Dear friends
I have a customer who has two w113 bodies and wanted to install on them engines coming from
1. Mercedes C36 AMG 1997 chassis w202
2. Mercedes C32 AMG 2002 chassis w203
After doing the obvious, which is to buy the wiring diagrams for those newer cars, have found that project is not feasible without spending thousand and thousands of dollar’s.
The main limitation is that Mercedes’ implemented from year 1991 the CANBUS technology on their passenger cars to reduce the complexity of the wiring harness on one side and also improve overall performance.
Car’s of this era which run on CANBUS have many small ECU’s that control so diverse things as for example one relay module (ECU) to control the radiator fan.
The instruments are all electronic and part of the CANBUS highway.
You have a relay module (ECU) to control the fuel pump, one for the ABS, another for the ESP (guess it’s the stability control) etc.
Not all the systems can be transplanted to the classic w113 without spending lots of money.
You can run the engine with a minimum set of independent ECU’s but then comes the fact that main engine ECU has to be reprogrammed or tricked to run on less ECU’s than on factory design. When the main ECU does not receive the data form all the individual components, switches the engine to the LIMP mode, therefore making the engine swap useless.
People with expertise on ECU reprogramming are few in the world.
For all the mentioned above I suggested the customer to abort the initial approach.
Here I come to the MB W113 community to ask for suggestions on which engine swaps are desirable for the pagoda, to pass the word of wisdom to my customer.
I am open to any suggestion, but an LS SWAP.
Many thanks in advance for all your suggestions on the matter.
Best regards
Eng. Leonardo Peterssen