Hi, hoping someone can help me. My grandmother-in-law has a1986 Mercedes 500SL which has been stalling on her mid drive. She’s had it “fixed” twice already but the problem remains. The car has sentimental value to her and she would love to be able to drive it again but the thought of it stalling and not starting again scares her. Does anyone happen to have a talented, trustworthy Mercedes mechanic in San Francisco? Someone who specializes in classic Mercedes would be ideal. Thank you.
The web is your friend . And if you really want this fixed then a local dealer might be the best choice . I don’t think any of the regulars on this site live in San Francisco or have a Mercedes . Search the web for a Mercedes club near you as a start.
I cannot help you with references in the SF area and I am NOT a Benz expert.
However, I’m near 100% certain this vehicle has CIS fuel injection which I am very familiar with due to experience on other Euro cars which used the same system. There’s also another phrase for CIS but since this is a family friendly forum…
The most likely cause for intermittent stalling is a worn fuel pump. Those can be intermittent and the failure is likely due to a badly worn commutator on the pump armature.
These pumps run at considerably higher fuel pressures than a “normal” fuel injection system so that is an underlying reason for pump failures.
Hope that helps in some way.
2 Likes
You might check on an SL forum for their recommendations, also Yelp and Google, search for Mercedes mechanics.
Here’s one forum (MB enthusiasts refer to it by its internal MB model, R107).
https://mbworld.org/forums/sl-slc-class-r107-62/
But I bet @ok4450 is right.
There’s a “repair shops” link at the top of this page, try clicking there.
I expect however you’ll get best results by asking someone who owns a Mercedes which shop they use. If all else fails, take it to a Mercedes dealership shop. In my area there are quite a few shops that specialize in upper-end German cars, Mercedes, BMW’s, Porsche, etc. I noticed another one just the other day in fact. I notice their signs when driving errands, and I expect they’re all in the phone book. You shouldn’t have any difficulty finding such a shop. Better however if you can get a personal recommendation from a Mercedes owner.
I seem to recall seeing one located on Lombard/Richardson in the Palace of Fine Arts area of SF.
Which is almost a waste of time . Most of the reveiws are years old .
1 Like
The what???
2 Likes
Ask a kid nowadays what a phone book is and I would bet they would say GOOGLE it. 
1 Like
I was surprised to get a Yellow Pages last week, very short, hard to imagine most companies would spend the money to be in it.
its the contacts in their phone or email. lol
We stlll get the Yellow Pages here it is about 6 by 9 inches and about the thickness of a paper back it covers 4 county’s in my state and about half of 2 county’s in the next state.
lol … I guess I’m a bit of a luddite, I still use the yellow page portion of the various phone books I get. Just the other day I phoned up a radiator repair shop, recommended to me, but I found their phone number in the phone book.
I actually miss the Yellow Pages but like other ink on paper media it’s dying out. The phone company here quit sending out phone books 10 years ago.
I wish Mutual of Omaha would follow that example. They bombard me multiple times weekly with paper solicitations.
Entire forests are being massacred for that purpose…
One thing I think the OP and the GIL needs to realize is this. The comments come across as finding a competent Benz tech means the car will continue on worry free. That is never going to be the case with any used car; and especially an aged CIS vehicle.
What the OP needs to do is elaborate on what those 2 “fixes” were that did not work.
Tester
Just from a quick search try these guys, seems like they work on a bunch of classic Mercedes, there are probably others as well.
+1
I can attest that those old Bosch CIS f.i. systems are really, really bad, based on my experience with it in my Volvo.
And, I can also report that I had to replace the fuel pump on that car ~ every 14 months.
Luckily, the pump was in a very convenient location (left rear wheel well) on that model.
I got into it a few times with the VW factory rep over CIS. His claim was that CIS is bulletproof and that if the fuel filter is changed regularly then the system never needs to be touched; ever.
He had no answer when I queried about why the number of customer complaints which were related to fuel pumps, fuel injector air leaks, fuel distributor issues, or control pressure regulator problems.
One huge issue was poor fuel injector spray patterns. There is even a bench tool for cleaning and testing spray patterns. Sometimes it helped; sometimes not.
Hmmm… With that level of lying, I wonder if his next career was as a used car salesman.
Or in politics. 
1 Like
The VW rep was a great guy and unlike most of them was very mechanically astute. That is why his comments about CIS were baffling to me. Just adopting the corporate line I guess.
In this case and assuming the pump is the problem I seriously question the idea of considering a 36 year old CIS equipped Benz to be fail safe.
“The thought of it stalling and not starting again scares her”.
There is no way on Earth anyone can say whether or not that car will stall in the next week even if the current problem was rectified.
2 Likes