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Casey's 1977 450SEL

Started by Casey, 11 December 2011, 01:11 AM

Casey

I got my new seat leather set in the mail.  It looks so much nicer than this picture can convey - nice thick padding and very well-made.  The only difference I can tell from the originals is that the diamond print does not actually puncture all the way through, but is instead just impressed upon the leather.  I don't mind that and it's probably easier to maintain long-term anyways.  I now just need to snip off a little piece to color match and mail it to World Upholstery who made it and get seat backs and rear headrests made, and hopefully some extra pieces of diamond-print material (maybe better to get Vinyl for this?) to use as door panel inserts.  Heading up to NY to see what I can get from a 280SE's green interior (hopefully all LHD-specifics) along with unrusted rear seat frames, and ordering the SEL-specific bits and any other bits I need from an SEL from the UK.  I'll probably order up new carpets and seat pads before I do the conversion, but it's going to hopefully going to turn out nice at some point...


Casey

#31
Well this green leather from alabassi (originally from World Upholstery) is really beautiful, but for some reason it doesn't photograph well at all.  Anyways I picked up new rear seat frames with fully-intact horsehair pads from MB_Mike, and though I don't have the big staples to properly attach the fabric to the pads (and am thinking I will hold out until I can buy new pads anyways and use these in one of my other W116's with shot rear seats), I decided to go ahead and temporarily mount the rear seat bottom leather to get an idea of what it will look like when I'm done.  A nice site indeed!  I completely tore apart the old very rusty one and discovered that somebody removed the entire rear heat seater setup, only leaving me with the switches. :'(



The leather has a nice sheen to it, but note the holes don't go all the way through the leather like the original MB ones:



These are really well-made!



I also got a few green interior bits including front door panels.  mirafioriman will be shipping over most of the remaining green interior bits I need including SEL-specifics soon.  Now I just need to order two more headrest covers, covers for the bolsters on the sides of the front seats, and door panel inserts in matching leather (or maybe the panel inserts really should be MB-Tex or fabric?), new carpets, floormats, and seat pads.  Oof.

The manuals from mikeohlman rounded out my collection nicely (the unlabeled one is the W116 heating/ac/acc):



mikeohlman also sent me some NOS seat nets, which will compliment the new leather nicely!



MB_Mike also had the elusive triangle hazard button I've been searching for for ages, along with a center console zebrano trim with no holes except for the hazard.  I'll need to add a few most likely but that shouldn't be much of an issue since there are cutouts on the bottom for everything possible and I'll need to get it refinished anyways.  I also got a set of manual window regulators with green handles, but can't say I'm 100% decided whether I want to use them or not yet...:



I think this photo proves that I may now officially be a hoarder of interesting MB parts (considering I only have one car with a manual climate control that could even use ONE of these):



Also not pictured here, but now all three of my W116's and one of the W123's have euro warning triangles!  I figured out a very pracital use for these.  at least the some of them (three out of four of mine) have a rather thick base which adds weight to the trunk lid.  So closing the boot requires less effort and makes a more satisfying thunk.

MB_Mike

It was good to meet you yesterday. Glad to see these parts going to use. I know a thing or two about hoarding...
1987 Home market 560 SEL

Squiggle Dog

Wow, so that's what World Upholstery seat skins look like! That is interesting about the perforations not going all the way through, but overall those look to be really high quality, and certainly much nicer than just having an upholstery shop make something up.

There's a guy on eBay who sells seat skins and he says he can make me a set with MB-Tex in two-tone for around $800. They also seem like they are decent quality and cheaper than World Upholstery or GAHH. I'm thinking that finding decent inexpensive used bamboo MB-Tex seat skins is going to be too difficult, not to mention it would be a lot of work to unstitch and restitch everything to make two-tone seats.

Yes, you have quite the collection of wooden parts! I had a really nice wooden surround, but it was missing the mounting plate, so it was not usable. Then I scored a super nice, mint one which I installed. Sadly, due to the moisture in the car, the bottom is warping.
Stop paying for animal cruelty and slaughter. Go vegan! [url="https://challenge22.com/"]https://challenge22.com/[/url]

1967 W110 Universal Wagon, Euro, Turbo Diesel, Tail Fins, 4 Speed Manual Column Shift, A/C
1980 W116 300SD Turbo Diesel, DB479 Walnut Brown, Sunroof, Heated Seats, 350,000+

1980sdga


Casey

The more I dig into this car, the more and greater problems I find.  At first the car seemed pretty rust-free, though the floorboards did look to be painted with rust inhibitor as they weren't a nice texture or body color.  Then I found paint chipping off in various spots and overspray all over, leading to the discovery that the paint job is not original, and was not done well.  The rear seat heater (one of my motivating factors for buying this car) was actually removed from the seats, and the rear seat was rusted throughout besides.  So I got a new seat frame, but it seems every time I go to remove a screw, I encounter one of three things:

1.  The particular screw is missing from at least one side of the vehicle.
2.  The screw hole is damaged beyond repair.
3.  The screw has been replaced with a nonstandard one, the PO seemed to be particular fond of Robertson head screws but also occasional flatheads and general randomness.
4.  An extra screw (or many) have been drilled into some random place to hold something together, either because of point 1 or 2, or both, thus destroying at least two parts is one go.

