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 gon na 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 gon na 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 got ta experience this. 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 gon na 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 gon na need some new tires.

That's for sure all right, we're gon na 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 gon na 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 gon na go in and spray each one all right, so we're gon na 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 gon na 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 gon na 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 got ta 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. 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 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 gon na 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, 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 gon na 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 gon na 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 gon na have to order up a fuel pump for the 500 sel in order to drive it, but we're gon na 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 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 gon na come back out here.

We're gon na 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 you.