It's been close to a month since my last update, but I've been busy. Sadly, I'm still working on the passenger side. I thought I'd be done by now. But, it's not due to lack of effort on my part. I've been working on the car in the evenings after work in addition to on the weekends. I just keep finding little details that need attention.
To recap and get you up to speed:
the floor and rocker repairs are done and coated
the rear wheel well (inner and outer) are now repaired
a hole in the trunk lid, previously covered by a rubber plug (presumably from an old antenna installation) is now welded shut
the trunk floor is repaired
the hood spring perch is now rebuilt and the new hood spring is installed
the wheels I'm going to use on this car are now painted
since I was in a convenient place to do so, the passenger side door jambs are now painted
At this point, I'm working on repairing the front passenger fender. It has some pretty serious rust issues and I sold my good fender from the parts car. Right now, I'm patching up the rust holes and will soon re-mount the fender to the car. Once that's done, I can finally turn my attention to the driver's side of the car.
Some photos from the past month:
...and that's where I am. I'm trying to do at least a little work every day, which has been helping a lot to speed things along.
Now that the Legacy is on the road and the Impreza is out of the way, I've finally been able to get started on the next project - the Mercedes 240D. This is my third W123 body 240D, and my sixth Mercedes diesel overall. The lineup is as follows:
1982 240D:
This was my first car. I owned it from 1996 through 2005. If circumstances had been a bit different, I might still have it today.
1985 300SD:
This was my fourth car overall, and replaced the 1982 240D as my daily driver. I owned it from 2005 through 2007, but sold it because I couldn't bear to see such a nice car get destroyed on my long commute. It's still in the family, though.
1985 300D:
I bought this car as a project in 2007, around the time I sold the 300SD. I found it in a Boston shipyard, beat-up and barely running. I spent a few weeks working on it and drove it all summer. I had a chance to double my total investment, so I sold it and picked up a VW Golf for a project car.
1981 240D:
Around six months had passed since I sold the 300D, and I was missing owning a diesel Mercedes. I found this car on Craigslist, only a mile from my house, sitting at a body shop. Much like the 300D, it barely drove. On the test drive, I couldn't top 20 MPH. But, the body looked OK, and the interior was in very nice shape. This car had over 300,000 miles on it, but had a low-mileage factory-rebuilt automatic transmission, a low-mileage dealership-installed used engine, a brand new exhaust, brand new tires, brand new radiator and brand new alternator. I bought the car in January, 2008 and got right to work.
I discovered severe rust damage in the floors and rocker panels. But, I experimented with some homespun bodywork and made it solid again. Once I had the car solid and running, I drove it for a while and then converted it to run on waste vegetable oil. Unfortunately, I had trouble finding enough vegetable oil to make it worth my while, so I sold the car for what I had in it in April, 2009.
1972 220D:
By early 2010, I was ready for another project. This came along. It was a runner, but had been off the road for around a decade. It came with a stack of paperwork, going back to the original invoice. But, the car had unknown high mileage and was in very poor shape. It did run, though. When I got it home, I found, once again, severe rust damage. As time allowed, I worked on the car. In late 2011, the Vanagon's engine blew on me, and I sold the incomplere 220D to make space for that project.
and finally... the 1983 240D:
As you know, I picked this car up in late March/early April. I've been busy with the Vanagon and the Legacy project, so the 240D has mostly just been sitting in the driveway and garage. Now that those two projects are out of the way, I'm finally able to start on the 240D.
As I may have mentioned, this is the filthiest car I've ever paid money for. I've spent a little time cleaning it already, but I still have a way to go before I'm ready to start working on the car. The previous owner had sprayed the engine compartment (and, I suspect, the interior floors) with some sort of oil mix to ward off rust. It's heavy, nasty stuff, so I spent yesterday and today cleaning it. Here's a little before and after:
The engine compartment isn't done yet, but I can see paint again. I also cleaned clumps upon clumps of Reagan-era dirt out of one of the wheel wells (three to go):
There's a long way to go, but once the car is clean, I start repair work. The first thing I'm going to do is patch up a blown brake line. From there, I'm going to jump right into bodywork, and then on to the rest of the mechanical repairs.
