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.
Well, with the Outback all taken care of and the garage cleaned out, it's finally time for me to get to patching the Mercedes floor. First, I had to wake the car up. I charged the battery last week (strictly as a precautionary measure), so I hooked it up, and the car started on the first bump of the key.
I backed it out into the sunlight for the first time in 2013. The name of the game this weekend was patchwork, so I started by making straighter cuts in the floor:
Once I had the holes cut, I made some templates and started cutting patches out of my donor panels. First victim, a dented door from a Jeep Cherokee - given to me by a co-worker when I helped him bolt on some straighter doors.
Once I had the first patch cut, I fitted it (roughly) with a few pop rivets...
...and then started welding.
I worked through the weekend, and have the passenger side of the floor almost 2/3 of the way patched up now.
Hopefully, by the end of next weekend, I'll have the floor patched up, and will then move on to make the rest of the repairs to the rocker panel and wheel wells on the passenger side of the car. It's nice to see those holes finally starting to close up.
I don't believe I've covered this yet in my previous blog posts, but with very few exceptions, I've always named my cars. There's been no particular reason I've done this aside from it's just something I've always done.
I called my first 240D the Bluesmobile, after the Dodge Monaco police cruiser in the Blues Brothers. In fact, all my Mercedes have carried that name, right up to the project I'm working on now (Bluesmobile 2, Bluesmobile 3, etc). I've always called the Vanagon "Magic" after the Who song "Magic Bus". The 1994 Subaru was Rudy.
Eventually, I came up with a name for my Volkswagen Rabbit, too. I'll get to that a little later.
I wasn't really looking for another car when I bought the Rabbit. I'd finished the garage restoration of the 1981 Mercedes 240D a few months earlier, and I'd recently finished converting the car to run on vegetable oil. I was without something to wrench on. I spotted the Rabbit on Craigslist, not far from my office. It was a 1980 2-door model (built in 1979 in Westmoreland, Pennsylvania) with diesel engine and 5-speed manual (which I later found out was not original to the car - factory four speed - and not correctly installed) transmission. The part that really interested me was that it also had a Greasecar conversion kit (incompletely installed). I knew the Rabbit was capable of 50 MPG or better on pumped diesel. With a WVO conversion, that car represented a potentially large number of free miles I could drive. I went over to check it out after work one day in October, 2008.
The car was rougher than I'd counted on. Even with 99,000 on the odometer (which I do believe was accurate), the body had seen many better days. The interior was dirty, but in otherwise good shape. The guy selling it was a bit of an oddball. He was in his 40s and wouldn't stop talking about all the dope he'd smoked with people while buying and selling cars in the past. Oddball or not, he seemed to be more or less on the level. I don't remember why he was selling, but I think he'd just inherited a newer car.
The Rabbit had its share of problems. I should have been more worried when I couldn't stop the car during the test drive. The brakes were nearly shot. I actually got out and requested that the seller complete the test drive, just so I could see the engine and transmission work. Aside from the brakes, the car seemed to work OK mechanically.
I had some concerns about the body, most notably the obviously Swiss-cheesed floor. I made an offer, contingent on the seller driving the car to my house for me. He agreed, and we made a deal. A few days later, the Rabbit was sitting in my driveway:
You'll notice the hood is up. The car had a parasitic power drain that killed the battery if it was left hooked up.
VW nerds will also note the incorrect round headlights. At some point in the past, someone had removed the square headlights and grill and replaced then with rounds. They hadn't changed the radiator core support body panel, though, so there was a gap underneath the grill. I found a VW parts packrat locally and bought a correct 1980 Westmoreland grill complete with square headlights and headlight buckets:
I didn't do much else before the winter. The Rabbit mostly sat out in the ice, with a piece of plastic over the broken quarter window (which I later replaced):
Long story short, the car had a metric ton of problems. In the spring, I rebuilt the vacuum pump and got the brakes working marginally better:
Even as the car's problems kept snowballing, I kept working. At one point, I had given the car a proper name, but soon started referring to it as "Little F*cker", which eventually took over as its name. In April, I reluctantly sold the 1981 240D, partially so I could concentrate on the Rabbit. I started in on the Rabbit's body issues in late spring. Here, you can see some weird blue primer applied by the previous owner to cover some rust:
The worst part was the car's floor. I thought I could fix it, like I did with the 240D, but it turned out to be much more difficult to repair, due to the way the Rabbit was constructed. Finally, one day in June, I hit my breaking point. One Saturday afternoon, while working on the Rabbit, I threw down my wrench on the garage floor, marched in the house, conceded defeat, and posted the car for sale on Craigslist. I removed the Greasecar kit and sold that separately. In all, I got most of my money back and the Rabbit, and it went to an enthusiast.
