Mercedes Benz 190SL

Pre-fitting the doors showed a larger gap on the left door compared to the right. In order to be consistent with a 3-4 mm gap on all panels the front left wing edge was leaded. As the door is aluminium and can not be leaded the front wing edge was leaded. After tinning the edge of the wing a steel plate was attached using aircraft body clamps to stop the lead falling off and to provide a template to lead upto.

 

 

 

 

The door adjustments allow the door in relation to wing to be moved in or out and up or down by a few millimetres. To move the door back requires the insertion of spacers. A friend of mine, Don machined two 1mm and two 2mm spacers, should I need these. One is required for the top and lower hinge, which is sandwiched between the door and hinge fixed to the 'A' post during normal mounting of door. The spacer is item 13 in the 'D' parts catalogue Group 72 Table 42. There is however no adjustment to move the door forwards to the edge of the front wing/fender. To reduce any gap at this point requires lead loading of the edge.

Wear in the hinge can cause the door to be out of alignment. A short fall in design means that the hinge pivot point on the 'A' post wears as it is made of aluminium and rubs against the harder steel hinge pin as it rotates. This wear is often as a result of lack of maintenece by feeding with grease via the grease nipple on the hinge. The softer and worn part is part of the 'A' post and out of bounds to replace. An oversize pin can be machined and the door part of the hinge drilled to take the oversize pin. This may weaken the hinge pivot point so an alternative is to bush the 'A' post, the stronger part. SLS, a Classic Mercedes-Benz parts supplier in Hamburg Germany, sell an oversize bush with new pin, but if any drilling is required to fit the oversize bush there is not much room. Incidently to remove a hinge requires a special tool which can only be fabricated.

After much filing and sanding the contour of the door gap followed the door perfectly. This entailed putting the door on then removing serveral times until a perfect finish.

More to come......... I have spent longer than anticipated to update this site as I have been utilising the time to progress the restoration which is at paint stage with all components in process of being rebuilt. I have additionally developed a new website Parry Chana Restorations. Providing valued customers with the same care and attention that my personal 190SL receives.

Posted by webmaster at 10:41 PM | Permalink

The 190SL is one of the earliest cars to be built in the "monocoque" or "unit body" design. With the exception of the rocker panels the steel body panels, frame and floor parts are all welded together to form a very strong single unit. The doors, hood/bonnet, trunk or deck lid are aluminium together with the 'A' and 'B' frames and dash. The aluminium parts will generally not need to be replaced but all of the outer body panels are made of steel and may need to be repaired or replaced. I was fortunate that with the exception of one or two minor areas there was virtually no rust on the body panels. Majority of the work on the left front wing and nose piece was panel beating badly repaired panels filled previously with bondo/polyester filler.

The factory fenders/wings and the nose (or tail) panels (item 45) were assembled and welded together on factory jigs, thereby insuring good fit and alignment. The entire front or rear could be ordered from the factory as one unit. Nowadays one has to resort to separate wings and nose/rear panels.

The nose panel, tail panel and fenders were in perfect rust free condition and only required a small attention with the hammer and dolly to work out small dents and ripples. Previous repairs were done with polyester filler rather than metal work. This was finished off with a small amount of lead to perfect.
If replacing the nose panel before welding ensure that the bumper brackets line up and that the holes through the nose have equal vertical and horizontal distances. The bonnet should be correctly aligned with the top of the nose. As one would not have access to the factory body jigs ensure that the headlamps are facing in a straight line. Note that the headlamp buckets are a separate part and not an integral part of the frnders or nose panel. This is an area overlooked and results in misalignment of headlamps. Another point to consider if replacing the nose panel is to ensure that the joint between the two parts is not overlaped with the fenders. Corrosion will result in latter years as the front tyres will throw up debris and become trapped between the two layers of metal overlaped. A butt welding this jointis typical of repairs at a restoration shop as opposed to overlapping as commonly done by bodyshops.

The grill area of the nose before restoration looked perfect until I trial fitted the chrome grill. The chrome barrel with the two spacers was impossible to slide into the nose aperture. The problem was either that the grill was too large or that the nose had panel damage not repaired earlier. Once stripping the paint and bondo it was the latter of the two. Incidentally no two bonnets or grills will fit different cars as these like the rest or the 190SL were hand built and made to fit by the factory workers. Taking measurements from different 190SL's it was obvious that the vertical distance was one centimetre too small in the middle where the chrome star would sit. The grill will fit with force when removing the chrome spacers. On the point of originality and as the spacers were probably there to prevent contact corrosion of the barrel with he upper and lower wings I decided to fix the problem. Most 190SL's I have viewed have one spacer, but there should be two, one upper and one on the lower. The bonnet line was higher than the top of the nose indicating that the top panel need to go up. A mini ‘Ram’ with a Portapower was used to correct the gap with a perfectly fitting grill.

With a perfect grill fit, it was time to lead around the upper nose section to fill holes previously made by a screw type body puller and to tighten the gap between upper chrome grill and nose panel lip.

The grill wing ends should ideally have a 1mm gap. Load loading and panel beating achieved this although at present there is greater than 1mm to allow for the thickness of the paint.

Posted by webmaster at 09:02 PM | Permalink

The left front wing looked perfect with paint. Sight down indicated no damage, but on close examination and by feeling the panel above the eyebrow under the arch indicated that there may be filler under the paint as the panel was too thick This was confirmed once the paint was stripped under which was layer upon layer of filler.