The title of this post says it all... but as usual, I'll say more.
As per my last blog post, the Vanagon made it home after Transporterfest, but only courtesy of a AAA tow. My long-term plan is to do a Subaru EJ22 engine swap. I've been around the original VW waterboxer engine since my parents bought their first Vanagon in 1985, and have owned my stock Vanagon since 2003. So, this isn't a snap decision. I've seen these engines fail more often than they work properly.
I didn't want the van to rot in the driveway while I saved and made preparations for the engine swap, so my goal has been to get it into the garage. In order to do that, I needed to move the Mercedes out.
The problem with that is that the Mercedes hadn't been so much as started in the better part of two years. I've been working on it bit-by bit - bodywork mostly up until this point. Thankfully, I'd been maintaining the battery. Still, I had to do a marathon of maintenance before the car would start:
After the Mercedes finally started, I took a chance and started the Vanagon. Amazingly, it wasn't completely dead. It was weak, noisy and smoky, but drove into the garage under its own power:
So, as it is, I'm currently trying to sell the Mercedes, for two reasons. First, I need to start raising money for my engine swap. More importantly, I just can't have two big projects sitting around. The Vanagon was my backup car. It's my project now. As such, I'll need to get something a little more roadable for a backup car.
Egad! It's been nearly a month since I updated the old b-log. And what an unfortunately eventful month it's been.
I'm not going to beat around the bush. The Vanagon is dead. Well, "mostly dead" anyway, to steal a line from Billy Crystal. As per my last post, I was having suspected oil pressure problems. I plumbed in a gauge and drove it locally a bit. Everything seemed more or less OK. I even attempted to install a tachometer:
The results of the second oil pressure test with the tach installed were inconclusive, due to poor quality aftermarket gauges. So, I decided to drive a little more locally to test the van. I was planning a trip to New Jersey, which should have happened this past weekend, and wanted a few more local miles under my belt before I took a long trip in the van. So, a week and a half ago, I decided to take the Vanagon to Transporterfest, a VW bus show at the Larz Anderson Auto Museum in Brookline, MA.
The van handled the first part of the trip OK, but as it really heated up at highway speed, the oil pressure began to drop. By the time I got there, the light was going off intermittently. Not a good sign. So, I enjoyed the show, and when it was over, I decided to head home. It was a 40 mile trip there and back. Well... I didn't make it back. Actually, not true. I did make it back home, but with the help of AAA and a ride from my wife:
Long story short, the van will probably start, but a scant 300 miles or less since I completed all the work, and the engine is pretty much dead. As I don't have the money to fix it (yet), I de-registered it, de-insured it, and am preparing to get it into the garage for long-term storage.
Bottom line, I don't want to sell the van. I don't need to, and in its current mechanical condition, it probably wouldn't sell for much. So, I'm a bit sad. After almost eight and a half years, the van is no longer usable. But, this is where we get to the point of this particular blog post.
In the past, every time I've had major car problems, I've learned something or otherwise gained from the experience. Conscious of that trend, I'm trying to take as many positives out of this experience as possible.
Most of all, I'm going to use this to complete a long-time goal of mine and learn how to swap a Subaru engine into the van. Once I can save enough money for the conversion parts, I'll be dropping in a Subaru EJ22 engine, just like in my Legacy. I know the engine very well - even better than I know the Vanagon's engine at this point. Putting one in a Vanagon, though... that's going to be a learning experience.
But, it'll be a long while before I have the money for the project. So, in the meantime, I'm going back to working on the Mercedes 220D project. I dug it out this past weekend:
It hasn't even been started since April, 2010. I'm hoping to have it running again this weekend so I can get it out of the garage and clear up that space for the Vanagon. I'll be resuming work on the Mercedes outdoors. As much as I didn't want to work outdoors in the winter again, I'd prefer to do that rather than leave the VW outside. When it's done, I do plan to enjoy it a bit, but will eventually sell the Mercedes to help fund the Vanagon engine swap.
It's important to understand that when I bought the Rabbit, I'd been hanging with the VW crowd for years, who'd been filling my head with how great the old diesel Rabbits were, and how easy they were to work on. I learned the hard way that the old Rabbits (at least to me) were far more difficult to work on than the old diesel Mercedes I'd had. Far lower quality, too.