That would even be less annoying if the PO had been consistent at all.  But although he appears to have been through the same operations on both sides of the car, each would have a different random arrangement of the above.

This, too, would be fairly tolerable.  What starts to get really irritating is that most places that the PO over reassembled, he thought it useful to use some super-adhesive nasty silicone crap that is really hard to deal with.  What really pisses me off is that at least 90% of the screws I remove are completely rust, leading me to believe there's a lot of hiding rust that just hasn't become serious yet.

Out of ten Mercedes I've owned, this was the second most expensive, and perhaps the worst overall condition.

Since the interior was all pretty much shot and I've got most of a new one, I ripped out all of the existing one today.  This exposed a lot more rust.  *sigh*  Still, the overall body condition seems pretty good, only one small hole worn in the driver front fender near the tire.  But I have come to the conclusion that the car is not worth doing anything with until the rust has been tended to fully, all glass and trim removed, and repainted from the ground up.

So today, I had at it:




My, there seems to be a lot of "rust-colored areas" in that last picture.  Let's have a closer look:



That's okay, I hear if you just put some black paint on right over the rust, it makes it invisible:


Hell, even the speakers were completely rusted away:


On the bright side, I found the missing first aid kit receptacle.  There's a cutout in the foam padding on the bottom of the hat deck piece, and it's drawn with a marker as well, but was never cut out for some reason:


A previous owner had sealed up the sunroof with silicon PRIOR to it's last repainting.  There's a nice rust field running around both sides of the seam bubbling up under the paint.  The sunroof motor wouldn't do anything, bu after chiseling away at the silicon for a fair while and then muscling up and cranking the sunroof manually from the trunk, it opened for the first time in years:




It's not so pretty underneath.  As expected, the tray is pretty rusty.  I'll probably try to replace the whole thing.  It is however working with the motor now.

I removed all the destroyed wipes from the outsides of the door windows, revealing every single bracket being very rusty and spreading to the door frame itself (see side picture above).  I then removed the front/rear windscreen trim, and found similar dishearting bits:


Note that awesome delamination, rendering the back window completely worthless?  Well, neglect was something the PO was quite good at.  Managed to delaminate the front windshield too (let's not forget that's a cheap warped plastic dash cap silicon-glued onto a *horrible* condition real dash:


*sigh*

Casey

The dome light is a different wiring configuration than any other I've seen, though it's still branded Hella and has the same external appearance:


Here it is with the rear one.  Note there is a wire soldered on each that screws into the frame of the car, and then a plug that fits over the round connectors rather than spade connectors including the ground:


Found this inside one of the seats, which I found amusing:


Even my gas lid is rusted beyond repair, and doesn't close itself once opened:


Now what to do with all this garbage?:


A lot of it is cracked, but some pieces are good.  I have literally every interior piece in parchment (except sill trim, which is grey), if anybody needs something.

I'd really like some advice on how I should proceed addressing all the rust if anybody has advice.  The passenger side footwell was the worst - it took me a couple hours to get the front passenger seat out and it's rusted up the side around where the seat belt bolt attaches.

Squiggle Dog

Raptelan--you crazy! The rust would be discouraging indeed. I went through similar grief with my ex-daily-driver 200D:



The best way to deal with rust is to remove it and prime, but I also like to use a rust converter, such as Rust Doctor when I'm not able to do that. You just sand or brush off any chunks and then paint the stuff on. It turns it into magnetite, a black "primer" that cannot rust.

I'm sure someone would love those interior parts. We could mix my red ones with your white ones and make a cool two-tone interior! Haha.
Stop paying for animal cruelty and slaughter. Go vegan! [url="https://challenge22.com/"]https://challenge22.com/[/url]

1967 W110 Universal Wagon, Euro, Turbo Diesel, Tail Fins, 4 Speed Manual Column Shift, A/C
1980 W116 300SD Turbo Diesel, DB479 Walnut Brown, Sunroof, Heated Seats, 350,000+

Casey

Quote from: Squiggle Dog on 18 February 2012, 11:01 PM
I'm sure someone would love those interior parts. We could mix my red ones with your white ones and make a cool two-tone interior!

