Upholstery Time

It's been a little over a year since I last posted to this blog. We drove it around with ugly upholstery that whole time. It was just fun to drive and we didn't care all that much that the interior was so unfinished. Because I never secured the driver's seat cushion down, springs started poking through and I had to be very careful getting in and out of the car to avoid being stabbed. It was time to take the car to the next level.

Last month I ordered a carpet kit and new, leather, seat covers. I also managed to procure, from a local auto upholstery guy, the best contact cement for gluing things down. I don't even know what brand it is, maybe Keystone? It doesn't seem to be available retail. Anyway, I had heard that it was really important to get the right glue. Many of the products you can buy at a hardware store just do not hold up. They may look good when the weather is nice and cool, but heat causes the glue to soften and things fall apart. I didn't want that to happen so I went with the good stuff. I wish I could tell you where to buy it.

The first thing I worked on was installing the carpet kit. Several of the pieces need to be glued on and it takes a lot of glue to do this. Each piece of carpet had to have at least three coats of cement and at least two coats on the metal that the carpet is to attach to. Although I had been told, I was still surprised that the carpet used up most of the gallon of cement I bought. Just putting the carpet in totally changed the look of the car's interior.

There is a piece of aluminum that separated the cabin from the spot that the convertible top rests in when the top is down. This needed to be covered with fabric. I already had a roll of the vinyl that my dad was going to do the car in so I used that instead of buying leather. This was another glue job. I got it done with only a couple of spots where I cut the vinyl a little bit too short. Oh, well, this was my first time doing anything like this so I am not surprised I messed up. It still looks pretty good, in spite of my inexperience. Next - the seats.

Taking the covers off the driver's seat was easy, they were just sort of draped over the seat frames. Both the seat back and the seat frames were broken. Luckily I am a metal worker so I was able to fix them. The metal band that the tops of the springs attach to was broken (rusted out) for several inches. I made a new one out of brass, which is what I happened to have lying around. It is supposed to be made of spring steel. Once that was in, I could reattach the springs so they won't poke through the fabric.

The springs on one side of the seat were rusty and probably weak. Instead of replacing them I shored them up by stuffing bits of foam rubber between the coils. The next layer is coconut fiber mat and on top of that is a felt-like padding. The felt was damaged so I had to beef it up in spots so it was back in shape. The seat back was much better. The frame only needed two welds to be good. It also did not need as much rebuilding of the padding.

Next, the passenger seat. First step, take off the old seat cover. Simple right? On this seat, there was another seat cover, a white one, under the top black one. I took that off and there was yet another black seat cover underneath that one! And the bottom one wasn't the original set, either. This car has had at least three sets of seat covers put on it and all of that was before my dad bought the car in 1975.

The original seat covers are designed to be installed without using nails, there are stiff cards that hook into slots in the seat frame. All of the seat covers on the passenger seat were nailed on. Since whoever did it didn't bother to remove the old seat covers, just nail on another one, there were dozens of nails to pull. These nails don't go into wood, either, they are spiral shank nails into sheet metal. Not easy to get out. Probably 90 percent of the time spent re-doing this seat was in taking it apart.

The passenger seat frames and padding were in really good shape so I didn't have to do any repairs, just go straight to installing the new covers. I was told that doing seat covers was strenuous and that is correct. At times I was kneeling on top of the upside down seat trying to compress the springs so I could pull the leather far enough to get the edge into the slots in the frame.

When the early 190SLs were being made, all of the body parts had the last four digits of the body number drawn on them in chalk or grease pencil. The seats were no different. You can see the number, 2520, on the bottom of the seat frames and even on the fiber "cards" that the seat back leather attaches to. That's the body number of our car.

Putting on new convertible top fabric is the next project. After that I need to re-do the dash pad which was done wrong. That is supposed to be quite difficult so I am saving it to last.

Now the seats are in and the car is really shaping up. I took it for a short test drive and it is quieter inside, too, as well as looking a lot better than the last time I drove it.

Drive!

We took the car on its longest drive yet this past weekend. A classic car show in Prescott Valley was the destination Saturday morning. There were perhaps 50 or 60 cars of all types, mostly American muscle. We parked our cute little car next to a red Thunderbird. It was fun and we met some interesting people.

Then we headed back to Prescott to do errands and decided to take the car all the way back to our house - about 40 miles one way. We had been keeping it in a garage in town so as not to have to drive it on the 16-mile long dirt road to our place. There are still a lot of details to attend to on the car and it is way easier to work on it at our house than in town.

On the way out I notice that the engine temperature was slowly rising beyond normal which is 180 degrees F. About 10 miles out it hit 190F. About 20 miles out it reached just under 200 degrees and stayed there for the rest of the way home. Although that is 20 degrees above what is supposed to be normal operating temperature it is not in a danger zone. I kept my eye on it, though.

The engine ran great the whole time. In fact the car was awesome! It was smoother on our dirt road than any of our other vehicles. I took it way easy. Don't want to beat it up too much!

On Sunday morning I worked on the car. The fan belt was loose and I though this could be the cause of the higher than normal running temperature. If the belt is slipping the water pump might not be moving as much coolant as it should. It was a serious pain trying to get the belt tighter. The bolts that hold the generator are so hard to reach. I think I got it mostly tight, though. The test drive later in the day will tell whether I did any good or not.

The next project was to get the headlights wired up properly. The first time I tried it, several months ago, I got one of the headlights to work on low beam but the other one worked on high beam. It was weird. I got out the wiring diagram and set to work. Finally I got things wired right. The wires were switched on the left headlight. Somehow fixing that also fixed the right headlight. Good. Headlights work now.

Since I was in electrical mode I decided to try to get the windshield wipers working. I couldn't get the motor to spin, even hooking it directly to the battery wasn't working. I removed the motor and cleaned all four of the wire connections and tried again. Now the motor works. After re-installing it I found that it didn't work with the switch. Messing with that didn't seem to help. Then I tried a different ground. That worked. It is hard to find just the right position on the pull-out switch to make the wipers work so I will probably have to take the switch apart sometime and see if I can make it work better. For now, I have wipers if I need them. There is still no top for the car so I really hope I don't need to use them!

The last project of the day was putting the sun visors on. These are the original visors with the original green, translucent plastic in them. Oh, and I almost forgot, one of the rear brake lights was out so I fixed that, too. The bulb was in the wrong position. Easy fix.



Now for the test drive. We decided to do a photo shoot of the car driving on the dirt road, hopefully kicking up some dust. It was fun. My wife, Nita, was the photographer. We drove to a few scenic bends in the road and set up the shots.

We were out for awhile, plenty of time for the engine to reach its highest temperature and the highest it got was about 185. Tightening the fan belt helped a lot.

It was a good weekend.

New Motor Mounts

 In an earlier post I mentioned that the first time we took the car for a drive on actual streets it made a lot of noise. This was because, among some other things, the fuel pump was vibrating against the steering box due to bad front motor mounts. Well, that problem is fixed now.

I ordered up a pair of new, aftermarket, motor mounts from 190SLparts.com and we put them in on Wednesday. It was super easy to do. It can be done from above so there was no need to put the car up on a lift. We jacked up the engine to relieve the weight, unbolted and slid the old ones out, and slid the new ones back in. The old mounts were totally collapsed. The right one had even come apart. Now that the new ones are in, the engine sits almost an inch higher. It needs rear mounts, too, but the supplier was out of them.

Since I had the car in my friends' shop for this, we put it up on the lift anyway so I could check for leaks and see how everything looks. The car has about 40 miles since its resurrection and new leaks are likely to turn up. The last time we had it on the lifts I spotted a leak where the fuel line attaches to the gas tank. I tightened a fitting and hoped for the best. This most recent inspection shows the leak has been healed. I am losing a little brake fluid somewhere and we saw a spot on the right rear wheel that indicates a possible leak. We didn't do anything about it yet. The only other possibility is that brake fluid is leaking into the air chamber in the brake booster. That's a pain to fix. I hope it isn't the booster.

After changing the motor mounts I took it for a drive. So quiet and smooth now! It really made a difference in how the car feels. I drove it on a few errands and then took a longer drive out a mountain road to see how the car handles. It was great!

It's mid-December now and I picked the warmest day of the week to take the drive. It was in the mid-60's. Not warm, but not bad, either. There is still no fabric on the convertible top so that may be the very next thing I try to do. With the top on I could drive it in cooler weather without freezing my ass off.

Another project in the car's near future is to get the heater working. I haven't even looked into this. There are some cardboard air channels that are not in good shape. I may have to repair them rather than get new ones. I don't know if the fan works or if the heater core is sound. The work goes on!

