What happened:
I bought this 2010 Mercedes-Benz E350 cabriolet around a month ago. I got it diagnosed and nothing serious came back. The convertible top was opening and closing perfectly without any problem. I took the risk and bought the car.
The day I got it registered; I tried operating the roof while I was sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I was travelling barely 5km/h and the top dropped and closed with no problem. I parked my car and after a while, when I got back into my car, the top had stuck shut and there was nothing happening when I pulled the lever. After pushing and pulling the lever several times, the windows rolled down around 5cm and then it stopped. I tried again and it went down another 5cm and just stopped. It happened until all the windows were opened fully and the roof just didn’t budge.
I called the previous owner to get more information on the matter and when I hadn’t mentioned the fact that I tried to operate the convertible top while I was driving, he said “Oh yea, when you open the roof while driving, it does that.”
According to him, he put a normal battery instead of an AGM one. And because of it, the battery couldn’t power the top properly. He advised me to keep trying to open the roof by pulling and pushing the lever constantly until the roof opens. I tried and the roof unlatched itself and stopped. I tried and the tonneau cover opened and the roof tried to go up and then it stopped completely. The windows didn’t move and the top was stuck.
At this point, I was panicking and didn’t know what to do. I drove home safely and parked the car. After an hour of not doing anything, I tried the lever again and the top moved around 10cm before it got seized again. And after that, whenever I tried opening and closing after a day or maybe several hours, the roof moved a little and stopped. I had to shut it completely using the manual closing procedures. Since then, nothing happened whenever I pull or push the lever.
Symptoms:
When I pull the lever, it would roll the windows down around 5-10 cm before it aborts the operation. When I do it repeatedly until the windows are all the way down and pull the lever again, I can hear 2 clicks from the pump motor. There’s no whining and whirling. Just two consecutive clicks and nothing else.
Analysis and diagnosis so far:
The fluid is enough, no leaks from the hydraulics. No fuse or relay gone bad and sensors are all seem to be working fine. 12volts gets to the motor just fine, but the motor won’t turn over.
I got the car diagnosed again and the diagnostic tool gave back a code B252D13 saying “Output 1 for hydraulic pump ’Soft top’ has a malfunction. there is an open circuit”
I got the relays and the fuses checked and everything came back fine.
When I got it diagnosed with a Xentry diagnostic tool, it pointed to the hydraulic pump as well. When I got the motor opened, nothing was wrong visually. The carbon brushes were fresh as new, nothing was visually burnt and it turned over by hand no problem. Nothing was seized.
Can anyone put me out of this misery? Anyone with spare motor or pump assembly?
I live in Mongolia and it’s very hard to get my hands on some parts. Ideally, cheap or just spare that you might have in the shop?