Well, it's been a very very long time since we've had flies in the garage. There's two flies, there's two flies in the garage, and that is because we, oh man, these things are annoying. That is because the last time we did any real work in the legit streetcar's garage was on this in the middle of winter. It's been like three months.

This is my cl 65 amg v12 engine project and for those of you who haven't seen the updates that i've sprinkled into videos since then, the reason it's taken me so long to get back to this project is simple. I didn't have the cylinder heads everything bolts onto the cylinder heads and i didn't have them, but now i do and not only do i have the cylinder heads back, but i have the cam shafts as well and they have been coated with an anti-friction material. So if you guys are familiar with the sls black series, lifter buckets they're coated as well, and this is going to reduce friction. Less friction means more power, less wear as well, so those have been done and, most importantly, we have my zlinda heads back from being ported and polished.

So these are the first v12 heads that i know of that have been ported and polished, and now there exists a cnc program for this because of the amount of time that i waited to get them back. So these took, i think, about two and a half months because they had to hand port one of these gigantic heads i mean there are probably hundreds of hours into this thing and then they had to write a custom cnc computer program. So this can be duplicated. So they hand ported the first one and then they were able to put it in their machine and go to town with the program.

So now, if there are other people out there in the v12 community that want to maximize the efficiency of their heads, they can do that and it won't take forever to get them back. So these things are a work of art. Just take a look at this and the flow numbers are unreal. I will put a sheet down below in the description box.

If you want to click on that, you can see what the flow numbers are, but these things flow a lot more air. They should make a ton more power and if you guys, are interested in having this done to your mercedes or amg heads, i'm going to leave a link down below to victory road performance. So that is who had all of this work done. They can take care of your cylinder, head, porting and polishing needs.

They can coat the camshafts as well, they have custom, grinds and - and another thing i can't believe - i'm forgetting this. These are the turbochargers and kind of hard to see, but we have a larger billet compressor wheel, so they actually had to hog out the inside of the compressor housing to fit this wheel. So these should make a lot more power as well, very excited about these. So we have new valve seals as well.

The heads have obviously been checked and resurfaced to make them perfectly smooth and clean and they're finally, almost ready to go back on the engine. Almost we have a lot a lot of cleaning to do in this video and we should probably put a timing chain on there with new guides that usually helps. Let's get this crusty old thing off. I think that's it.

Oh yeah there we go. This is just simply a thermostat for the oil coolers, so that way the oil can heat up and then, when this opens, it sends the oil to the oil coolers and we're good to go. So just like a cooling system, but for oil - and this is one of those parts that has a very inexpensive seal. This is just a few dollars, but if it goes bad, it'll cost you literal thousands of dollars to do with the engine in the car.

There is a ton of stuff in the way right here that would have to be removed just to replace this seal and, as you can see here, it's kind of flattened they shrink over time and they begin to leak. So i don't think we had a leak in this case. I know this looks nasty guys, but if you remember in the other videos we had an abc pump that basically blew up and just spewed oil everywhere, but we're definitely gon na clean. All of this up before it goes back together, we have our brand new seal from mercedes, so we're just gon na use a little pick.

Wow. This thing is really hard there. We go all right, cool yeah, not very flexible. So, let's go over to the parts washer.

If you guys don't have a parts washer, it's no big deal brake cleaner will take care of these little parts, no problem, it's just all melting away, and then i just use a little plastic scrub brush in most situations, and all this dirt will just come right Off and don't forget to clean up the inside too, and this is what it looks like after nice and fresh and clean ready for a new seal. I'm gon na be just lightly lubricating any of these rubber seals with this stuff from mercedes uh. You don't have to get this. It's probably really really expensive.

I fully paid for a couple of these when i left the dealer 10 years ago, but i'll leave. You guys some links for some other stuff you can put on rubber seals, so we're just very very little. You can put them in dry as well, but i've just been doing this forever and i think in some of the work instructions, mercedes tells you to lube. Some of these seals up there you have it.

This part is ready to go on and look at how much that seal sticks out compared to our flattened, pancake seal that was probably going to leak and, of course, i've cleaned up the surface on the block as well - and this was just a couple minutes with Brake clean this thing's, pretty cool, it's got its own little handle here, which is nice. Oh! Does that look good? I love it. Cleaned up the bolts as well. No one's ever going to see this stuff, but i like it clean.

