Getting An Abandoned & Ultra Rare Pre-Merger AMG Started After Sitting For 27 Years! Will It Drive?

hey guys welcome back to legit street cars so i got a call this morning from my friend mark from young timer's garage that a very special car that he bought sight unseen showed up last night about a week before it was supposed to and he wants to dig right in exploring this car of course i have to be here this thing is so so cool a pre-merger amg 500 sel with 30 000 miles on it so i came out here i kind of lost my voice over the weekend i didn't even really get cleaned up or prepared for this but i ran by the shop grabbed a bunch of tools and in this video we're gonna explore this car see what we can find and try and get it started so without further ado let's go talk to mark see exactly what he bought and then we're getting into this so here it is a 1984 500 sel pre-merger amg package with 30 000 miles it hasn't run in 27 years mark what did you do what'd you get yourself into here what's the story well it's got a really cool story behind it uh turns out the original owner that special ordered this car from mercedes-benz then later had uh amg do some work on it he was sent to jail for life so the car ended up being on the used car lot for uh mercedes-benz and uh someone else saw the car and purchased it and then they ended up uh having some issues with it and that owner then passed away and the mechanic just ended up taking possession of the car and here it is today so it's a pre-merger amg with a lot of cool accessories and we're going to try to dig into the engine and possibly find out if it has a pre-merger amg cam on it and that would be really cool because that means you know it's got a higher compression engine so yeah so this is a a gold over uh tan interior and uh 30 000 original miles so you can't really go wrong hopefully it'll fire up after sitting for uh 27 years on the lot we'll see what it takes to get this thing going uh should be pretty fun though so mark was able to verify that this does have the amg body kit from back then from 1984 1985 it also has a special amg suspension but what we need to find out is does it have the amg engine so some of these had the amg treatment done to the engine and we're going to find that out by removing one of the valve covers and seeing if amg is stamped at the back of one of the cam shafts if it is that means this thing has amg cams it's a higher compression engine it's a higher output engine and that means this car is a lot more valuable so this 126 chassis is so cool it has heated and reclining rear seats look at how nice these things are and then just like my 325i bmw these things look to have been covered since day one with original mercedes wool seat covers look at this look at the leather the bolsters are perfect there's nowhere at all the interior's like going back to 1984. even the headliner is in excellent excellent condition but it's got no battery right now so we don't know what's going to light up and come to life and i really want to test out those rear seats so let's do something about that all right so mark was going to head out and try and find a battery for the mercedes but the battery in his volvo is totally dead no lights coming on at all but luckily i carry the best portable jump pack with me anywhere i go guys i've tried them all this is the one to get the fantic t8 apex 2000 peak amps check this out we'll connect this negative lead it's going to tell us why this car won't start it's only at two volts now most of these little jumpers will require a lot more voltage than that to even try and start your car so it needs to sense a certain amount of voltage to work not this guy it's got an override you just hold the light and the on button and we have 15 volts ready to go mark do the honors and the t8 apex will start even the biggest and highest compression engines my caprice ppv is totally dead it's literally reading at no volts but we're gonna bypass that give it 16. and let's hear it come to life and the features of the t8 apex basically never end it's got a super bright led light some flashers as well it's got two-way fast charging meaning that you can charge this to a hundred percent in just an hour and a half or if you only need one jump start you only need to charge it for 10 minutes and it'll power up all of your devices this has enough juice to charge an iphone six times and the best part is you guys can save 15 off your very own fantix t8 apex charger by clicking on my link in the video description box and using my coupon code so a big thanks to fantix for continuing to support automotive content creators like myself now we got to use this guy to power up the 500 sel because mark's not back yet and i can't wait to see if those seats work so see what happens here there we go we got 15 bolts ready to go we don't need that many though for these seats and check out the keys and we have the original owner's manual as well all right so here we go not going to try and start it or anything oh it's making noises it's making old mercedes noises all right so here we go yes are you kidding me look at that so cool i gotta experience this [Music] oh this is the best thing ever this is the best thing ever 1984 500 seo the year i was born this is beautiful so comfortable guys it's like being in a time machine right now i cannot wait to see if we can get this engine started and dare i say possibly driving i don't want to get my hopes up but this is too cool all right so mark came back with a used porsche battery that he borrowed from a friend so that is going to have to do and what we're going to start off with now is checking over the fluids we're going to bore scope the cylinder make sure it's not rusted out and basically a bunch of preliminary inspections before we try and crank this thing now we also need to figure out which engine this is this is gonna affect the value of the car so it could be the factory five liter