I made a promise a few cl 65 videos ago that i would cut open the failed accumulator ball and show you the inside, show you what caused all my abc suspension woes. So promise is a promise, no matter how dangerous it is. Don't try anything you see here at home. There's no good way to hold this thing and it makes sense.

It says to hold up to a bunch of pressure, but look at how thick this is all right: okay, yep! That's what we got going on here, people that was a little bit more difficult than anticipated, but well worth it. I think what is inside of these mysterious accumulator balls? Okay, rubber diaphragm, it's kind of hot yeah, this rubber diaphragm - is what failed guys look at that. This has to withstand 3000 psi or about 200 bar and it had failed and a little chunk there escaped and clogged up the entire system. So it looks like this.

Accumulator ball is lined in this rubber and it's very thick, it's very strong but uh. You know 17 years of suspension travel and it just let loose and that's what we have inside wow look at how thick this is, though this is some serious stuff: wow, hey guys, welcome back to legit street cars and welcome to another cl 65 amg video today. We're going to fix a very annoying and common problem on the 215 chassis mercedes. This would cost you, as you could imagine hundreds, if not thousands of dollars to get fixed at a shop, but we're gon na.

Do it practically for free we're, also gon na. Do a little bit of maintenance to get this thing ready for some dyno tuning and we're going to install a prototype intake. I have the only one here at legit street quarters. That's going to make this twin turbo v12 sing to us at wide open throttle.

So that's the intro, that's about all! I got to say, because we got ta get to work well, i lifted the cl up to do a quick oil change and then to clean everything before we reinstall all of the plastic covers, but i should have known you cannot lift an abc suspension mercedes without Finding something wrong with it, so this thing has just been sitting around my shop for the last couple of months. It runs great. I've even played with it in the snow a little bit, and i did notice over the last few days that there was a tiny little puddle under the car. It was, of course, green, abc fluid, uh and yeah.

I found the leak right here, so if you guys remember a few videos ago, i had to tighten up this fitting here. It was already tight, but it needed a little extra oomph to seal and that fixed it. Now it looks like this one up top is leaking so anyway, no big deal. Let's just go ahead and tighten her up all right, so we'll hold the block and then give this guy a tighten and see it's already tight and it normally doesn't take really much more than this for it to seal.

Let's give it a little bit back out. I can't even turn it like all right that turned a tiny bit. I don't know, hopefully that should be it all right, we'll clean this up, see what happens all right. I got max in the car, and the only good thing about abc suspension is that you're gon na know if your leak is fixed, pretty much right away, because it's at like 3000 psi max go ahead and fire it up all right.

I have a jumper on this time max go ahead. All right looks like we might be. Okay, okay, never mind, never mind. We are not.

Okay, that is still leaking. You got to be kidding me, stop stop leaking. What in the world you got to be kidding me, this thing is still leaking unbelievable. This car is seriously unbelievable, while this trunk is a sight for sore eyes.

I do plan on having this all cleaned up in this car back on the road by the end of this video, with a suspension system that doesn't leak and turbos sounding really nice, but anyway, uh i'll have this charger on the car for two days now, because That's how long it's gon na take for my two new abc lines to come in from the mercedes-benz dealership, so this saga doesn't end. I'm still dumping a ton of money into the abc suspension system. But what happened here is the seal for the hydraulic lines was compromised because i had to take apart. These lines take them on and off, like a million times over the last few videos, when i was trying to figure out why the car wouldn't raise up - and you can only do this so many times before the seal gets flattened.

This is a metal to metal ceiling surface once it goes flat, it'll start to leak, and at that point you have to replace the fitting, and in our case that means i have to replace the entire line. So anyway, we got a couple days until these lines come in. So at this point i need a drink here. We go.

Oh, it's perfect, so you may be wondering why anyone in their right mind would ever own an older mercedes with abc suspension or how i just smoked out my drink, and i can only answer the latter and that's with the cocktail, smoking and infusion kit from today's Video sponsor bespoke post bespoke post is a monthly membership club delivering top shelf goods from under the radar companies. Like the tooled box that comes with a tether that unravels to 10 feet, it's made of cobra woven 550 paracord, very strong. You also get a hex drive tool kit with a driver and a super bright led flashlight with an adjustable lens, and since i love going camping, i got the switchback box as well. It comes with a legit military compass, a super sharp stainless steel knife made in sweden a tri-fold camp shovel.

