1958 190sl Mercedes restoration
8/21/2022 Yes I am still alive! Being the president of the British Car Club of Charleston, I've been having Tech Sessions in my garage. Over the past year and a half, I've had about 12 different British cars in the garage doing little things like brakes and lights to changing the clutch on an Austin Healey to a complete engine and transmission rebuild on a 1952 MGTD. I just ordered about $5,000 in new parts for the Mercedes.
8/24/2022 Since the hard top was in the house, I decided to start on it. There were cracks in the paint so I got a razor blade and chipped the paint off. I removed 90% of the paint that way. The condition of the headliner wasn't that bad, some tares at the edges that I think I can fix. I removed all the rubber and glass. I have all new rubber on order. I removed the chrome J hooks at the corner to rechrome them. The hard top has visors which is very rare. They are in very good shape. The brackets need to be rechromed though.
I'm still uncertain of the exterior color. Check out the options.
I've been rebuilding the brake booster. It seemed to work OK when driving the car but decided to rebuild it anyways. It's good I did as it needed to be. The delivery shown above included a rebuild kit for the booster. Below is the booster with th new parts.
I'm trying to find the right color blue paint for the nose, shown below. A borrowed hone did a good job of smoothing the bore for the new parts.
I'm not sure if I ever mentioned on here, but I'm the president of the British Car Club of Charleston. That has been taking a lot of my time. I have been organizing Tech Sessions for the past couple years. I typically have 1 or 2 a month. Members of the club buy parts they need for their British car and we would install them. We have done lots of brakes, replaced clutched and rebuilt two transmissions and two engines. So the next engine the club will be working on is the 190sl. It will be the first overhead cam engine we have worked on.
6/24/2023 Leather door tops
The wood door tops were cleaned up and covered with leather.
Leather ashtray top - I did these projects in preparation to putting leather on the dashboard. The leather is pretty thick so I wasn't sure how easy it would be to stretch. There is significant leather stretching going over the speedo and tach.
The brake booster has been rebuilt. Just need to paint the parts before final assembly.
The exhaust manifold has been sand blasted and painted with 1400 degree paint.
I'm still working on the trunk, hood and doors.
AAAAhhhh, 6 years, 7 months since I started.