I like it clean. Of course, i'm going to torque everything on this engine, but when i'm reassembling with the impact i like to put it to the weakest setting possible all right next up, we are cleaning this entire disgusting engine and making sure that all of our mating surfaces are perfectly Clean and smooth and ready to go, especially where the cylinder heads lay so speaking, of that per mercedes benz, and this is just something you should do in general - uh we're going to use some gasket remover. So this is a spray. That's going to sit on the old gasket material, it's going to kind of melt it away and then we're using okay, i'm dropping these all we're using plastic razor blades, so you're not going to see me use any drills with brushes on them or anything like that.

We're going to be very, very delicate with this v12 engine, so let's go ahead and spray some of this on the top of the engine, we'll do a top to bottom approach, and this is going to eat some stuff away all right. So when i'm using this stuff, i like to cover up the cylinders as much as possible. You want to be really delicate with these cylinders and we're just going to do a little light mist. That's all you don't have to go too crazy and this stuff will start to kind of bubble.

Up a little bit goes a very long way, so i'm going to do the entire engine and i'm going to let this sit for about 30 minutes. So it can get in there and do its thing and speaking of getting in there and doing its thing, really weird transition, but it kind of works. This is keeps and keeps is a subscription service that makes treating male pattern baldness, easy and affordable by keeping everything online. So you consult with a real doctor from the comfort of your own home, come up with a plan and the treatment is shipped right to your house.

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When you do you're gon na get 50 off your first order, so that's keeps.com, legit or just click. The link in the video description box, any big thanks to keeps for keeping my hair, where it should be on my head and for continuing to support automotive content creators like myself. Now, let's get back to cleaning this v12 engine, this is gon na, be my favorite part of the video because look at this little sneak peek watch this watch this. Yes, because this stuff hasn't been on there, that long, it just comes right off with some brake clean.

This is gon na look sweet all right. So, if you're wondering how much damage a plastic razor blade can really do here. Well, it's not a lot, and that is exactly the point. We want to be very, very gentle.

With this mating surface, that's why we are using the gasket remover spray to kind of loosen this up for us all right, but hang on. Let's keep it real here for a second, if you guys have our tv that is not on a direct sealing surface, go ahead and get yourself a normal razor blade. Not gon na hurt anything by doing one of these, the plastic one will take you forever. I don't know how this stuff gets in here, but we have like sand just just sand.

You know hanging out, but you know what i am not a big fan of sand in engines. So, let's suck this out all right, things are looking good, i'm just using a plastic bristled brush here on the head gas mating surface, just to clean up some of the remaining gasket material and honestly, i'm spending probably two three hours on this whole top end area. Just to be gentle make sure we do it right, see that fly they're everywhere, get off my engine, dude jeez. This is how far we're gon na get with the plastic razor blade and the gasket spray remover.

So we are gon na, be moving on to cleaning the pistons and finishing out the head gasket mating surface with some good old-fashioned wd-40 and a green scotch brite pad. So this is a very soft pad. It's not going to remove any metal or anything like that. But it's going to make everything, look nice and the reason i'm being so.

Gentle with this is because we have coated cylinders and they are in perfect condition and we don't want to scratch these up. We don't want to ruin them, so i'm going to be very, very gentle with some wd-40 on a rag to clean this up, we're going to be gentle on the pistons as well. I'd rather have a perfect cylinder wall and not risk scratching anything than a shiny, piston. That's not going to make any difference at all.

These are really actually in pretty decent condition, so we will get most of this carbon up, but i want to be safe, so wd-40 actually cleans very, very well, so we're just going to do a little bit on the pistons and it's also a good lubricant. So we're not going to scratch anything up. This is a very, very gentle form of cleaning pistons. You can use brake, clean or carbon choke and honestly, i don't know if it would do any damage to the coating on the cylinder walls, but i really don't want to find out, and this works really well, when you get to the cylinder part.

Just be careful, don't accidentally go inside even with something as soft as the scotch brite pad with the pistons. It helps to turn the motor over. So you can have a piston right at the top. We're going to be able to make these real nice look at that uh, i'm almost done cleaning.

It's looking awesome and i just wanted to point out that if you see kind of some staining, i'm going to call this at the very top of the cylinder. As long as it's perfectly smooth and there's not an actual buildup of carbon you're, fine, don't risk scratching up your cylinder wall to make this look shiny. This thing has probably looked like this for tens of thousands of miles. It's not going to affect anything.

This thing ran perfect, so i did go around with a rag and some of the wd-40 just to kind of get some of this coloration off. But it's really no big deal. You can spend some time on it and make it look pretty if you want, but just don't start scuffing up. The inside of your cylinder wall is my point uh something else.

