Our Excellent Adventures

This is so easy to do. Just order the Mercedes wheel inserts from one of the several vendors out there - waiting for them to come in is probably the hardest part.

Drill a 1/4″ hole in the plastic (yep, it’s plastic) cover.

Use a screw driver and pop out the insert. Don’t pry against the wheel - you may scatch it.

You are left with a very nice hole that needs filling.

Just pop in the new insert and you are good to go!

Of course, if you want to, you can take each wheel off to remove the insert but why would you want to do that?

The finished product.

Yep, it was hot today. Not as hot as in Mosul, Iraq, where it was 109 today, but East Bay hot. Still, I had a clean drive way, mods to do on the Sprinter. A perfect afternoon!

I jacked the Sprinter up about 4 inches using the trailer hitch. That gave me a little more room for rolling about looking for sockets that for some reason are just out of arms reach or under me where I can’t see them!

I got a new sway bar and Koni shocks for the rear in this afternoon and decided to go for it. I had gotten as estimate from a shop for 6 hours to do the work which translates to about $725. I looked underneath the bus and saw I would have to remove and replace 10 bolts to do the job. This is a no brainer.

To remove the shock you need 2, 18mm sockets, wrenches or a cresent wrench. All of these bolts, nuts today are torqued pretty tight so eat your Wheaties before starting or get a small cheater bar if necessary.

You can see from the photo below, the Konis are larger than the stock shocks.

The bolt and nut at the bottom of the shock are 18mm.

The bolt at the top is 21mm and very deep threaded. I thought it would never come out. Definitely takes some horse to get this one loose.

I am not sure how long the first one took but the second took 18 minutes to swap.

Here is a picture of the stock sway bar. You need to remove 4-50 tork screws and 2-18mm bolts/nuts. Start with the screws and remove the bolts last. This bar is easy to handle as it is very light.

The difference between the stock and new sway bar is shown here. There is a big difference in diameter. There is a substantial difference in weight which makes if a little difficult to install the new one.

The new sway bar comes with new axle bushings and new bushing for the arm (left and right). It also comes with some very sticky grease (like the old wheel bearing grease). I used it on the bushings for the arms but I did not put any on the axle bushings. If I need to, the axle bushings will be fairly easy to grease.

The bolt on the sway bar arm is 18mm and the tork screws on the axle bushing are a 55. The arm is under a slight pressure. I removed the axle bushing first and then the arm bolt. Installing, I installed the top tork screw and then went to the other side and installed the top screw. Then the bottom screws and last the arm bolts. They took some force to get the bolt through. Then I went back and tighted all the screws and bolts.

The finished sway bar replacement in place. Tommorrow I make a run to Monterey so I will see if things are tightened up a bit. I would expect less sway and faster recovery from a bounce.

The Sprinter is a pleasure to work on! Everything is so clean underneath and easy to get to . . . the Eurovan I had was covered underneath with something like cosmolene - no matter what you did, you got sticky and dirty. The oem sway bar was coated with something black but that’s what the Lava Soap is for.

If you are planning to do any mods, such as adding GPS, or even changing your own air filters, oil, etc. there are at least a couple of tools you need to add to your collection.

The first is the oil filter wrench like the one shown here from europarts.com.

Next you need a set of tork screw driver bits, some tork sockets and some small wrenches in mm size. I seem to use a T-25 screw bit most of the time. Whether of not you need a torque wrench is still being debated. Apparently most of the torque requirements on the Sprinter are beyound what a human can achieve. I just happent to have a torque wrench but have yet to use it on the Sprinter.

Last you need a set of automotive molding tools like these which are invaluable in taking of dash, door side panels, logos and badging (like 2500) etc.

It always amazes me when an 8,000 pound vehicle has a horn that sounds like a baby road-runner. I mean it is down-right embarrassing when someone cuts you off and you can’t even express your displeasure with a polite tap on the horn, afraid they’ll drive off the road laughing.

I installed Hella Supertones a couple of weeks ago and while they were better, they still weren’t what I was looking for. So, I got on the web, went to the SMB (Sportsmobile) forum and checked out what some of them use - good idea!

I decided I did not want to sound like a train, or try to mount shiney chrome trumpets so I settled for a “Bad Boy.” This is a small, 118 decibels air horn that uses the 2 wires on your Sprinter and easily attaches inside the engine compartment where the oem horn is located.

It is available several places on line and here you can hear a resonably good rendition of what this horn and others sound like.

Yes, I was tempted to get a “Dukes of Hazzard” horn and I do have the site bookmarked just in case I get cut-off again with no respect.

Tire pressure is usually a subject that everyone agrees to disagree on but I confused on this one. I have posted this in the SMB forum and in the Sprinter-source forum. Since the #1 cause of tire failure is low air pressure we can’t take this lightly.

This is the manufacturer’s label . . .

and I don’t know whose label (Sportsmobile?) this is but the difference is major.

The tires maximum capacity is 3049 pounds at pressure 80psi.

The GVWR in 8550 pounds with the GAWR Front 3970 and the GAWR Rear 5360. I am not over these but I am within about 200 pounds.

Higher pressure will help my mileage but a stiffer ride on these trashed freeways in California will be bone crunching. (I have hit some holes that the rear axle comes entirely off the road.)

BTW, if the rear seating capacity is 0 as it reads on the second photo, why do I have 4 seatbelts in the rear?