untouched and they just did the suspension and body kit upgrades at amg or it could be a 5.4 liter so bored out with different cams there was also an option for a 6 liter dual overhead cam engine which we know it doesn't have that because the valve covers would be much wider so if this has amg stamped into the back of the cams then it's most likely the bored out 5.4 liter so anyway without further ado let's take a look at the oil all right let's take a look it hasn't ran in 27 years it's a good chance it has really old oil in it yeah okay it's there it has oil it doesn't really smell too fuelly either so it's a good chance it was just normally maintained and then it just sat for 27 years and we found a bunch of stickers here as well and i always love finding stuff like this so it looks like they serviced the coolant in october of 1986. i found this on the door so it looks like 1980 but i think that's february 21st 1990 it had 20 000 miles and they changed the oil mobile oil possibly so 10 000 miles since 1990 listen to that ah these things are just such beasts look at the door latch mechanism i mean they weren't messing around man these things were built so well and it's easy to see why we have the proper engine oil level this engine is not leaking anything at all it's bone dry and take a look at these amg shocks and the white coil springs so in the 80s amg would sometimes cut the coils and then just paint them white and it looks like that is what they've done here it's got a little bit of a lower ride height and they are white so very very cool amg history going on right here and even though it's holding air it's definitely gonna need some new tires that's for sure all right we're gonna bore scope the engine i swear but i'm just geeking out over this car and i'm underneath by the fuel filter and the fuel pump right now and you can just see how clean this car is underneath as well and something we might have lucked out on is that someone disconnected this hose right here which means they may have drained the fuel which would be perfect because 27 year old fuel is not going to ignite so we'll hook that hose back up and see what we can see in the tank as well and then get some fresh fuel in here but check this out on the bottom of the rear bumper you can see right here it says amg and this is indicative of a pre-merger car because this amg is just a little bit different than what we see right now it's gone through a couple iterations and i think this is one of the earliest so very very cool to see this in person i've only seen this in pictures online but this definitely looks like a 1984 amg bumper we keep discovering stuff on this car on our way to pulling the spark plugs and right underneath the lip spoiler you can see here amg that looks a little different than what we saw on the bottom of the bumper and then it's got the chassis code 126. very cool all right here we go let's pull this plug wire off and here we go well it's not rusted it does look a little oily possible fuel it's pretty fouled out and dirty um but it's a good sign that this isn't rusted out it gives us hope that water didn't get into the cylinders or anything like that so not bad overall let's get the boroscope in there all right here we go inside of one of the cylinders okay there's the cylinder wall and there is our piston piston looks like it's got some carbon on it the lighting is not the best right now just depending on what engines we're bore scoping sometimes we can get a good look at it and sometimes we can't well anyway what's important here is that we can see the cylinder walls right there so at this point i would feel pretty comfortable with fogging out the cylinders pouring a little bit of oil in there and just making sure these rings are free and then going ahead and cranking by hand this looks really really nice and i've already gone ahead and pulled out all of the spark plugs and every cylinder looks about the same so i'm really happy with the way the cylinder walls look so let's go ahead and fog out this engine while we continue to look over everything else to protect the engine on its first start and to make sure those rings are free we're gonna fog this out with the amsoil engine fogging oil this can is pretty cool it will spray upside down as well all right so with that i'm just gonna go in and spray each one all right so we're gonna go ahead and take off the air box a couple tens i'm really surprised this plastic isn't broken up at all usually this has just deteriorated and cracked all over the place this is looking good though and here it is not too many people have ever worked on this system look at this spiderweb of lines so this is a central fuel injection system it's mechanical fuel injection so it does have fuel injectors but you'll notice there are no wires going to them just a fuel line and they open mechanically and this is the entire brains of the operation well or lack thereof there's really not too much of a brain going on here it's just all mechanical lots of linkage and uh not too many people know how to work on these i had worked on a few but the last one was probably like 15 years ago but i know that these injectors can be cleaned we had a tool when i worked at mercedes-benz where we can clean them out on a bench but let's just hope they're clean enough to fire this engine off so we can tell what kind of condition it's in so right now what we're doing is taking the valve cover off to check the camshafts while the fogging oil is kind of getting in there and doing its thing you want that to soak in there for a while so i think this is the easier valve cover to remove it's just a few tens and i can't wait to see if there's an amg stamped on the cam this is so cool it's like being a colombo detective of cars i love this kind of stuff all right actually we don't have the fuel lines on the passenger side so we're just gonna go ahead and remove this valve cover instead luckily all these