I have indeed thought about buying up your red interior to do exactly that with the door panels, and then some day ordering custom seat skins to match. :P  But my parchment stuff is LWB and I already have near-perfect bamboo and tobacco SWB interiors.

I also thought about making a "W116 Anne Hathaway Cottage edition":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2y5nk_ekMM

Squiggle Dog

Quote from: Raptelan on 18 February 2012, 11:17 PM
I also thought about making a "W116 Anne Hathaway Cottage edition":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2y5nk_ekMM

Haha, what is this I don't even...
Stop paying for animal cruelty and slaughter. Go vegan! [url="https://challenge22.com/"]https://challenge22.com/[/url]

1967 W110 Universal Wagon, Euro, Turbo Diesel, Tail Fins, 4 Speed Manual Column Shift, A/C
1980 W116 300SD Turbo Diesel, DB479 Walnut Brown, Sunroof, Heated Seats, 350,000+

Casey

Quote from: Squiggle Dog on 19 February 2012, 12:04 AM
Quote from: Raptelan on 18 February 2012, 11:17 PM
I also thought about making a "W116 Anne Hathaway Cottage edition":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2y5nk_ekMM

Haha, what is this I don't even...

BBC TV Series called Top Gear.

It's series 8 episode 4 if you want to look up the full hour for download.  Basically they take an S280 and decide to make it more like a comfortable home, pouring a lot of cement in and then laying flagstone and wood flooring, replacing the door panels with plasterboard, adding a wood-burning stove, etc.  Of course that added a couple thousand pounds of weight to the car, so it ended up with a 0-60mph time of 35 seconds or so. :)

There's another good episode where the guy who did the interior design and the guy who does the test drive debate their respective classic cars - one owns a Mercedes 600 Grosser.

littlefin

#41
Quote from: Raptelan on 19 February 2012, 12:13 AM
Quote from: Squiggle Dog on 19 February 2012, 12:04 AM
Quote from: Raptelan on 18 February 2012, 11:17 PM
I also thought about making a "W116 Anne Hathaway Cottage edition":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2y5nk_ekMM

Haha, what is this I don't even...

BBC TV Series called Top Gear.


The program has become something of a phenomenon on British TV. It started out as a regular car review program but has now morphed into something way beyond that. The presenters do crazy challenges like racing each other across Europe or South America on different forms of transport, driving to the North Pole (literally) and turning regular cars into amphibious vehicles, to name just a few things!

You should check it out by whatever means possible!
110011 1967 230
108057 1972 280SE3.5
116024 1979 280SE
126037 1983 500SEL
124030 1989 300E

Squiggle Dog

I've actually watched a few episodes of Top Gear. Apparently, now they even have a version for the US.
Stop paying for animal cruelty and slaughter. Go vegan! [url="https://challenge22.com/"]https://challenge22.com/[/url]

1967 W110 Universal Wagon, Euro, Turbo Diesel, Tail Fins, 4 Speed Manual Column Shift, A/C
1980 W116 300SD Turbo Diesel, DB479 Walnut Brown, Sunroof, Heated Seats, 350,000+

mirafioriman

Rust, nearly all uk cars of this vintage have some ;)

It all depends how much time, money and inclination you have 8)

Ideally, strip it down to a bare shell, get it dipped or blasted and then cut out all rusted areas and weld in new steel.

In reality for most of us it's a case of doing as much of the above as you can ::)
I'm called Dave! I currently own: Mercedes W116 450 SEL 6.9, Mercedes W109 300 SEL 6.3, Mercedes W126 420 SEL, Fiat 130 Berlina, Fiat 131 Supermirafiori, Fiat 131 Panorama, Fiat 132 2000, Fiat Argenta and a Citroen Xantia.

Casey

Well I cleaned the car out with an air compressor, which just made things look much worse by revealing not only some holes through the floorboards including a long crack running the entire length of the joint between the rear floorpan and the rear seatbed on each side, but also patches of galvanized steel showing through other holes, apparently somebody in the past knew well of the rust and invested in a super-cheap patch job.  I've been seriously considering scrapping the car but I don't want to give up on it yet. :/

There are also holes under the windshield gasket on the lower corners.  If I do restore this it's going to be an epic project, but I've already got a green SEL interior and brand new green leather seat skins.  Still, maybe those are best saved for another chassis.  Perhaps the best route forward for this is to patch it up a bit, piecemeal together a more passable interior than it's original one, and sell it in "reliable but gas guzzling daily driver never going to be very fancy" condition for cheap and move along.  This has been a terrible experience...

>:-(