 

 

 

Sight down the bare metal wing with a wipe down of panel wipe clearly showed previous accident damage to the middle of the panel. What should been a concave curvature from back to front was in fact a convex pane, where the panel at the eyebrow edge had gone in 2 centimetres. The only remedy was to use a mini hydraulic ram inside the wheel arch to push the outer edge back to shape. Heat shrinking and panel beating the stretched panel was followed with lead loading.

 

 

 

A hole to the front of the eyebrow was previously repaired by mig welding. This rather poor repair was cut out with a new panel fabricated and butt-welded. The panel was sanded with a mini air sander mounted with a 3M 2" Roloc Bristle disc. This is great for removing rust, paint and filler with-out gorging the underlying sheet metal. Any ripples in the panel after panel beating were smoothed out by lead loading.

 

 

 

The panel was lead loaded to smooth out minor ripples and hammer marks left after panel beating. The final work to complete to metal work stage to align with door can be seen in the entry under 'Door Gaps'.

Posted by webmaster at 10:22 PM | Permalink

Condition of the right wing before stripping was as confirmed after stripping and in exceptional condition. Despite the condition I could not understand why so much filler was used on this wing. Filler was applied as filler costs $20 gallon and primer costs $200 per gallon. The filler was stripped layer by layer with paint stripper to bare metal. The lower portion of the wing need minor panel beating to perfect, which would have been a better option. The upper portion had a few dents where presumably one would lean on the wing to make repairs in the engine bay. These were panel beated and any ripples finished off with lead.

 

 

 

It was surprising that so much filler was needed as the panel after stripping was perfectly straight. It appears that this body shop was treating the panel like a Boyd Coddington restoration, fill the whole car with filler, but did not sand off most of the filler.

 

 

 

The head lamp bucket was removed to de-rust the top of the bucket and to reach high up in the wing. This being a common rust area I wanted to be double sure that all signs of rust were removed. The top of the wing slopped down at the front, indicating that the wing was in good shape. With the headlamp bucket welded the area around the indicator light and head lamp was leaded and the chrome bezel trial fitted. Always best to trial fit a metal and primer stage as once painted and adjustment will need to be lived with.

 

 

 

You will loose count as to the number of time you will need to pre-fit chrome parts. It becomes rather monotonous as you fit and remove. I must add that I am not striving for perfection as a concours 190Sl but rather as Bruce Adam's of the 190SL Group International once said ' Do it one but do it right' was the motto I have adopted.

Posted by webmaster at 08:56 PM | Permalink

Whilst the body was upright on its side I had easy access to the lower portion of the rear wing forward of the stone guard. It appeared that the 190SL had been jacked up at this point causing damage to the lower lip and filler panel joining this lip on rear wing / quarter panel to frame. Rather than panel beating or fabricating a repair panel this was filled with bondo / filler. Looked perfect with paint but a magnet indicated filler and drew my attention to stripping down to bare metal.

The damaged body panel and frame filler panel were cut out. This provided access to the inner portion of the rear wing, which was remarkably rust free. This was acid washed, rinsed and sealed with epoxy primer.
The remaining lip and panel was panel beated to ensure that the curvature followed the contour of the body. It was important to get this part correct as the rocker sill chrome, door and stone guard will show any bad contours. A cardboard template was transferred onto a flat piece of sheet metal. The curvature was made with a hammer and dolly and the lip of the covering panel fabricated on the edge of the work bench. Both panels fabricated were welded in after an initial trial fit. This area was finished with lead solder.

The rear panel after metal work and lead loading produced a nice base for paint. The chrome eyebrow moulding holes were checked for correst location and contour with the body. The chrome moldings need work on the edges to perfect a fit as the contours did not follow that of the eyebrow sheet metal. Possibly the reason for this was that I was trying to fit new replacement parts to original factory rear panels. The tooling over the years may have worn or these have been re-manufactured to fit the new factory panels. In fact a few 190SL's viewed with new panels and chrome moldings showed that these did not exactly fit like a glove. Another reason to pre-fit every part to the body before final paint. I like to pre-fit when body is in metal and after the primer stages before top coats are applied. Time consuming, but you can appreciate why a professional restoration shop's labour hours can accelerate quickly.
As a matter of course all chrome work was trial fitted to the body during metal work as well as during the primer stage to ensure correct fit. Any cutting or adding of metal to perfect a fit can be done at this stage.

Posted by webmaster at 12:06 AM | Permalink

190sl in Los Angeles USA before shipping to UK in 1999.

This photo was taken on arrival of the car from the USA. To aid shipping parts were packed into the boot, interior and bolted into the engine bay where possible. In addition to this chrome and valuable items were shipped over in secure crates.








This 190SL was assembled in the Mercedes-Benz Sindelfingen pant and delivered to the customer through Mercedes-Benz Denmark on 21st September 1960. From there it ended up in the USA.

On initial assessement my plans were to complete engine rebuild, flat and paint existing paintwork and to complete 190SL as a driver. As I started stripping parts it became obvious that previous repairs were not done satisfactorliy. More and more I stripped the car more and more I became dis-satisfied with previous work. The floor pans were initially painted semi-gloss black and the finished results was not good. On stripping the paint on the floors a great deal of pitting and pinholes were discovered. The decission to replace the floor pans and seat supprot proved to be right. One thing lead to another and finally I made the desicision to strip the entire 190Sl of every all paint, components and every nut and bolt.

Posted by webmaster at 12:50 AM | Permalink