If the car had been in better shape to begin with, I might have enjoyed it. I did enjoy the several test spins I took around the block. It was fun to drive. But, in the end, it was way too far gone for my taste. For all I know, though... it might still be out there.
After I got rid of the Golf and the Jetta, I still had the Subaru and the Vanagon, which was more than enough car. Still, while I now had ample parking space in the driveway, I was still lacking in the common sense department. It was only a few weeks after I sold the Jetta, that I got "the itch" again. Unfortunately, as usual the prescription was another project car.
After the Golf and Jetta, I was in no mood to deal with Volkswagens again, and started scouring Craigslist for another Mercedes. Not much was showing up until one day when I saw an ad for a 1981 240D, located right here in town. The car was sitting on the lot of the owner's mechanic, and I went over to check it out.
The car had been repainted several years prior, but it was fairly high quality work. The interior had also been redone, and would need only a little cleaning to look new. Under the hood, the news was even better. Although the body had in excess of 315,000 miles, the engine had been replaced with a low mileage used engine at a Mercedes dealership several years before. The same dealership had installed a factory-rebuilt transmission within a year or two of the engine.
The radiator, alternator, tires and full exhaust were also less than two years old, with very few miles on them. The seller told me she'd had the car a long time, but was now selling it because it felt like she "had to get out and push it". I test drove it and found her description to be apt. The car topped out at 20 MPH on flat ground. The seller's mechanic suggested the car needed another engine. I had a feeling he didn't know what he was talking about.
I had an inkling it was a filter and tune-up issue, as on the blue car, but couldn't be 100% sure. I made an offer. We haggled a bit, and $700 later, I drove the Mercedes home.
It took a little longer than I'd figured on to sort out the car's running issues. I changed the fuel filters and adjusted the valves to no avail. In the end, it turned out to be a clogged screen coming off the fuel tank that was the problem. I replaced that and the car ran like new.
At this point, winter was winding down to a close. I knew the car had a rust bubble in the floor, so I took up the carpet to see if I could get a better look at it. The more I poked at it, the worse it seemed. I took the seats out, started digging, and found severe rust holes in the floor and rockers that had been almost completely hidden by factory undercoating. As I had to tear into the car to find this, I don't think the seller knew anything about this. Still, the car didn't turn out to be the bargain I thought it was.
(large rust hole - driver's side floor against rocker - AFTER undercoating removal)
At this point, I had to make a decision to keep working or scrap the car. I'd never dealt with rust this bad before, but the car was too good mechanically to let go of it. Plus, the upper body was still in great shape.
So, I got to patching metal. I worked evenings in the garage for a couple of months, and by early summer, the car was ready for the road, running like new and looking almost as good:
In the end, all the work was worth it. This was a car that I planned to keep forever. Mechanically, it was just too good to let go. So, I put it on the road and drove it in rotation with the Subaru. I drove it as-is for a solid two months or so. Then, the fuel crisis of 2008 hit.
I still needed to drive - a lot - and it wasn't getting any cheaper to do so. I thought about it, and then made a big decision; I'd convert the Mercedes to run on used vegetable oil. I ordered a conversion kit from http://www.greasecar.com/ as they were local and the most reputable company I could find.
The conversion kit was fairly easy to install. I took a few days to do it, but I'm sure I could do it in a few hours now. I'll never forget how awesome it felt the first time I hit the switch with the car rolling and the car automatically and seamlessly switched over from running on pumped diesel to running on vegetable oil (Incidentally, this does NOT smell like french fries. It's distictly like burning vegeable oil - like a kitchen grease fire. It's much nicer than diesel, but does not smell like food.)
Of course, this is when I ran into problems. Due to tough competition from other local greasers, I had a lot of trouble finding free vegetable oil. I did eventually find an Indian restaurant that agreed to give me their oil, but after a few weeks I found that they were filling my grease barrel with restaurant trash.
I went back to driving the Mercedes on straight diesel and didn't drive it much through the winter. Eventually, I realized that I'd spent a lot more on the vegetable oil conversion than I'd save by driving on "free" fuel, and decided to sell the car. I just couldn't justify the expense if I couldn't find the oil.
Unfortunately, I ran into a similar problem that I'd had with the Golf. Nobody wanted to pay my asking price. I priced the car so that I'd make a profit, but had no takers. After around a month I did sell it, but didn't make a profit. I did, however, get all my money back.
I really liked this car, and was sad to see it go. Selling it was made easier by the fact that I already had another diesel project waiting for me in the garage. More on that in my next blog post.
If you have some more time to kill, here's the beginning of a series of videos I did documenting work on this car. Please note that these were done before I was Youtubing anything, so I ramble on A LOT. My videos have gotten better since then - I promise :) There are 12 or 13 videos on this car. All pre-grease-conversion.