There's some real world stuff guys. When i took this cylinder head off, it went perfect. It just came right off, so i don't know where this came from, but you can see right here, there's like a little nick in the mating surface and uh. If you ever see something like this, you don't have to freak out and send the whole engine to a machine shop and spend thousands of dollars for a little nick.

Like this, we can take just a tiny bit of sandpaper we're going to be very, very gentle. I don't want to sand any of the actual head surface, we're just getting this little tiny ridge and we're just going to sand it off very, very gently and we're just sanding down the ridge. That's it so yeah, it's a uh wednesday and i'm just using sandpaper on my v12 amg engine block two to the normal day, totally normal and there you go right where the light is shining. That is where our little ridge was, and now it's perfect and we didn't damage anything.

That's always a plus. Here she is, after blowing out all of the head bolt holes with air and kind of giving it a preliminary wipe. So it's looking really really nice, but right now we got to add a little bit of saran wrap to the mix or i'm sorry. This is kirkland.

Signature stretch, light plastic food, wrap, i'm used to saying: saran wrap it's kind of like one of those kleenex things. It's a brand and you just keep on using the name for the rest of your life. It's plastic wrap, so we're doing the old plastic wrap trick. Actually, i've never done this before this isn't an actual trick or anything.

I just want to cover up all the work that i just did before we start cleaning all the nastiness from the rest of the engine. Um borrowed this from the kitchen, my wife's, not gon na, be happy. If i get it dirty yeah all right that actually worked out pretty well now, let's get the wagon out of here and probably cover up the cylinder heads too, because this is this is gon na get messy all right people. I am ready for some extreme v12 engine cleaning with cans of brake clean.

So i got my gloves they're perfect condition. I got my glasses, i could barely see out of because they're so dirty and we got a dirty engine. So just remember this or, if you don't i'll, probably just put up a before and after yes, oh this brush definitely did not sign up for this life. I'm gon na get my money's worth out of you today.

Buddy this brush is gon na save us a lot of brake clean. Look at that all right. Remember when i said this was going to be the favorite part or my favorite part of the video or this job or whatever. I lied this sucked this really sucked.

I'm disgusting, i'm hot um and i think it's pretty clean. I've gone through five cans of brake clean. If you're wondering - and i think i need to invest in one of those venturi blower thingies - you can stick it into a bottle of whatever and hook up shop. Air and just kind of blast things away: okay, saran wrap did its job, we're all clean up top excellent and uh.

Let's uh, let's get a new crank sensor in here, yeah be much easier to do now than later, and those always fail all right. So i'm going to replace the crank sensor and the knock sensors, this you can do with the engine in the car and they had to make it like that, because for some reason they couldn't make crank sensors. That would last very long. These would go bad quite frequently, so there goes that one and in with our new one, of course, this is from fcp euro lifetime parts replacement guarantee and with parts like crank sensors.

You definitely want that click, so the knock sensors rarely go bad. I've never actually replaced one on this engine, but if you ever have to you have a head and a turbo charger on this side. I don't even know if you can do it with the turbo in there. Oh crank, this bad boy up, but without the turbo there, it's like a two second job.

So, of course we don't want to cheap out on sensors like this that are really difficult to replace. So these are the factory bosch, sensors, very inexpensive. I think i don't know 20 30 bucks there's two of them. You plug it in it'll.

Pretty much tell you exactly where it goes, and on the driver's side, it's just as hard to replace it with the engine in and it looks pretty clean in there. Huh, look at that nice give them all torque okay, so we have the oil thermostat all sealed up. We have two new nox sensors, a new crank sensor, and this guy is looking pretty remember what it looked like before: yeah yeah. This is what it looks like now, so not bad! You can go crazy with this and i'll do a final clean up before we install the cylinder heads, but these guys are looking pretty good as well.

It's kind of hard to tell but they're these little ribs on the surface and that's good. That's why you don't want to use a whiz wheel. You don't want to cut that down. This is exactly the smoothness that the factory wanted and if you see a little bit of staining from the old gasket, that's fine, that's fine! Everything is perfectly smooth here anyway, with that we got to start replacing some real parts here, guys we're going to start off with this guide right here for the oil pump chain, so i've actually never done any engine work on a mercedes v12.

Everything you're seeing in this video series is my first time and that's because when i left the dealership in 2012, these things just didn't break in this fashion, so i've just done coil packs and normal kind of maintenancy items on these engines. There we go we'll alleviate some of the spring pressure there, um and yeah, so everything the heads, everything you guys are seeing this whole timing chain ordeal my first time doing it okay, so we alleviated all the pressure there. Now we can remove this bolt. Okay - and there is our guide and yeah wow good thing - we are doing this.

