definitely would go for it but before this car is done probably halfway or the end of this week i thought you guys would like to see a video on it i know you guys like to see these low mile cars that are just in pristine condition they're very hard to find if i had the cash and i wanted to buy one of these right now i wouldn't even know where to look euro asian bob could probably find one but then this one just pops out of the blue hey do you want to service my car and it's like this is a museum piece it's like wow where was this where's this thing been all my life it's amazing guys if you're curious what kind of tools you're going to use to work on this r129 check my amazon affiliates link in the description below we get a small cut and we really appreciate it and make sure to hit the subscribe button because there's many many more videos to come thanks for watching you

Channel: Car Wizard

Views: 159,018

Keywords: car wizard, david long, hoovies garage, tyler hoover, car issues with tyler hoover, omega auto clinic, car repair, car maintenance, Hoovie, mechanic, Car issues, BendPak, Car trek, mercedes, benz, sl, sl500, R129

Id: n-x22QkvdfA

Length: 15min 17sec (917 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 28 2021