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1963 Mercedes 230 SL W113 Tidy Up

398K views 946 replies 141 participants last post by  ted11 
#1 · (Edited)
(NEW UPDATES)1963 Mercedes 230 SL W113 Tidy Up (NEW UPDATES)

Hello every one, One of my good friends Jonas recently purchased this little gem to add to his collection.
This car had won numerous Concours events during the 1980`s but had not been shown since and was used on sunny days by its previous owner and although it has been very well looked after the car was in need of a little bit of love to bring it back to its former glory.
So my intension's are to go round the car to identify any issues and correct those and when these are taken care of we will finish it of with a full detail.
Here is the car


 
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#4 ·
Well I have had a look around the car, here are some of the issues to be dealt with.
Whats this around the headlamp




wheel trims the wrong colour

Suspension requires painting

Inner arches well protected but dont look very good

Brake pads require replacement so might as well tidy the calipers up at the same time

Looking at the reflection in the front bumper notice bad repair in front panel

lets see what other issues arise along the way.
 
#9 ·
Well I started with the headlamp bowls (wish I hadnt) someone had done some work to the front wings at some time or other but could not get the headlamps to line up with the bolt holes so using all the skills they had obviously built up over years and years (working on lawn mowers probably) they decided it would be a great idea to splodge loads of body filler onto the head lamp and then push it in the hole, tape it up over night and Bobs your uncle as good as new.
My Gran dad told me there were people who do this sort of thing when I was a kid and I think I have seen evidence of it on virtually every car I have worked on since, any way that isnt the best of it someone at a later date has repainted the wings and just masked up to the chrome surround (to much trouble to undo one screw).
This is going to become an issue later on but for now I am going to try to get the headlamps to fit correctly (using screws, no less).
Now I would really like to be able to get the lamps to fit without damaging the paint on the wings but I am not sure I will get away with it, so decided to go at the filler very carefully with a razor blade removing a bit at a time until it was back to the wings,then very carefully using 1000 grit wet and dry rubbed what was left of the filler back to what I guessed was about rite, Wrong, after scraping body filler from the headlamps for about an hour and a half I offered the headlamps into their holes to find that the shape of the wings was completely wrong, so now I needed a re think, well after pondering for a while I decided that it was going to be impossible to reshape the wings and bowls without damaging the paint so although this now meant that the wings would have to have paint there was no way I was going to bodge the lights in as before so now I had made my decision I thought sod it lets start another job instead (I was fed up of looking at the bowls ) so a change of scenery was needed so in my wisdom I thought lets have an easy job for a few days then go back to the lamps.
I decided I would tidy up the inner arches (big mistake) the minute that I looked for the bolt heads for the **** shield and found they where buried in 40 years of under seal there was that little man in my head again saying its all got to come off, we will need one of these then

Well for the first 2 layers it was great until it hit some sort of rubberized material that thought it would be great if it just clogged the brush up every 30 seconds and on top of that if I speeded the tool up it just started to melt the rubber and just push it to the side of the brush the cool down and go hard again (well I wasnt expecting that) right out with the Nitromors (im taking no prisoners now) I might as well of threw cold water at it for the good the Nitromors did, then I clicked the car must have the same material on it as the space shuttle lol, any way joking apart I ended up using a heat gun, gas blow torch and scraper and the last 3 days of my life but at least when the dark comes I go in my garage and start refurbishing the parts that I have removed




used up my photo limit for today, so more tomorrow
 
#12 ·



then a couple of coats of Zinc primer

then 4 coats of stone chip


then 4 coats of satin black

I then turned my attention to the brake caliper, this had been powder coated twice, one in black and one in red but because of the depth difference where the coating had flaked off I decided to remove all the coating and re prep all of the caliper rather than rely on the powder coating as a base for my paint


this was then Etch primed and then painted in aluminum colour paint also painted the hub silver while I was at it


With this done my attention was turned back to the inner arch my intension is to get it all back to base metal treat any signs of corrosion then prep for re coating.
Once I had got back to metal it became clear that there had been a little welding repair sometime in the past in the footwell area but although the repair was ok I noticed that the footwell was rippled and might show up once it was painted so I have decided that I should deal with this now rather than be disapointed later


So this is where im upto at the moment so I will update as things progress.
thanks for reading.
Your thoughts, ideas and comments good or bad, are always welcome.
 
