Hello Everyone,

My 97 e420 has served me well to 178Kmi. Yesterday it coded for cylinder 1 misfire. On inspection i found 5mm of oil around the base of the spark plug at the bottom of the spark plug tube. I dried the oil, pulled the plug and verified the cylinder is burning clean.

As best I can see from this forum it looks like the culprit is a valve cover gasket. Can anyone give me a guess of how much time is needed for the job or if the problem could be more than valve cover gasket. Should I be shopping for another car?

Thank you!

Scott

 

More info and resolution: It turned out the #2 cylinder was full with oil! Some oil sloshed out and coated the wires leading to the coil in cylinder#1 causing a short and cyl1 misfire..

I dried up the oil and the wires, reset CEL, all is good.

The repair shop wants 2.1 hours to replace one side valve cover gasket, or 3.5 hours to do both sides, plus $50USD for parts for each side. They say the valve cover gasket kit comes with o-rings that seal each plug cylinder tube.

I'll get the work done sometime next week.

 

E-class engines for the most part are pretty bulletproof, but with 178k i guess something had to go wrong at some time lol glad to hear the problem is solved though!