W126 rust repairs (photos)

[oscarham]

Hello again everyone,




I thought it might be of interest to share a few pictures of the rust and repair work carried out on my 300se after seeing a few new owner posts. It


started off as just the wheel arches and a few scabs here and there, then quickly got out of hand..

This is just a handful of examples - it was both sides of the rear window, both sides of the boot, rear passenger side step, all outer wheel arches, two inner wheel arches, battery tray, bonnet front lip, a bit in the front door shut, two new wings...

PS sorry for bad formatting, I haven't got the hang of it

 

[APEX Benz]

Oh my!!
It's great to see how much you must love this car because that is without doubt a labour of love.
The salt over there really plays hell with the sills & lower regions huh!?!
I am very fortunate to have two entirety rust free W126's but I credit that to living in Sunny Australia, not any wisdom or skill of mine!

 

[DREAMER NO2]

You are doing a good job on it .Looks like the W126 goes in the same kind of places as the W124

 

[oscarham]

I haven't got the skills to do the repairs myself, those are pictures sent to me from the body shop. I'd have saved a lot of money if I did it! It was a bit of a rot box, fortunately (nearly) all gone now.

 

[APEX Benz]

I always say, there's no such thing as a cheap Mercedes... They either get you on the way in with the purchase price or it milks it slowly out of you over time as one tries to sort all of the deferred maintenance issues one possibly would have avoided if one had spent more on a nicer one from the get go...but either way, it'll cost you.
I'd like to add that I have never paid a great deal for any of the Benz' I've owned!!

 

[oscarham]

Oh my!!
It's great to see how much you must love this car because that is without doubt a labour of love.
The salt over there really plays hell with the sills & lower regions huh!?!
I am very fortunate to have two entirety rust free W126's but I credit that to living in Sunny Australia, not any wisdom or skill of mine!

Yes the salt certainly causes havoc. 190e's are quite common but I have only ever seen one other 300se in real life, it must be due to rust problems. It definitely is a labour of love, that's for sure.

 

[DREAMER NO2]

And these are even less - W124 260 E

 

[charlysays]

I always say, there's no such thing as a cheap Mercedes... They either get you on the way in with the purchase price or it milks it slowly out of you over time as one tries to sort all of the deferred maintenance issues one possibly would have avoided if one had spent more on a nicer one from the get go...but either way, it'll cost you.
I'd like to add that I have never paid a great deal for any of the Benz' I've owned!!

Depends on what fuel you run them on Mercs are the only passenger car to ever be fitted with an indirect injection diesel equipped with an inline injector pump.

I've had a few Mercs (all C250 TD) but the one I have now I have owned since 2017. I paid £200 for it with no MOT, a blocked cat. and ABS light on. Sorted those issues for around £50 outlay and drove it for 3 years on a blend of 90% recycled chip fat 10% petrol.
At that point I felt the car had proven itself so I fully resprayed it myself and replaced all suspension arms and bushes, shot the blasted rear subframe etc and stripped / welded and repainted the rear subframe area. The car is now in its 7th year with me and I have done 75k miles in it mostly on recycled chip fat. It had 175k miles when i bought it, its now on 250k miles.

I've spent a total of £1500 on the car to buy it and replace/ restore any bad bits with a fuel saving in excess of £10,000 over the 7 years I've been using it.

I had another one before, did 100k miles in that with a similar outlay on purchase/repairs. So thanks to these cars I have so far saved at least £20,000 in fuel costs for an outlay of around £2500 on purchase/ repair costs. I call that amazing value for money!

 

[Rockron]

I had another one before, did 100k miles in that with a similar outlay on purchase/repairs. So thanks to these cars I have so far saved at least £20,000 in fuel costs for an outlay of around £2500 on purchase/ repair costs. I call that amazing value for money!

So long as you enjoy the work and regard it as perhaps a hobby or pastime.
Of course you've got to offset some of the £20k fuel saving against the value you may or may not place on your labour/time expended on maintenance and resto.. Obtaining and treating the chipfat oil could have been a faff I imagine?

When applied to my rust prone (mechanically near sublime) MB commercial, I value my labour rate @75p/hour max.
However I've only got a limited amount of spare time, so it's a Lexus for mundane day to day trundling!