wires are nicely labeled you have to be just so careful working on something like this all these vacuum lines are so fragile and they can break at any point look at this though surprised to see this it hasn't completely hardened on us and broken off so that's nice there's only four bolts that hold this guy on let's see if we can snake it out of here without disturbing anything else okay wow wow this engine is clean no wonder that's what it looked like in the cylinders this thing is clean this camshaft is perfect no rust or anything this is beautiful so mark's going to get a mirror because what we need to see is at the back of the camshaft but just look at the inside of this engine this is great single overhead cam you can see the guides there this chain is a little loose but then again it hasn't had oil pressure in so long that may be nothing to worry about there is the tensioner right there so that could tighten up if we get this thing to run okay so here we are back of the cam i don't see anything yeah no marking no nothing unless it's just on one of the cams but you'd think they'd put it on both so it doesn't look to have the amg cams but there is a zero six back there which basically just indicates to us that this is the factory motor that came with the car some guys replace the cam shafts with the euro spec cam and it's worth like 20 25 horsepower something like that so that's okay it looks like they did the suspension and body kit upgrade on this car they didn't touch the engine which mark you know even if they did touch the engine the thing would be slow exactly it's not going to be a fast car it's still a slow cut like even the amg version of this it wasn't breaking any records at least in today's day and age that's for sure so this is an untouched engine it looks like and it does look like it has 30 000 miles it looks to be in excellent condition um so at this point we're going to go ahead and try and turn the crankshaft i don't see any reason why it won't turn um and then from there we got to move on to fuel all right so mark is cleaning stuff up so we can get that valve cover back on i have removed the four bolts from this fan and take this out of here because there's no way to get to the crankshaft bolt with that fan in the way so now we have some room so we can spin this engine over by hand all right guys moment of truth here i have a 27 millimeter on the crank bolt and go ahead try and turn it we have all the plugs out so this should be easy yeah it's turning all right mark i think you got a good one man yeah this is great so cool oh this is like butter no issues at all here and i've seen a lot of old engines with rusted cylinders and you don't even want to try turning them or you could break all the rings this is perfect let's get this thing back together um we have to see if it has any fuel in the tank which i don't believe it does um hopefully it doesn't we'll hook up that fuel line and see if the fuel pump works get some gas in there start it up i mean try and start it up i don't know how it's gonna run but yeah we're getting there all right so we couldn't find a new valve cover gasket in a pinch for a 126 chassis mercedes as you can imagine it's something we have to order but this gasket doesn't seem to be in the worst of conditions so we're just going to roll with it now it's super easy to replace later so with that we're sealing this engine back up there's easy going back in yeah you gotta kind of shimmy it on there there you go nice and four bolts four bolts that's all that holds it in all right guys so i'm replacing all of the spark plugs right now and you're probably used to seeing a spark plug like this the wire would slide over but with these old school wires we actually have to screw this off and expose the threads and the wire will go over these all right last one screw this guy off [Music] okay last plug is complete now let's get these wires back on and it's so nice that everything is labeled actually like putting spark plug wires on these threaded ends more than the other ones it just feels like it's clicking in better and i just messed up the order and you know for sure that it's on the plug sometimes the other style ends of the plug will wear out and you're just not 100 sure it's making a good connection it's usually on the cheaper plug wires though [Music] all right it's hard to see underneath there if that line is the one that goes directly from the tank so we're just going to put a tiny little splash of fuel in here hope that it comes right out and there it is fuel is coming right out so they did disconnect the fuel line to drain the tank i'm really hoping they did that 27 years ago and hopefully they also crank the engine over a bunch with no fuel so the injectors are clean as well so all right i'm gonna go hook up that hose and we'll get some fresh fuel in there all right so this hose doesn't really want to go over put a little silicone spray on there we jacked up the car because it was almost impossible to try and do this with it lowered this hose still doesn't want to go over all right so it looks like they put a piece of hose extension on here and it's not the right size it's too small to fit over there so not really sure what's going on but it was definitely clamped on there a long time ago i could not get it off yeah look at that it's literally a piece of pipe they did some kind of adapter a piece of pipe so i wonder if this is what goes directly in here but it doesn't seem to reach so i don't know maybe they had a fuel leak issue here and they just put in a little chunk not really sure but we might have a piece of hose that will work so we got a piece of hose here that we cut down that should work i know it fits over this thing i just want to make sure it's going to be snug on this and yeah we should still be able to clamp this down we'll have to fix this later this should be good temporarily though just to kind of get things going all