#15 ·
Sorry for the delay in updating you all on whats been happening but have been really busy trying to get the rest of the rubber off the underside of the wing but we have progressed a little.
I left of the last time with the footwell down to bare metal where I found there were a couple of plates that had been welded in at some time in the past hence why there were ripples in the pan so I tapped some of the high spots down a little then filled the offending section of the floor, after the filler had cured it was flatted back with 80 grit paper and refilled where it was low then re sanded this left the floor looking ok appart from a couple of bits that needed another light skim of filler which was done and flatted.
Jonas was flying down from bonny Scotland to see his family in Birmingham and was coming to have a look at the car while he was here so I decided to throw some paint onto the floor section to give him a rough idea how it will look when finished although the finished article will have stone chip under the paint so should look better, this brought me up to friday evening so the car was left until Jonas had looked at it.
So Saturday Jonas and his good lady Jo arrived and its always a great pleasure for me and the wife when they visit as they are also complete car nuts and lovely people to be around, so after a cup of coffee Jonas and myself went out to look at the car and as he had only seen the car once (when he purchased the car) it would give him a chance to look over the car in more detail (no pun intended) and discuss some of the issues around the car, Now to say that Jonas likes his cars is an understatement and has owned some amazing machinery none of which has ever stayed standard so has a very good eye when it comes to cars so not much gets past him so when looking over the inner arch he noticed the bolt on shield could fit against the sill better and determined that the floor would have to have more work to correct this, but all in all quit happy with how things are going even though it appears slow he does appreciate what is involved to get to the finish that he would like and just told me to do whatever I want until I am satisfied with the car, I take this as a great compliment.
So later on Saturday after noon I started reshaping the floor pan so the s..t sheild would fit properly also if you had not already noticed there appeared to be a slight kink that only really showed up with the gloss paint so that would have to be done to.
The other thing that was bothering me was the spot welds, now I would normally like these to be visible to show originality of the panel but these as you will see had no real consistency and definatley not in a straight line so I decided they had to go as well.
Now leaving the footwell for a moment you will notice that there has been a new inner flitch panel fitted and was a little untidy around the shock mounting and also some of the brazing needed grinding back so I will attend to this.
Here are some of the pictures upto and including what I have been doing today, its still got a bit to go before its ready for paint but does show a little progress for a lot hours.


















 
#18 ·
Well Im getting there slowly, every time I have thought its time for stonechip I have found some thing that could be a bit better but this morning gave the lower inner arch and chassis leg a bit of wet flatting and then laid 4 coats of white stonechip over them, there is a couple of bits im not happy with in the upper section so thats what ill be doing this afternoon.
Im hoping to get six or seven coats of stonechip on the panels but do not want it that thick I lose the definition on the panels, once done and dry I will paint it the same colour as the bodywork.
Here are a few pics of how it is now






Any comments welcome
 
#23 ·
Here is the latest update at 4.15 am Saturday morning and just knocked off for the night, because it has rained today here in lovely Birmingham I was forced to work inside my garage refurbishing a couple of steering parts and expecting the sun to come out by the afternoon (according to the forecast) as i really wanted to get some paint on the inner arch, well it did stop late afternoon, 11pm in the afternoon but this was not going to stop me getting my fix for the day so out came the work lamps and I was ready to do some work, now with the drain tubes from the engine bay now working as they should I couldnt really start painting could I, so what could be done, well my mate Nubzy had seen my garage light on and had come over to see what I was upto, I explained that I was going to paint but couldnt then he stuck his head under the wing and said what I had done looked good but the front panel looked s..t in comparison and what was I doing to tidy it up, I did explain that I intended to re underseal it and paint it, " it still wont be as good as the rest of it will it" well obviously he was right and it took about a nano second for me to decide to strip it all off and do it properly (sorry Jonas but it has to be done) so after five hours with a scraper in my hand I decided that my neighbors could probably do with some sleep so I have called it a day, I shall get back on it tomorrow.
Any way here are some pics to keep you going

















 
#25 ·
Managed to get a bit done today even though its rained for most of it, got the area that was offending me down to bare metal, re sealed around previous repairs then zinc primered the area, whilst doing this i had damaged some of what i had already done but nothing drastic.
I decided to put some base coat on the majority of the inner arch just to asses any defects that showed up buts its not bad to be fair, once its all got some paint on it will be flatted again before the top coats are put on.
I have also got my painter coming out this week to start work on repainting the roof and blowing the front wings in around the headlamps.
Any way i am stopping for the night now as I have got soaked today and I am sure no one will begrudge me a night off.
I will leave you to look over the pictures, please let me know what you think.
Cheers all
Ted11












 
#29 ·
Wow stunning work again, loved your other work so will be keeping an eye on this.

Can i ask what stone chip you are using on this car?
I would normally use a 3m product but using Waxoils stone chip as it is a little thinner and I wanted to keep it looking a bit smoother finish rather than the more pronounced stonechip look, hope this makes sense.:thumb:
 
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