back from the dead in 7 days, a 1988 Mercedes-Benz 420sel

Saved from the mobile homes

Our newly aquired 420SEL at Jim's Shop

The 420SEL arrives at Schank's Workshop

Found in the glove box archive

Frank's unbelievably clean passenger side camshaft

Made it out of the shop on its own accord

Spruced up with proper S class pancake wheels (barrowed from my SL)

Everything works on this car, all the lights, all the switches

Unexpected Find
Marketplace contains many sad cars that are left to rot in various places. This particular W126 was in the side yard of a trailer park in Baroda, MI about two hours south of the the workshop. A good friend of mine, Jim, pioneered the finding and purchasing of this car. All I had to do was drive the truck and trailer. I am always intrigued by a new project, but this one was different. Normally, we get cars that aren't running and they get put into the pen. The pen is where cars that aren't worth saving go on to live life as a parts car. Jim's plan was to get this car, have me get it running, and then determine what to do with it. As with most things Jim comes up with, I am always game.
​Getting the prize
This particular car was described as worth 8-12k running, a wild thought for a car with 244,000 miles. It was said to just need an ignition speed sensor. What inspired us to go pick this car up was that we happened to have a parts 420SEL with the sensor in question. So we set off and arrived in Baroda to a small trailer park. We circled a few trailers until we saw our 420SEL sitting in the grass near a trailer. It was a windy, blistering, day in November, but it all seemed to stop just long enough for me to load the car into the trailer. A measly $700 exchanged hands, and the owner very promptly went back into his home.
Start from scratch
Our newly acquired car landed on November 15, and sat for a couple days until I was able to head back to Jim's to assess our situation. My first thought was to get a battery in and ready to go. I opened the door and put the key in the ignition so when I put in a battery in, I would hear that distinct Mercedes balloon deflating noise. Once it was sorted that putting power to it didn't cause a fire, I went on to to rolling the engine over by hand. It seemed to feel very good, so I set off to pull the plugs and see what they had to say. What I found was that there were three different types of NGK plugs in the 4.2L V8 M116 engine. All of which looked to have been used at some point. I took out cylinder number one to check for spark, and to my surprise bright blue spark was present. Running off that high, I removed all the spark plugs and sprayed some WD40 in each cylinder, since the car had been not running for around three years. As the cylinders soaked, I packed up my things and headed back to my personal workshop. 
What to do next
 My  best resource is always my friend Jim, who has a very long history with these cars; parting them out, writing about them, and even driving them. While the 420SEL was beached in Jim's driveway, we were chatting on the phone one day and trying to figure out when I would be able to head down and work on it again. After some regular chatter, I mention bringing the 420 back to my workshop so it could be inside and I could work on it more regularly. Even though it was not my car, Jim was more than willing to let me trailer it up to the workshop and let me work on it. 
Research!
Historically, I am extremely stubborn and when I start working on something, and I do not like to stop working said thing. Researching everything I could find about W126 no start issues I narrowed it down to a few items, the biggest being fuel delivery and timing. Now that the 420 was in my shop, I could really get to know what issues it was hiding.
Frank
First on my list of things to do was get the inside clean, so that I could bear sitting in the drivers seat to crank it over. Mostly it was just candy wrappers: it far cleaner than others car's that I've dealt with. In the glove box there was a surprising number of owners manuals. The original receipt for the first owner was in the glove box, registered to a fellow named Frank. Along with that, there was picture of a man, and two children outside of Twitty City. I knew then, that I needed to name the car Frank. 
It runs, sort of..
It's now November 25, and I was quick to figure out what was wrong with Frank. I sprayed some starting fluid down the intake and not even a pop occurred. This had to be a timing issue, and then it occurred to me there was an old distributor in the trunk. I popped off the passenger side valve cover, and barred the engine over to TDC. Once I knew I was riding on TDC, I popped the distributor cap off and saw the rotor was not even close to cylinder number 1. Pulled the distributor out, aligned rotor to cylinder one, and threw everything back together. Sprayed some starting fluid down the intake and Frank decided to make a cough for life. Now that the ignition had been figured out, it was down to fueling. New fuel lines were installed on Frank and after some poking around I found that the return and feed were swapped. Fuel hurdle one, solved. Even after that, still no fuel to the CIS injectors.
To the Trunk
There were two other fuel distributors in Frank's trunk, one half taken apart and the other was in unknown condition. That wasn't good enough for me, so I texted Jim and asked if I could take the known good off of his other 420 parts car. Of course he said take whatever you may need to get it going! On went the "new to Frank" fuel distributor and just like that we had fuel at the injectors. WAY too much fuel actually, so I went to leaning out the 3mm adjustment on the intake until I was able to get Frank to run. I'm assuming the old owner got to the no fuel part and was trying to richen the mixture. With sweet victory, our $700 mission was completed on November 29, and now it was on to fixing small things like valve covers, brake lines, instrument cluster gears, and rebuilding a fuel distributor to make sure it would never fail us again.