Stay away from Dorman flex discs

[alcurin]

I have followed this forum for some time. I thought I would pass along my most recent experience. My 1996 C280 has 218,000 miles and I bought it used several years ago. It gets regular and preventive maintenance and may well be the best car I have owned.

Since I did not know the complete history of the car, I set about changing the flex discs and center bearing. I have used Dorman products before but their made-in-China policy is going to cost them a lot of customers. I won't buy another Dorman product if I can avoid it for my vehicles or any other vehicle I work on for someone else. I have 45 years in automotive repair, rebuilding, and modification work and I am a licensed mechanical engineer. The Dorman discs were installed carefully and properly.

I changed the flex discs in October. This past weekend, I drove the car backwards onto my ramps to check why I was getting a noise and vibration during hard acceleration (why do people think these cars are slow?). Turns out the Dorman 935-501 flex discs had been flexing. So much so that the bushings in them have hit each other and knocked chunks out of them. The old SGF disks were cracked and a couple of bolts had corrosion on them, but they had probably been in the vehicle a long time.

Don't be fooled by Dorman's claims of quality products. I will now have to take the drive line back out of the car to replace the flex discs (and to ensure everything is okay with the non-Dorman center bearing). I have some Febi-Bilstein replacements on order and I am confident that they will do the job. That is the price you pay when you think you can save a few dollars and get "lifetime" replacement parts.

As you can see, the bolts on the Dorman units did not even have a chance to get dirty. In the second photo, you can see the washer under the bolt is undamaged but the bushing is broken.

Again, I hope this saves someone else some time and money. Please learn from my mistake. You don't have to buy OEM but made-in-China is not a good alternative.

[kowalski]

stick with Lemförder parts

[alcurin]

As a follow up: Dorman did honor their warranty. I was told that the guibos are now sourced in Germany. I was then sent another pair, but they were the same Chinese made junk.

Further contact with Dorman led to the shipment of a SGF GAD 156 front guibo and a SGF GAD 139 rear guibo. Dorman claims that these are the correct replacements. For now, they are still in their boxes as I had sourced two SGF GAD 135 guibos from another company. Those are identical to the ones I removed except that the MB star and the MB part number is not on them. The removed discs had SGF and GAD 135 on them (as well as the MB information).

The new SGF GAD 135s are installed and working properly. I do not anticipate any further trouble since they are from the same company as the guibos I removed.