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Is you guys can get 20 off your first box by going to bespokepost.com legit20 or by clicking on my link in the video description box and using coupon code legit 20 at checkout, and with that let's go, try and fix my car all right. So let's get these lines off the car, so one of these lines goes to the valve block that supplies the pressure to the system kind of nice. We're replacing this. It probably would have failed in some fashion.

Eventually there we go not currently leaking, but it did leak a couple videos ago, so i'm replacing that for good measure. This is the line that's leaking this time around and if we follow that it goes all the way to the front valve block and it is the pressure supply line to that valve, block all right. So we'll crack this guy loose and we're gon na lose a little bit of fluid, but not too much all right. So with both ends loose, we can't fish this guy out all right here it comes.

This is exactly what you don't want to be doing after you've spent the better part of two weeks of your life fixing your abc suspension, get out, get out all right, it's a couple of days later, and we have our new lines from mercedes, so we can Kind of compare what's going on here and you guys can cross your fingers with me that this even fixes it because they don't look all that different to the naked eye. So there you have it. We have our old and our new and uh yeah. It's a little bit kind of hard to tell right now what the difference is, but this has been compressed a bunch of times and this hasn't and you can see some pitting and that wear line.

So i believe, that's probably where the leak is coming from and here's just another look at what it's supposed to be and here's the other line. You can see this a little bit better. This is really hard to show on camera, but on the right side is our new line on the left is the old and you can tell on the one on the left that it's just a little bit more mushroomed out than our new one. It's really hard to see on camera, but uh anyway, crossing fingers that this works.

Let's go get these lines in now. I know what you're thinking you've probably already made this comment alex. Why didn't you just go to the steel coils and just get rid of this entire madness of abc suspension? If i had a crystal ball, if i knew all of this, that would eventually happen. Would i have changed over to coils honestly you're gon na think i'm a complete weirdo, but no? No, i really like abc and this car is not a good example of an abc car.

I'm not saying that they're reliable and they don't cost a ton of money to fix and that you shouldn't be afraid of abc cars because you should um, but i've just never seen this many issues with any other car. But mine and honestly, i'm glad it's me and not one of you guys dealing with it because i don't know if many other people could could live like this. You know. Luckily i make youtube videos so that helps but yeah it gets frustrating.

It gets very, very frustrating get in there all right. New lines are installed, just give it a final tighten, and that's that's about all. You need right there. If you got to go much past that you might have an issue, these things may have been taken on and off too many times i'll, tighten this bottom guy up there we go all right, let's see all right, guys do a little dance say a little prayer.

Let's hope this doesn't leak max. Let's do it looks good, not seeing any leaks. This is great. It would have been coming out by now.

All right, all right, you can do it, i mean i did it again. I don't know why i'm even happy anymore. Every time i fix them on this abc suspension as if that's it, that's never it, but for this video, why am i even saying that i was gon na say for this video? That's it! Let's just move on. Let's just move on: it's it! It's! Okay! Right now, all right before i do an oil change and install the custom intakes, we have to go for a ride and do a sound check on these factory air boxes.

So normally they do have a tube that goes right here and then it gets colder air from right behind the grill. Those tubes are destroyed, they're all kind of smushed. Together they go bad after a while, but that's not going to change anything for our tests. At the moment we just need a good baseline before we install our quad cone intake, yes quad cone yeah, so at idle with no load.

You cannot hear anything from the turbos at all. I don't think that's going to change much, let's go test this thing out under load and, at the same time, we're warming up the oil for the oil change. This is a test that needs to be done, but first i should probably feed this hungry beast. That's pump's, not in the best shape, sounds like it's going to explode 470, a gallon.

How much is gas by you all right? I can't take this anymore, i'm clicking it off at 9 gallons, i think at costco it's like 50 cents cheaper. So that's enough! All right, we'll see if this makes any noise in the car all right, i'm only going to quarter throttle people this thing's not tuned. Yet - and we basically didn't hear anything hang on: let's do one more time: yeah, nothing all right, see what it sounds like from the outside. You can definitely hear a little bit of the blow-off there, so we replaced these uh with weistec units, so you wouldn't be able to hear that from the factory.

So we got a little bit of that going on and that's kind of about it. You really can't hear the turbos very well with the factory air boxes. So, let's see if we can fix that after we fix something, that's really annoying. Let's see, of course, now it's working, you guys remember on the road trip video.

