A friend cleaned the throttle body of my daughters 240, after which the car would barely run. I repaired a vacuum leak and found the ignition wires corroded and the insulation deteriorated. I insulated as well as I could and got the car running. This morning the car died. It will start but will not run?

Any ideas on where to begin trouble shooting? Fuel system or Ignition?

 

Barely run at all or just barely idle? Go back to where work was done. If throttle body was incredibly dirty, you may have upset the balance of the idle. It should have idled higher in order to compensate for the crud in the TB, but could have been stuck open by the junk, yada yada yada.

Make sure all hoses are connected first. May need to adjust the TPS and bolts and so fourth on the TB, could have bumped the TPS. Did he remove the TPS? He put a new gasket on too right?

Check this... Engine Tune and Performance

 

how was it running *Before* your friend cleaned the throttle body?

 

Ran fine...idle seemed a little high but not bad. After cleaning TB it ran rough and struggled to pull up hills. I found a vacuum tube split and it seemed to idle and run better, although would skip and run rough occasionally.

I found 4 wires connected to a gray box on firewall (ignition?) that were corroded and tried to cover them w/tape. My daughter drove it about three miles...said it would still run rough occasionally...next morning it died a mile from the house.

So far...I have replaced two wires -- one to the starter and another to a sensor, but cannot trace the red and black wires from the gray box. Once I trace those down and replace I will be able to address TB issues?

 

first rule of mechanicing, whatever you last 'fixed' is likely to be directly related to what broke.

if one vacuum tube was split, they are all suspect, I'd plan on replacing ALL the vacuum lines, the bulk hose is pretty cheap... also important are the molded hoses that go to the idle valve which is tucked under the throttle body.

re: grey box... a 1986 with a B230F engine has 'chrysler' ignition, I believe, but nothing in the ignition has 4 wires that I can see (main ignition controller has 10 wires).

solid red wires are almost always unswitched power, and solid black are often ground.

I do see a few wire module in the diagrams for the LH-II car, has 2 blue+white wires from pin 3 to the LH ECU and to a single empty connector labeled 'idle speed adjustment point', a black wire from pin 18 to ground, and 2 orange wires from pin 2 to both ignition module and the EFI ECU , box is shaped like a home plate (rectangle with two corners beveled off) and has two mounting tabs. its called 'breaker box' in the diagrams, but I have no idea what its function is, its not breaker points as the ignition is computerized.

Have you replaced all the fuses? the 240's used the really lousy tinned ceramic fuses, these corrode over time and make lousy erratic connections, which can cause all sorts of erratic problems. I'd get out on ebay, and look for a guy selling "mercedes w124 fuses", a complete set of those ceramic fuses in copper and brass. replace all your fuses, cleaning the spring contacts of any that look even a little corroded. On LH 2.2+ cars, there's also a single 'blade' type fuse near hte power steering reservoir in a standalone fuse holder, this supplies power to your engine, I'd replace this fuse holder with a marine one if it looks even a little sketchy (one end goes directly to the battery + terminal, the other goes into the wiring harness, so you need to splice the new fuse holder onto the existing wiring). Your 86 has LH-II rather than LH2.2, so I dunno if it has the same thing, I'm not seeing it on the schematics :-/