After I got rid of the Rabbit, I picked up the Impreza, which was a very quick project. I had it at daily driver status in under two weeks of wrenching on it in my spare time. At this point, I had just gotten married (weeks earlier) and didn't have room in my life or wallet for a project. Not that I didn't think about it, occasionally.
Of course, those thoughts came to a screeching halt in August, 2009, when my impeccably reliable 1994 Subaru Legacy decided that it had been reliable for long enough. One day, when leaving the city for my 50 mile commute home, I was sitting in traffic, and thought I saw the temperature gauge creeping up. I got on the highway, and the gauge kept going up. I pulled off at the first exit, and stopped the car on a side street, steam coming out from under the hood and the temperature gauge almost pegged.
I popped the hood and realized immediately that the upper radiator hose had blown. As luck would have it, my wife was with me, and she had a friend who lived close by. She called him, and in a few minutes I had a ride to the nearest Autozone. They had the rad hose in stock, so I bought it and some coolant. Soon (after treating our friend to a dinner as a thank-you), we were back on our way home. To be on the safe side, I decided to replace all the cooling system hoses that weekend and do a coolant flush. I'd done an otherwise complete tune-up on the Legacy weeks earlier and wasn't worried about anything else. I got the hoses, put the car on ramps, changed them, and filled the radiator. Once I had it as full as I could get it, I started the car to bleed the air out of the system.
I never understood what happened, but as I was bleeding the cooling system with the engine running, I heard a distinct metallic "ping" and the engine ground to a violent halt. As I was standing in front of the idling car at the time, this startled me a wee bit. I checked the fluids. All seemed OK. I got in the car, pushed the clutch pedal in, and it started right up. I didn't know what to make of it, so I let the clutch pedal out, and the engine ground to a halt again.
Eventually, I realized that something inside the transmission had given out with the car at idle. Luckily, I was at home in my driveway at the time. Of course, now I had to decide what to do. I mulled it over, and even considered junking the car. Eventually, I decided that I'd try and find a cheap parts car and swap the transmissions myself. I found a running, driving, parts Legacy for $400, and got to work. A few weekends later, and the Subaru was back in action.
By that time, it was late October and I was exhausted. I decided to take a break from projectland for the winter.
Of course, come spring I had the "itch" again and hit Craigslist. After my experience with the Rabbit, I wanted to steer clear of Volkswagens for a while. It's like I usually say - I can only handle one VW's share of problems at one time, and for me, that VW is the Vanagon. So, I started looking for another Mercedes. I chased down a few leads. Most promising to me was a 240D near the Cape which sold before I could get to it.
I also located a 1972 220D out west. The car was in rough shape, but I made an appointment to see it anyway. The asking price was $500, and BOY was the car rough. It had originally been a deep maroon, and looked to have been repainted once in its original color, and then once (poorly) in black. The paint was peeling all over, exposing surface rust. The interior was in pretty good shape, but the floor definitely needed some work. The car did start, and although it hadn't been driven in years, it sounded pretty good.
Still, I had to think about it. I left, thought it over, and shot the seller an offer a few days later. A week or so later, and I was out there with a tow vehicle I'd arranged through Craigslist. The Mercedes, immobile for years, drove on to the trailer under its own power, and off again once we got to the house.
The interior was in pretty nice shape, aside from dry-rotted carpeting, but the exterior needed work. Aside from needing a new oil cooler, the car was intact. The OM615 engine was new to me, but VERY similar to the old OM616 and OM617 engines I was used to. Best part? - 4-speed manual!
So, this was the beginning of the project for me. The car has plenty of issues, but at a buy-in of $250, it satisfies my Mercedeslust and keeps a project within arm's reach for when the daily drivers are behaving themselves. I've done less work than I would have liked in the past year and half, but the car is coming along. As of thsi blog post, the driver's side floor is repaired. Once I'm done with some work currently in progress on the van, I'll mostly be working on the 220D. Plus, I'll be tying my blog posts closer to the actual work and my Youtube page. So stay tuned - there's a lot more interesting Mercedes stuff coming.