This would intermittently stop working. Of course, all right we got a new oil filter and seals and the first couple of oil changes. I just use the cheap stuff, whatever i found on sale at the store, you're, basically just doing a flush at that point, but now that we've done two oil changes, we're ready for the good stuff. Now you guys know i use amsoil on all of my cars, including my european fleet.

I think it's the best oil in the world, so get ready for spring click on my link down below and you guys are gon na get 25 off all amsoil products. Well, my weird door and window issue isn't acting up at the moment, so we're moving on to the quad cone intake system from victory road performance and then i'm sure, by the time we're done doing this. The car will break again and i can show you how to fix it, but here it is a prototype intake system that vrp sent me to test out on the v12. So i'm going to be testing this out for sound in this video and eventually for performance.

Once we get on the dyno to compare it to the factory air boxes, but this isn't really sold as a performance modification. I don't think the factory air boxes are all that bad. This is just to make your turbos sound cool for the most part and we'll see if it gains any power on the dyno, but it comes with everything you need we're gon na go ahead and install it on this engine, and then i'm gon na talk to You guys about hot air intakes, because that's essentially what this is. I have a hot air intake on my turbo trans.

Am this lightning has a hot air intake as well, and i know what you guys are saying: alex you're supposed to put cold air intakes on engines and you're right and we're gon na talk about it. But first let's go install this so there's three bolts on each air box that you're gon na undo done this a million times in the other video. So i'm not gon na show you and then these things just lift right out after you unplug this one sensor. Very easy, after you've removed the air boxes, you're gon na remove the two pressure sensors and install them in the supplied plastic tubes that are gon na attach to the turbos.

Then you have to remove these rubber seals that sit inside of the factory air boxes. They just pop out like that and you're just gon na install them in those plastic tubes, like so make sure they're totally round nothing's, kinked and you're good to go. Then we're just going to install these tubes right on top of the turbo they'll fit nicely since you're using the factory seal, and then we just got to clock them properly and we have our secondary air injection tube that it doesn't really quite reach. So that might be a suggestion i make on these.

Is that we're gon na have to clamp this now no big deal, but i believe the other one came out a little bit further out and didn't require a clamp. So i don't know i could clamp this too and just call it a day. Once these are installed, you can connect your extension, harness that goes from the pressure sensor to the factory harness here. Normally, these sensors rest right in this area on the air box.

So this one wouldn't reach, if you didn't have this all right at this point, we're ready to go so you just want to make sure all of your hose clamps are on before you slide your filters over just like that. We can make little adjustments once we get it on the car. All right, then we're just going to slide the intake over the tube here. Push it down like that and we'll tighten up some clamps, okay, that's nice and solid, and then i'm just gon na kind of position these just so that they're pointing further down.

I don't think we're gon na run in any hood issues or anything and we'll just tighten these guys up. Okay, all right, this side is done, okay, so this side is basically the same, except there is a short pipe and a long pipe. On that side, we have the long pipe facing the back of the car on this side. It looks like it would fit better if it's the opposite, because if we go like this, it's basically gon na hit that inner cooler so we're gon na flip it, and then i had to flip the clamps as well.

You guys will figure this stuff out. Basically, you don't want the clamps hitting anything and we're just going to slide it on just like that. Tighten everything up and we're good. Okay, all right - and here you have it.

Our quad cone intake is fully installed and this looks pretty pretty cool. I'm not gon na lie. I think i would paint these black or maybe have them polished and something to note i don't know if this would really be an issue, but there's nothing that actually mounts these intakes to anything. So i mean they're solid, but you could technically just pull them off the turbos.

If you wanted to, but again the turbos are sucking air in it's not pressurized on this side or anything like that. So i think they're fine, but yeah anyway uh something else. You can't have these two covers on with this intake system, so no more carbon fiber, no more name plate that says that g strauss built our engine uh. So if you're into those you can't really do anything about it.

But anyway, let's go test out some sound. You can hear a little something before we didn't get any of that, so i'm kind of surprised. I didn't think it was going to change at all with no load, but anyway, let's go put some load on it. Darn it break everything's working just fine.

The issue is the window, doesn't work, the door switches, don't work the seats, nothing uh intermittently. Obviously, now it's working so annoying when stuff works all right, so we already got a little bit of a noise just driving. So you can just hear that air rushing in and then our aftermarket blow-off valves, all right, so that was like about half throttle at most sounds pretty awesome, but let's go into dino mode there we go. That's what i'd like to see all right guys.