right make sure this side goes here this fits really nice and snug all right there you go hose repair complete let's fill it up all right so we got about three or four gallons of 93 going in the tank right now all right here we go mark is going to try cranking it right now i'm not 100 sure if the fuel pump is working kind of doesn't sound like it is but uh either way we want to crank this up a little bit without it starting so i'm actually going to go ahead and pull the fuel pump relay just in case it does work and we want to build some oil pressure in there get the oil circulating so go ahead mark let's see what happens sounded good keep going yeah keep on going let's crank it for a total of like about 15 20 seconds you don't have to do it all in one shot we'll let the starter cool off but i want to get that oil circulating all right so we did that a few more times and let the starter cool off in between let's go ahead and get this fuel pump fuse in there and go ahead mark let's try it again [Music] it runs we got another one running guys it's unstarted fluid though and it should die yep yeah so we don't have a fuel pump right now it's not working i'm gonna go back there and try and bang on it though dude that is awesome it sounded great though too no ticking noise no nothing you guys thought we had a little bit of slack with the timing change there but apparently cranking it getting the oil pressure going uh was able to put the tension back in with the tensioner and uh it runs it runs this is so cool 27 years pre-merger amg car and it's running beautifully you got to be super happy about this i'm really excited i can't wait to get it on the road is that next yeah i think it should be it should be but we got to figure out this fuel pump thing so i'm going to go ahead and have mark turn the key i'm going to take a little hammer or something and try and beat on the fuel pump and see if we can get it to go so i had to make another fuel hose repair i replaced this one as well it was leaking pretty bad so at this point i'm just going to kind of treat it like a starter we're gonna give it some gentle taps turn the key to position two and just go back and forth with position two all right guys so i think we have a two part problem here this relay doesn't seem to be working with this plugged in and with mark cranking the engine or turning to position two i'm not getting any voltage at the fuel pump and the fuel pump's not working so i have devised a little jumper here you can see here it's kind of sparking i'm just kind of holding it a little bit this fuel pump might be locked up okay so we're gonna have to order up a fuel pump for the 500 sel in order to drive it but we're gonna start it back up with the starting fluid let it run a little bit longer this time warm the engine up just kind of listen to it a little bit longer sounded great the first time but i mean honestly we just want to hear it go again so here we go [Music] guys run so good it's so smooth and so quiet so i've straight up lot driven cars with someone sitting on a fender spraying starter fluid into an engine you can do this for quite some time so this thing is uh smoking up the storm it's all the stuff we put into the pistons still smoking it's getting a little bit better now it's still smoking quite a bit i'm hoping that'll clear up we did spray a lot of the fogging oil in there so that was the initial smoke and yeah i can already tell it's kind of clearing up right now let's kill it that's it wow this runs so good so good feels so good to bring one of these things back to life after so long it makes you wonder like how does a car like this just sit for 27 years without anyone getting the itch to start it drive it do anything someone loved this though look at the custom floor mats with the initials of the previous owner maybe or it could have been the guy that ordered it and went to jail for life that had custom mats ordered oh and you know what we found something else that's really cool in here this thing has like a 1984 radar detector and it seems to be powering up it might work it's the spectrum whistler and look at this thing whistler spectrum face forward wow this is one of the early dealer add-ons most likely i mean whoever had this thing specked out spent a ton of money the normal 500 sel was about 60 000 in 1984. and i'm not sure how much money that is today i'll pop it up on the screen but these were very very expensive cars back in the day and it really wasn't until the 220 chassis s-class that they began to become somewhat affordable okay so we got the 500 sel started but we're not done there mark has already ordered the fuel pump and the relay so in the next video i'm gonna come back out here we're gonna check over some more fluids the transmission fluid the differential fluid look at a few other things and then pop the fuel pump in and take this thing out on its maiden voyage in like 27 years so yeah very excited to go for a cruise in this car i kind of want to sit in the back while mark drives around though because it's just so comfortable back there but who knows what else we discover in that video so i hope you guys will join us for that one and if you guys want an update on the two 1957 190sls i made a video of these when mark first got them uh check out young timers garage mark's channel and on instagram he's documented the cleanup of these cars and it's quite amazing so definitely check that out so with that i hope you guys really enjoyed this video if you did give it a big thumbs up share the video subscribe if you're new and most importantly have an awesome day i'll catch all of you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: LegitStreetCars

Views: 661,608

Keywords: RARE PRE-MERGER AMG CAR, FIRST START, ABANDONED CAR, WILL IT START?, MERCEDES AMG CAR, 500SEC, 500SEL, LEGITSTREETCARS AMG

Id: _59iM-e32oc

Length: 24min 47sec (1487 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 16 2021