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Hey all, and welcome to the build thread for my 1995 Mercedes E300 diesel. I've decided to name this build “Medium Pimpin’,” since it’s going to be somewhere between ultra high-budget unobtainability and cutting springs with an angle grinder. I’ve got some fun things planned for this summer, and this should be an enjoyable build. There’s not much done yet on the car, but the build begins in earnest this morning, so I thought I’d do a thread as we go.
Alright, with that out of the way, on to the story.
The budget for this build comes from the sale of my previous project, a 1992 Dodge Ram with a hopped-up Cummins turbodiesel.
I’ve always had a fascination with diesel engines, something about their simplicity and the wonderful clattery noises they make. This particular specimen was a ton of fun: it was loud, quick for a chunk of iron weighing just shy of four tons, and it got attention everywhere it went. What it wasn’t, however, was particularly livable in the city. As fun as it was, it was just ridiculous to try and drive in traffic, and it was fully a foot too tall to get in my parking garage. I placed it for sale after two years of ownership, and a gentleman from Ohio came and purchased it, driving the old lumbering beast all the way back to the Midwest.
To replace the Dodge, I had my usual set of ridiculous criteria. It turns out, surprise surprise, that the combination of cheap + reliable + good gas mileage + RWD + good-looking is not easily met by the used car market. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and an infinite number of conversations with my incredibly patient girlfriend, I decided upon a W124 diesel, which met all the criteria more or less.
Mercedes fans will debate about which of the three diesels offered in the US was the best, but what’s not up for debate is the fact that the facelifted W124 looks just miles better than the original body. For reasons only understood in Stuttgart, whereas all the gas models got the facelift in 1994, diesels waited until 1995. That means I was searching for a single year. Oh, and it had to be either black or silver. Oh, and with grey, black, or cream leather, and not that MB Tex vinyl stuff either. As you can imagine, I was looking for a very rare combination, especially considering how uncommon diesels are on our shores. I wound up looking for about three months, until I found a black on grey one in San Francisco. The girl and I bought plane tickets and flew down over a weekend when I otherwise should have been writing or grading papers and took a look.
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