Daily 190E

[Rocambolesque]

Some of you might remember my old ride:


Well, I sold it 2 weeks ago. I lost motivation in this project, I felt like I reached a dead end with it. The new owner seems cool, hopefully he'll have fun with it.

The next day I started hunting for a new ride. Since I moved to the city, I wanted something with a little more refinement, a sunroof and an automatic (never thought I'd say that of my life lol). I went looking at car with that thing on the hood


I ended up with this thing. 1992, 2.3 litres, broken odo at 242k kms (PO swears it broke during the test drive)...



It's fairly clean for a car of this vintage, it's got a sunroof and an automatic, and more refinement than the Jetta. So it checks all the boxes

I didn't really have time to work on it other than giving a good clean to the interior. First mod was fixing those sagging seat nets:



The plan is to drop it, put wheels on it and make it reliable enough to cruise the US 66 next spring when I finish school. And replace that horrid steering wheel!

[Houstons23rd]

Looks pretty clean planning on bagging it?

[Rocambolesque]

Nah, I'll probably do it the ghetto way, aka cutting 300/400E springs with E36 Raceland front shocks and Saab 900 rear shocks.

...Or maybe I won't be a hack and I'll buy YSR coils. Maybe.

[Rocambolesque]

Thread resurrection! Hell yeah!!

This week I ran to the american border and went to pick up Bilsteins and Eibachs. Look!


...then I got searched like a criminal when I crossed back in Canada. A Young guy with a Benz, probably a drug dealer...

The springs were kinda beat up and rusty. But upon cleaning them, they weren't so bad after all. Apparently they are older than the car, as they are stamped February 1991. Doesn't matter, they'll get cut anyways.


Tomorrow I'll install those. I also have to change a bunch of parts you probably don't care about, like engine mounts, ball joints, fuel filter, etc...

[duncan89]

Very nice ! Is it a lot of work replacing shocks on a w123? 2 hours ?

[Rocambolesque]

Dude, I just did it today. I tought it would be pretty straighforward since I bought the right spring compressor to do the job. Every single bolt gave me hell. It was either torqued to 100000 Nm with Loctite, or rusted, or stripped, or difficult to access. I started at noon and finished around 8 PM. My whole body hurts right now.

But at least I have a cool suspension. Its not slammed (waiting for wheels to adjust final height), but the handling is very nice.

[esskay]

look forward to seeing this..

[#MrBenz]

Nice job! J'aime

[P78]

if u get a left rear view mirror from england you have two identical ones

that's what i did with mine

looks real clean

[Rocambolesque]

if u get a left rear view mirror from england you have two identical ones

that's what i did with mine

looks real clean

I might do just that, the rubber things are all dryed out and cracked. For some reason I can only find complete mirrors...

Now here's the moment where you will get disappointed. This is after 2 weeks on the Bilstein/Eibach combo:


If you compare with the photo in my first post, you'll see that the car has been dropped about 1" all around. Not very low at all I think I'll leave it like that for the winter and I'll get cutting after getting new wheels when spring comes around.

Here's what I did today. The car's rear parcel shelf was looking like this since I bought the car. The black material faded to purple and the PO installed (or had installed) aftermarket speakers and junked the clean looking OEM grilles. He probably thought the spaceship look of almost all aftermarket speakers was cool. It's not.



So I took the thing out and sprayed it with Duplicolor fabric paint. Results were good.


One thing I noticed with Mercedes is that the odd bits and pieces are somewhat hard to find, and if you manage to find them, the guy will probably ask an arm and a leg. Plus, junkyards aren't filled with old Mercs. All of this to say that I couldn't find a set of OEM speaker grilles. I thought about doing something else. I trimmed the mounting tabs on the speakers to get them to sit lower than the shelf. Then I asked my sister to cut me 2 pieces of fabric with the same shape as the OEM grilles and sew the edges. I secured them with black thub tacks. There you go, refurbished rear shelf:


The rear muffler broke last week. It doesn't make much more noise. A Bosal muffler is about 250$. I cut the bracket and the turndown tip off the old muffler and welded them to a piece of pipe. All painted with VHT flameproof paint:


Installed (there's still mud stuck in my bumper!):

It's completely hidden like the original muffler, you don't see it from behind the car. You just hear a slightly deeper exhaust note.

I also couldn't find the spark plug wire holder thing for under 40$, so I decided to make my own with zipties. Now the wired don't touch the hot metal:


And finally plugged the hole left from the licence plate frame with a metal plug I found at a hardware store:

[loekaaz]

You know that hole is there for your outside air temperature, do you?

[Miroteknik]

^rekt

[Rocambolesque]

You know that hole is there for your outside air temperature, do you?

I know, I put it somewhere else.

[Laef]

Any updates ?

This was beginning to be interesting !

[Rocambolesque]

After a long and snowy winter of drifting just about every street corner, getting stuck on ice multiple times and swearing at my worn-out, 80$ dollar tires, it's time to take care of the car and get ready for summer. Fortunately, nothing broke during the winter, and I gotta say that I'm surprised by the fact that the car started every single time, even in -25 celcius weather. CIS is better than I expected...

When mid-May comes around, I'll be leaving on a 4-week solo road trip with this car. I'll be going to Chicago first, where I'll take the old Route 66 all the way to L.A. Then I'll take the PCH up to SF, where I'll head east through Yosemite Park, up to the Bonneville Salt Flats, then east again through Wyoming and Iowa before heading back home.

Sounds totally awesome doesn't it!?

Now if some of you live along the way and wanna shoot the shizznit, drink beers and talk cars, PM me! I want to see how the car culture is away from home!

That means I need to get work done! And don't worry, I won't disappoint all of you by doing this trip with the car this high up in the air. The stock wheels (had to choose between wheels or motels during roadtrip) will get re-wrapped with 195/50's and springs will get cut.

Its still cold out here, but today it was warm enough for me to refinish the cluster. The 7 needles each had their own hue of orange:


Got some acrylic paint and a brush from the local art store and worked my magic. I also ordered W124 gauge trim rings. W201 ones were like 40$ instead of 15$, and I figured both clusters were the same by looking at pictures. Wrong! I ended up cutting the W124 ones apart to fit them:


And a night shot:


And to finish, here's a shot from last fall: