Thursday, September 4, 2014

Progress continues on the Mercedes. Yes, seriously.

If any of you are/were regular readers, you will have noticed a dropoff in new content here in late Spring. The long and the short of it is that I continued work on the car for a few weeks after the last post, and then had to take off the end of June and all of July. I resumed work on the car in early August.

After my last post, I did not in fact do any filler work on the passenger side fender (it's still on the to-do list). Shortly after that last post, I turned the car around and started work on the driver's side. While it took two sporadic years of progress to complete the passenger side of the car, it took closer to two months to repair the driver's side.

Thankfully, this was largely due to the fact that the driver side was far more intact than the passenger side had been. The floor/rocker were mostly intact, with some rusty areas I had to weld up (there is only one riveted repair on this side, due to proximity to fuel and brake lines - the rest are all welds). I also had to do nearly identical repairs to the rear wheel well on this side of the car. As for the front fender, it had similar damage to its passenger side counterpart. However, rather than repair it, I'll be replacing it with the solid fender from the long-departed '79 parts car. Reminder - I would have done the same on the passenger side, but I sold the good passenger side fender from the parts car some time ago.





















Aside from a lot of details I skipped over, that pretty much catches us up. I'm on the verge of painting door jambs on this side and hope to have the whole car in fresh paint by the end of the month, once I get through a laundry list of detail items.