Lost a Bet

This car was auctioned at Mecum Anaheim, 2015 for $180k

A friend and I had a bet on what another 190SL would go for at the Mecum Anaheim auction. We were both way off. He guessed $125k and I guessed $100k. It went for $180k! It was an older restoration so I thought it would go for less. You never know with auctions and, of course, it's hard to tell that much about a car by looking at a tiny photo on the internet.

Whoever lost the bet had to buy lunch at In-N-Out Burger. That was me. I figured it would be fun to pick up my friend in our 190SL, so I loaded the car on my trailer and hauled it to town. We had fun driving around in the cute little car on a warmer-than-usual November afternoon. It ran great! And we enjoyed good burgers.

At Prescott Cars and Coffee, November, 2015

The next day I took it to Prescott Cars and Coffee in Prescott Valley. It's a local version of the famous event in Southern California. This was our car's longest drive yet, about 20 miles round trip, and it was awesome to be driving it. The event wasn't quite what I expected. There were very few vintage cars. It was mostly tuners. It was fun to see a new generation of automotive enthusiasts enjoying their cars and each other. Not my scene, though. This was the third time it was held ( on the third Saturday of each month). It has been a different bunch of cars each time so maybe future events will have more vintage and exotic cars. I'll probably go again.

I met Robert Webster, another Mercedes restorer, at Cars and Coffee. His shop, Webster Workstatt, is in Phoenix and he used to work with Jared King, the restorer I know in Prescott. He mostly does the mechanical end of the restoration but is starting to get into the whole thing. Small world. I can't imagine there are many more people in AZ who specialize in restoring the old 190SL and 300SL Mercedes. They may be the only two! I'd post Jared's web site but I don't think he has one. He specializes in bodywork, paint and meticulous assembly of the cars.

Good friends of ours, Bill and Laurel, have a small empty garage at a property they own in the middle of Prescott and they graciously offered to let me store the car in it. This is great! One of the reasons I am not driving the car enough is because I would have to load it and unload it from my trailer every time I brought it to town from our house. Now I can just go to the little garage and drive the car.

Our car in the backyard of our rental house in Prescott.

It doesn't have a top yet, or a heater hooked up, so I will still not be driving it much for the next few months. It's just not that warm here for convertibles in mid-winter. I will probably bundle up and do it anyway, at least a couple of times. This could also be an incentive to install the top fabric and maybe even fix the heater.

Old Photos, Ads, and Posters

I have been too busy with other things to work on the 190SL the last three weeks. I did get new motor mounts sent to me and I now have the bow drill which is the fabric that wraps all the bows on the convertible top.

Next week, if I can, I will get the new motor mounts installed. Not sure when I will tackle the convertible top project. I have to get psyched up for it. Having not done anything like this before, I don't want to do it wrong. Really, all I want to do is drive the car but the weather has been wet so no driving until things dry out a bit.

For entertainment one evening I searched the web for old ads, photos, and posters of 190SLs and other Mercedes from back in the day. Here are some of them. Enjoy!

 

Noises on the Street

Last month I decided the car was put together enough to take a real test drive. I loaded it on my trailer so we could take it to town. Then we got so busy with other stuff that we couldn't find an open day for its first drive on city streets. It sat on the trailer for three weeks but didn't go anywhere. Until yesterday.

I hitched the trailer up to the F250 Tuesday morning and my wife, Nita, and I headed down our 16-mile dirt road and another 24 miles of paved road to the parking lot behind our friend, Jared's, shop in Prescott. He specializes in restoring old Mercedes so we figured it was the best place to start our test drive. If something went wrong, we had an expert on hand.

I started it up and we took a spin around the parking lot. The car was noisy but it all seemed pretty OK so we decided to take a little bit longer loop - about 2 miles. On this loop the car got noisier. There was an engine noise that vibrated the whole car plus it sounded like there was a rock or something rattling around in the right front hubcap.

When we got back to Jared's shop we took the noisy wheel off and found that one of the pins that holds the auto-adjusting part of the brake had extended too far out and was grinding a groove in the aluminum brake drum. He popped it out and put a washer behind the cotter pin so that it wouldn't stick so far out and that noise was fixed. Easy!

We decided to drive a longer loop. We took it where we could use all of the gears, which worked fine, but the car made even more noise. The engine vibration was worse and there seemed to be noises coming from all four wheels and just about everywhere else, too. The car sounded like an airplane dragging cans of bolts down a runway. We could hardly hear each other speak. We abandoned our plans to drive it to lunch. Jared said he thought it was a successful drive since it made it back to the trailer without dying out on the road somewhere, but it sounded bad. Really bad.