Look at that see this nice crack right here. Yeah this thing would have failed, so we're definitely going to be replacing all of these guides. We have our brand new guide mercedes-benz. So we have new verse old, they look exactly the same, that's good and we're just going to swap over a little spring right there, all right! It's all, lined up, give it a little torque one for good measure.

Bring this guy right up there all right! That's it that's all she wrote there is our new oil pump chain guide and mercedes does not make this spring anymore, not that it really ever would need to be replaced, but uh i asked and then i'll make it, but that's, okay. This thing is totally totally fine feels perfect. These are some of the other guides, and these two look okay, but this guy right here you can see it's starting to crack up at the top, and it kind of looks like a guy smiling after he's had some stuff to make him happy hello anyway. This is a this is a bad plastic guide right here, so we're gon na replace it with a nice shiny new one all right.

So if i remember correctly, this guy goes here, and this guy goes here. Yep like that. I got these guys here. This one's gon na go on later and uh yeah.

This one goes here. I think i think that looks right. I'm gon na go look at my old video footage, but i'm pretty sure this is right. It's a good thing about making videos.

This part is gon na, be the craziest thing you see and hear on youtube, and that is, i will not be replacing the 135 000 mile timing chain, the factory mercedes timing chain - and i have the new one sitting right here and the reason is this: hasn't Stretched at all hasn't stretched one bit in 135 000 miles, and this isn't the only one i've seen like this i've seen half a million mile timing chains from mercedes that haven't stretched at all, and i was speaking with my good friend tasos i'll leave his channel Linked down below, if you guys don't know who tassos is you got ta check out his channel? He is one of the best engine builders, european engine builders in the whole world, he's like thousands of miles away from me, but we've become good friends. We kind of talk a lot and send little engine videos to each other and stuff like that, but anyway, tasos is a great guy. I trust him with really anything to do with engines, and i talked to him about this and he said don't replace it leave it. He's like this is a little trick that he does.

He leaves the factory timing chain because it's polished, so i said tasos. What do you mean? This thing is polished, and he said after so many revolutions of this timing chain going around and around and around with these plastic guides. It's polished itself and it actually has less friction than a brand new one and since it hasn't stretched at all, there's virtually no wear on the chain whatsoever. So he said: go ahead, use the old timing chain with the new guides hi alex good morning.

Man. First of all, thank you very much that you mentioned me on your video. I appreciate it. Second, that's what i'm saying about the timing chain.

You see that's nice and polished here. This is been polished here, it's been polishing here, it's been polished, that's what you want. If it's not, it's not stretched. It's not stretching this.

This chains, i have seven timing chains. All right, i can put for you all down this 5156, but it's exactly the same type like the v12. All right. I have two marks here.

One mark here on mark here because, like this all right and then i'm pushing it full back, what's my point, all the in chains, the double timing chain like this like how it has the m104. Let us say like what has the one five six one, five, nine or the two seven five, two seven, nine, all of them that double chain they never get stretched. I can show you timing, saying with 80 000 kilometers, 100, 000 kilometers, 200, 300 and half million kilometers all of them. They are excellent.

They never they're, never one one to see that, let us say has more steps than the other, no nothing. I have put even brand new timing saying once only once after all these years, only one time i put the brand new time insane and since i get it and i get the measurement, i never bought a game new time insane. This is not a hard fast rule. This isn't a diy video, i'm just showing you what i'm doing so.

In most cases, i would say just go ahead and replace the timing chain, but in this case, after speaking, with tasos, i've determined for me, i'm gon na go with what he says. Don't look too deep into this. I almost wanted to just put the new one on there just so i wouldn't confuse anyone. You can go either way, okay, but that is the reasoning behind me not replacing the timing chain, and i think it's a pretty good one.

Anyone gon na tell me about this good thing. I check my audio after every scene, so i've just temporarily put the front cover on in the balancer, and this has marks on the balancer and it's got a little line here on the front cover and we're just going to put this at 30 degrees right there. This piston should be up almost up, and that is factory spec for setting up the timing, so we're good to go right there. So at this point i have a little bungee cord set up that is going to hold our timing chain up while we're putting the front cover on so let's go ahead and put this guy back in here.

