A clean shop makes for a stress free space
​All was going well on the W126 forefront in the Workshop until I decided to pull out Frank and clean up the floors. As usual, the V8 roared to life and casually pulled out into the space beside my Workshop. Leaving room for me to clean up the oil dry from all the various fluids that had found their way out of the engine during the revival work. A few dust clouds later, the shop floor was clean and ready to house its four wheeled tenants again. 
Not so fast!
I slide into my freshly 'redone' drivers seat, expecting Frank to come back to life, and to my surprise, it spins over then suddenly stops. "Well that's weird" I thought. After a few cranking attempts I noticed the starter was pluming smoke, so I decided I should probably  the battery just in case. Confused, and betrayed, I fired up my John Deere and yanked Frank back into the workshop. In complete disbelief, I let Frank sit for a couple days.
All it takes is time
It was a cold morning in the shop, and things were froze up outside, and little did I know, inside too. Gathering my thoughts, the most logical starting point is to see if I can spin the engine over by hand. Four ten millimeter bolts later and the fan is off the engine. I grab my 27 millimeter socket and half inch drive ratchet for the moment of truth. After many attempts of moving the engine back and forth a few degrees, there is a dead stop in both directions. Time to rip off the valve covers. The passenger side shows nothing out of the ordinary, maybe there's hope? The driver side was a different story. There was a deep gouge in the valve cover itself from the timing chain, and both timing guides were broken. I grabbed my inspection cam and noticed there was a chunk of the timing guide wedged between the chain and timing cover. After some fighting, I was able to pull it out, but that was not the source of our 'sticking point'. Proceeding to look down the spark plug holes, I found that cylinder three could have contacted a valve. Valve contact at low engine speed doesn't necessarily explain the engine being stuck. As if the engine fighting me wasn't enough, I went to hook the battery up to roll the driver window down, and I heard a little motor whirring. Unfamiliar with all the electronic gizmos on the W126 chassis, I assume it's just something under the hood. As soon as I heard the familiar "thunk" of the door locks, I knew I was in trouble. Lets just say a coat-hanger, an airbag, and three hours later, I was back into the car.
What's next?
There are a few ways to proceed from here, with one way being more grim than the other. We took this $700 car from a neglected non-runner to a shiny, running and driving machine. The more unfortunate fate for Frank would be a future in "The Pen". Neither Jim and I want to do that to such a nice car, so we've decided to see if we can get it back up and going. We have a parts 420SEL with the same engine but with less miles. I noted down when we got the parts car that the Camshafts were no good. Since it is lower miles, maybe the Cylinder heads themselves would be good and we could swap the nice cams from Frank.  Is it worth getting a timing chain, guides and a head gasket set? Time to pull the engine and see what survived. 

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.