So it's not too crazy loud, but it definitely sounds really cool just so you can get an idea of what it sounds like in the car. It's not it's not very loud, it's not very loud at all, but noticeable. You can hear the turbos just ready to go. It's pulling up, oh check it out guys it doesn't work.

Yes, nothing works, perfect timing! Look at that all right! So now that we're done with the intakes. Oh look at that now it works now. It works sneaky little fella. Oh now, it's oh! Oh there we go when we were driving this thing home.

It was like zero degrees uh a year ago now from kansas, and this broke a couple times and we had the window just slightly down, not good, not good at all, all right guys. Let's talk about aftermarket intakes for a couple of minutes and then i'll fix the door. So what we've created here is essentially a hot air intake, because we have an exhaust manifold and a turbo right there. So hot air is rising up and getting sucked into our engine just like it is on my twin turbo, n54 and to a lesser extent, but on my svt lightning, which yes still has blown head.

Gaskets, i'm going to be replacing those, and just like my over 1 000 crank horsepower turbo trans. Am i have the air filter right there, so the radiator fans are blowing hot air right onto the filter. The engine is really close to the filter and the turbo. So it's sucking in hot air, ironically, really, my only modified car that has a cold air induction is my caprice ppv, that's naturally aspirated.

So this is getting air right from here and it's going right into the intake manifold. So this is a cold air intake, because it's sucking that air through the grill and getting cold air from the outside. So i'm not saying that having a hot air intake is a good thing. You want cold air, dense air going into your engine because then you're gon na have more oxygen, more oxygen, more fuel, more power, so cold air is good.

Hot air is bad, but in the real world, how bad is it? I think that depends on a few things, but one of the most important is airflow and restrictions. So if you're making a cold air induction system, that's restricting air, it's not going to make any more power. In some cases it can lose power compared to a hot air induction system like this. That essentially has no restriction whatsoever.

So before i had my youtube channel, i did extensive testing on my turbo. Trans am on the dyno. We ran all sorts of piping systems. We ran one just for testing just right out here into the open air.

We ran one through into the bumper and i tested that on the street as well and at the track, and we could never come up with any real world gain by going with a cold air intake on this car. And i think a lot of that had to do with the fact that we had to add piping with lots of bends and that added a restriction and if you have a forced induction car with an adequate intercooling system like this, it has a four inch intercooler. It's massive: it doesn't really make that big of a difference in the real world. Now in a perfect world, you'd have a very low restriction.

Air intake system that gets its air from somewhere like this, the factory mercedes, are really good. With this, they all basically come with factory cold air induction systems because, like the caprice, they get their air from the front grill area. So, when you're driving down the road, that's going to be the coldest air possible, so in a perfect world, we'd have some kind of system that would come off. The turbos not have a million bends adding restriction and then have some kind of filtration system in here.

But a lot of times - and this is why you don't see this much in the aftermarket world that requires so much work and there just simply isn't enough room for any of that that they just go with something like this. We see this on the n54. There's massive horsepower cars with filters that are just placed somewhere in the engine compartment they suck up hot air and they still produce, in some cases a thousand horsepower or more because their intercooler system is working properly and the real world difference just doesn't stack up. To add all of that piping and all of that cost into an air intake system.

So that's it we'll be testing this on the dyno as well i'll, throw the factory air boxes on also and we'll see what the difference is, but i don't think it's gon na be much. I really do think it's mostly about air restriction, and we saw this on my wife's supercharged escalade. We simply lifted the air box a little bit, so the air temperature was probably the same and we gained 20 wheel horsepower by basically removing the factory air box. Out of the equation, so let me know what you guys think in the comments section.

Have you done your own testing on cold air versus hot air intakes? What did you find all right enough talk about air? Let's talk about wiring issues, so, as you can see, the cl has a pretty crazy door hinge system. Look at all this stuff going on here and, as you could imagine, because of that, this harness right here tends to move around a bit and because of that. Okay, someone's already been in here because of that the wiring can break and cause intermittent issues and uh yeah. So let's unravel what someone else did and see what happened now, this tape is very brittle, so it's a good chance.