Then we have this timing chain gear, this idler gear. This is actually reverse thread, so we're tighten it by going lefty lefty tighty, righty loosey. I guess for this guy here we go mesh, stay meshed, lefty, tidy, lefty, tight, lefty tight. Let's torque this guy too good measure, that's an important one.

Yeah we're good and so we're basically starting from scratch here with timing. So any marks don't really matter. I had actually marked these to the cam before you know just for good measure. I'm just used to doing it, but in reality, when you're taking the front timing cover off, the whole chain is going to drop anyway.

So if you didn't mark it to the crank, you got to start from scratch anyway, which is what we're doing anywho. This looks pretty nice right here. This is where we need to be to get the front timing cover on, and i just want to show you on the inside of the front timing cover this guy right here. This holds the chain to the gear, so once we put this on, we can let go of the bungee cord and even if the chain kind of slides in there, it's going to be fine, it's going to be solid on the crank where we want it.

Okay, so everything is all cleaned up and we are ready to install our front timing cover. So i have a new seal right here, a new front seal. We have these two new seals installed. This is clean and i just wanted to show you guys that there is a proper way to install the sealant, so you don't need it everywhere, so you can see here.

We don't need it in these areas. Obviously, that's where the seal is in these areas, but where the uh, where the bolts go in, we do need sealant. So we're gon na follow this little map here for the sealant and there's also a specific torque sequence for the bolts too. So it wants us to go on the inside edge here all right, so we got that guy that guy, that guy, that guy, that guy, that guy, that guy, that, guy that now we get all this don't want anything there.

We're good we're good front timing cover. Go back to your home you're, never coming off again! Oh man! I hope i didn't just jinx myself. This thing is sealed up so well and you kind of like only get one chance at uh, not smearing, all of your rtv everywhere. So, okay and okay - i like it - i like it that felt good that felt good.

Let's get some some bolts in here and that'll, make me feel even better. Oh my gun, my gun. Where are you? Ah, i have your gun set up. Ah, hang on my finger's gon na be my gun right now.

Okay, there we go okay. Actually, before i tighten up anything, i like to get the harmonic balancer on here: okay, just to center the seal, so we don't have to put a bolt in there. We don't have to torque it or anything like that. I just want that in there before we fully tighten up um all of these bolts, and you have about roughly 10 minutes of working time after you put the rtv down.

So we're working quick, we're working, quick people, so there are some of these. The balancer has to be removed for, but we had it on there while we tightened up quite a few of them, so we should be good to go there and i've decided i'm going to replace this water pump. I kind of don't like the way it feels and you can replace the water pump without having to take the front timing cover off, but because we're setting this for the first time uh with the rtv and these bolts do go through i'm going to bolt it Up it doesn't even have a gasket on there uh just to torque everything down just so our rtv sets properly. So these are only 14 newton meters.

If you have an extension - and i add a little bit - i just got it up to 16 - should be fine. All right everything is torqued. I like to go around like five times just to make sure i didn't forget any, especially when there's like 20 bolts, like this front timing cover - and i just wanted to show you that with the timing cover on so this part of the chain is going to The crank gear - and so is this one here with the timing cover on - we can't mess this up. We can't skip a tooth because of what i showed you on the inside of the cover that's holding the chain to the the gear, the crank gear.

So we can because of the idler kind of adjust which side gets longer and shorter. That way, once we get the heads and the cam on here uh and the cams, we can align these properly, but right now, if this happened - oh no! Oh! No! It wouldn't matter it actually wouldn't matter at all, because we cannot physically skip on the crank gear, which is uh all that matters, and i am tired and dirty. We do have some more parts to install before das. Zlinda heads go on like the root of all evil.

Well, actually, it's the o-ring that goes here for our little valley cover oil distribution center thingy. That's gon na sit right here like so, but i'm shocked, guys i'm shot. I got to go to work. I got to take a shower.

First, get my lunch ready. I am done, i'm done so. I think it's time to end the video all right so with that give this video a thumbs up. If you could, i don't know why i'm wiping myself with a oily t-shirt but give it a thumbs up, share the video subscribe if you're new, all that kind of good stuff, it really helps out the channel, but the thumbs up button for whatever reason the youtube Algorithm it likes it, it likes it so give it a like comment down below that helps as well, even if it's just to say hello, i'll, probably respond back so anyway.

With that, i will see you guys in the next cl 65 amg engine video, because we're going to keep these going until this thing, fires up which i cannot wait for i'm slightly nervous about as well. But anyway, i hope you guys are there for the journey. So have a wonderful day i'll catch. All of you guys in the next video you.

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