The next day I took the car to Rich Biel's  automotive repair shop so we could put it up on a lift. Chris was the lucky mechanic assigned to help me figure out what was causing the noise and how to fix it. The plan was to start with the loudest noise first. It turns out that the motor mounts are shot and the front ones had collapsed enough that the fuel pump was hitting the steering box. That was the source of the vibration. I ordered new mounts but they won't get here for a week. In the meantime, Chris put shims under the front mounts to raise the engine up just enough so it doesn't rattle against the steering box. When I started the car, the difference made me smile. It no longer sounded like an airplane. It sounded like a normal car. Almost. There were all the other noises to deal with.

The next target was to take both front wheels off and re-mount all four of the pins that hold the automatic brake adjustment washers in place. It turns out that the cotter keys holding the pins in place were too small and allowed the heads of the pins to drag on the brake drums. Bigger cotter pins were in order plus some washers just for good measure. The dragging-can-of-bolts noises should be gone.

Now for loud rattle number three. We found that the exhaust system was not attached to the frame in a key place, was attached badly in another place and, as a result, the muffler was rattling against the car's body. Chris got some generic exhaust brackets and adapted them so that the whole system was attached at the correct spots with rubber to absorb the vibrations. This moved the muffler up slightly - just enough to clear the body. Another problem solved.

While the car was up on the lift we discovered that the gas tank was leaking at one of the gas line fittings. That took a few more minutes to tighten up. We are not sure we fixed it, though. Time will tell. I also noticed a hole in the bell housing where there shouldn't be one. Apparently the clutch had exploded at some point in the past and something punched a silver dollar-size hole in the side. It's in a spot where it shouldn't cause any problems, though. Best to leave this one alone. A new bell housing probably costs a fortune if it is available at all.

Now for the second test drive. Wonderful! It was so much quieter! I could actually hear the engine run instead of listening to it vibrate against the frame. It sounded damn good to me. I drove it around some more, went to the store, visited some friends to show it off, and stopped by Jared's shop. He admitted that he was trying to be supportive the day before, and only said nice things, but he was thinking, "what a pile of junk!" The difference between Wednesday's drive and Tuesday's drive was amazing. It was a different car. A really fun car!

Of course there are still lots of things to work on. The interior needs to be done. There are still some lighting and electrical issues, and there are still some noises to deal with. Fortunately they are practically insignificant noises, some of which will go away by themselves and some will be muffled when the carpet kit goes in and the rubber for the doors and trunk is installed. I doubt it will ever be as quiet as a modern car but it will sound and feel the way it did when my brother, Rick, and I drove it to the mountains to go rock climbing back in the 70's.

Door Glass

I got the door glass installed this weekend with no problems. I had already gone through the window regulators, cleaning and lubricating. There was a little bit of straightening of bent bits, too. The original glass was in the trunk wrapped in fabric so it was in pretty good condition.

First I had to put in the door brush thingies that go on each side of the window and are mounted to the door with spring clips. Getting the clips on is a bit of a chore, probably because they were the old ones and were bent a little when they were removed. A little bit of prying open and squeezing shut did the trick. They are pressed onto strips of metal at the top of the door and inside the window slot. Then the brush doodads press into the clips.

Next I lowered the window through the slot a little bit and put the window guides in the metal slots on each end of the window. I lowered the window the rest of the way to hold the guides in place. I had to put a little dab of silicone to secure them in the slots. Then I raised the window to a point where I could mount the window to the regulator using 10mm bolts. There are rubber washers and grommets, too, that protect the window from touching metal. A felt strip goes just behind the glass where it mounts to the regulator. All of the soft bits are there to protect the window from breaking and to keep it from rattling.

The process went pretty smoothly and now the doors have their windows. Another step accomplished.

I bought a new wooden bow for the convertible top and installed that, maybe prematurely. I was reading about how to put the top canvas on and discovered that all of the bows need to be covered in a fabric they call bow drill. It looks like thin cotton fabric. The fabric that goes on the aluminum bows is supposed to be backed with rubber. I wonder where I can get that? Is it even necessary?

The descriptions I was reading about installing the top seemed to indicate that the top fabric should consist of more than one layer of canvas. What I have is only one layer. I need to do more research to find out what to do. Just like everything else on this car, I have been learning by doing. It's a little scary. Let's hope my luck holds and I get the car done without wrecking anything!