Propeller shaft (41)

The "original" status

Mercedes-Benz 219 propeller shaft as per the spare parts list

Sorry for more photos of bad quality.... Well, these photos were only used as reference photos for my own work. They may be a bit boring... except for one thing. Note the first picture where the shaft is one, dirty unit. Look at the universal joints, they are not in line with each other! This has caused some discussion on the Ponton list as well as with my friends here in Sweden. This is quite unusual but I'll stick to this due to four reasons:

• The shaft has never been taken apart (according to my fathers knowledge)
• The shaft had factory (I hope or my previous statement is wrong) made markings on the joint flange as well as the sliding joint and the shaft was assembled according to those
• The spare parts books (Type 219 Edition C) picture of the propellers shaft also has universal joints that are not in line with each other
• According to the guy who balanced the shaft it doesn't matter how the universal joints are assembled to each other, the main issue that everything is balanced...

The future will see if this decision is correct or wrong!

The second picture is the propeller shaft intermediate bearing before redone.

Restoration

The universal joints had to be renewed. Calling my Mercedes-Benz suppliers gave me a shock. If my memory doesn't fail me I think that they wanted ~100USD each (year 2002). Calling around I found the same at Uni-Cardan for 25USD each...As you already may have guessed I renewed everything else too. That wasn't many items and none of them were expensive.

I've also been a proud owner of a Mercedes-Benz 280SEL from 1969

One thing that I did was to convert the ball bearing to a sealed one. This got the advantage that I don't have to grease it regularly and the car will be a bit cleaner on the underside ;-). There is however one disadvantage with this solution that I chose with which I'm not 100% happy. I was told to change to the sealed bearing and on the same time throw the two spacer rings around the bearing away. They are not only spacer rings, they keep the grease inside and around the support bearing. If I throw them away I'll get tons of dirt in the housing which doesn't attract me. But if I keep them they need lubrication. With a sealed bearing I will only have access to one of the two chambers that the rings and the bearing constitutes. Well, I kept the spacer rings but filled the chambers around the bearing with grease (Molybden disulfide as usual) and hope that this will hold during my lifetime.

Below comes some photos of how you dismantle the joints. Don't forget to remove the rings that both lock the joints and keep them centered.

This is different pictures of the sliding joint. The blue marking was made by my father when he restored/lifted the motor. In such a case it makes life easier if you remove the propeller shaft.

Tool

Here is a tool that I made for removing the nut holding the support bearing. It is made out of an impact socket with the outer diameter fitting the cut out in the propeller shaft flange. You have to be quite precise when you file the pins so that they hold for the torque needed, 100NM.

Assembly

Well, everything was put together, got a coating of primer and thereafter a layer with the famous DB7164, semi gloss Tiefdunkelgrau. Then it was delivered to the balancing guy who destroyed the finish (planned though) when removing old and adding new weights. It should now be balanced perfectly up to 3000 rev/min, over that the balancing hasn't such a big influence.

"Detailing"

Unfortunately no pictures of the painted shaft yet.