This was fixed a long time ago and the wires just broke again. So what happens? Is the wires break just from moving so many times, and this car's got 135 000 miles? This usually happens on the driver door because someone's getting it out more often on the driver's side and it's a lot of door opening and closing events. Okay, yep they used heat shrink, that's nice! So what happened? I will get a hold of it from this end too. It just kind of peels back wow yeah lots of tape, man, how many repairs did they make here jeez so right now, i'm looking for a smoking gun, quite literally a wire, that's going to be broken or frayed.

That's pretty much. What the culprit always is. With these issues, but if you don't know that you can go down the rabbit hole of replacing really expensive control units and it can cost a lot of money for no reason - and i could already see we got a cut in this wire here - i pulled back A lot of this harness and just inspected individual wires. You want to look over pretty much.

All of these. You can also have speaker issues. If your speakers aren't working on this side, it could be one of the speaker wires. That was compromised with the opening and closing of the door, but right now i am going right after a previous repair, so they have spliced in this large red power wire.

At this point and right here again at this point, you can see it's cut right here. So we'll fix that, i don't think that's the issue, but if you notice right now, this isn't working the seats not working, and i just made a little bend right here in the previous repair. It's kind of loose right at the edge, so watch this just for me, moving it. Okay, it's still not working, hang on you kind of got ta fiddle with it, but if we make it straight, it should work.

Now there we go now the seat works. So there's something going on underneath this heat shrink tubing. So let's get that off all right. So we'll just cut this off completely there we go okay, so they didn't do a solder connection.

They did a little butt connector, nothing wrong with that. Necessarily so you can see, some of these wires have broken off now. There's still definitely a connection here. Um and this mostly works, but who knows what's going on under here might not be enough strands that are reaching and making a good contact in here.

So we just need to chop this entire thing out all right. There we go and we're just going to pull this out of the accordion, we'll cut it right here just so, we can replace it with a nice new wire. You can see here a little hole where they were probing checking for power and we'll just cut this whole thing out. Get rid of those probe marks, get rid of everything start from scratch, all right, let's strip our new wire and we'll go ahead and attach it to this end here and a little nice twist like so - and i know some people don't do solder connections anymore, but I still do still like them.

They'll just heat your wire up from the bottom, and your solder will melt right in no need to go too crazy with this either. So there is our solder connection and we're going to seal it up with some more heat shrink. Tubing - and i like to use quite a bit of this - go further down the road there put it right in the middle just like that, then i get to use the little torch from the cocktail smoking infusion kit from earlier and we'll just heat this up. All right so i've completed our wiring repair on this end and then our new wire goes through the accordion over to here.

So we cut out that entire troublesome area - and now we have this a seat that works now. It was intermittent last time, but i'm pretty confident that this is going to last forever. So let's go ahead and tape up the rest of the wiring i'll put this accordion back together and this job is done. Harnesses are all wrapped up and looking pretty so we'll feed this back in the door all right, the accordion is snap-backed in.

We are done, but you can kind of get an idea of why these wires eventually go bad they're, just kind of stretching back and forth too much, and i do think there should have been a recall from mercedes a long time ago. I remember making these repairs when these cars were still under warranty, so less than four years old, these wires were failing, not good, all right, so the door is repaired and i just cleaned out the trunk we're leaving a few things in here, though, we have the Hoovey, space suit from car trek and uh a couple of sun shades that came with the car, our messed up air intakes - and this is a stack of receipts and literature on the cl, including a letter from the previous owner before hoovy. This is really cool. It just tells you all about the car so original msrp of 185 000.

uh. He sold it and bought a tesla, and he was the third owner used it as his daily driver lists a bunch of stuff that he replaced and then goes on. The history of the cl65 only 194 were produced in 2005 and the guy was just really into this car. This is definitely a nice letter to have come with a car purchase and even has some of the factory performance specs on here.

This is really cool. I got to sit down and read this whole thing, but that's for another day, oh and mercedes had an issue with the harness right there too. For the trunk same thing, the wires would bend and stretch and break, and then your trunk wouldn't work all right. That'll do it for today's video make sure to follow me at legit streetcars on facebook and on instagram, and i'm posting up really short videos of shenanigans that happen on a daily basis like playing around in the snow with the cl65 with the new intakes.

It sounds pretty cool, basically just spinning the tires all day long and it doesn't get stuck these michelins. They work really really well uh. So with that, if you enjoyed this video, give it a big thumbs up share the video subscribe if you're new, most importantly, have an awesome day i'll catch all of you in the next video you.