| I’ve wanted to visit the Fox Collection in Melbourne for over 10 years. I used to have a job where I would commute to Melbourne twice a month but the opening hours never lined up with when I was there. This weekend I am traveling through Melbourne and happened to have the Saturday morning fee. I went along for the morning with my kids. The Fox Collection is a part of the personal collection of Lindsay Fox, an Australian trucking magnate. Lindsay Fox is now 87, and has been collecting these cars for years. As well as the public part […] One of my favourite day trip drive near Sydney is the Oberon to Goulburn Drive. I’ve done this drive in both directions and its a great mix of different roads, plus limited traffic. I even incorporated this road in my recent trip to Melborne. I had also seen that the parallel road that goes south out of Bathurst was also paved in the last 10 years. This road head south until it hits Crookwell, where you can either keep going south to Gunning, or veer off to Goulburn. I wanted to try this as another full day trip from […] This month’s night drive was a bit different. Instead of meeting up and doing a drive for 60-90 minutes, we did a very short drive and then went to check out the club library. I’ve been a member of the Mercedes Club for between 10 and 15 years. I knew the club had a library, and I heard it was pretty good, but I had never seen it. As the library was located in the club store room, this felt like a great night drive destination. The night drives are normally attended by around five to ten cars. This is […] The choice of radio for my 1965 Mercedes 250SE Cabriolet was not an easy one. I don’t know what radio the car had in it’s early years. It is a diplomat delivery car, that was picked up from the factory in Stuttgart. The original radio would have either been a slimline model, or perhaps a radio delete plate. At some point, some butcher enlarged the opening and fitted a DIN radio. When I purchased the car it had a ghastly 90’s CD player. A few years ago, I removed the 90’s CD player and installed a Becker Tribute Radio. This […] My 250SE Cabriolet had a feature I was not aware of. Underneath the injection pump is an oil/coolant heat exchanger. This was also an option on late 230SLs. Instead of a separate cooler that the M130 engined cars have, the heat exchanger helps warm up the oil when the engine is cool and cool it down when the engine is hot. There are lines from the oil filter housing that go to the heat exchanger, as well as coolant lines that come from the side of the block. An example is pictured below. The picture is not my heat exchanger. […] Editors Note: This is part three in a series by Nick Gruzevskis about owning a Modern Mercedes convertible – in this case his R170 SLK230. The first part can be found here and the second part here. There are times when you feel like you’re making progress on a classic car and other times it just feels like you’re procrastinating. As I have just completed an interior, I was feeling positive, so decided to strike while the iron was hot. Since putting the interior back, I’d used the car on freeways several times and noticed the steering wheel shuttering […] On my trip to Victoria last last year, the alternator on my 560SEC packed in. I was able to limp the car home by swapping batteries with a friend in another W126. I also purchased another battery on the road. When I arrived back in Sydney, it was this new battery that was still in the car. I was just going to leave that one there, until I noticed a slight creaking from the bonnet hinge. The bonnet was also a few mm too high. Turns out the new battery I bought along the way was slightly too big. It […] Today I went to a cars and coffee event at Gough Whitlam Park. It was organized by Enthusiast Insurance. I had been invited by a friend, and assumed it was a regular cars and coffee event that they were sponsoring. I think it was more an event for their customers. I’m not an Enthusiast customer, but it didn’t seem to matter a great deal. Gough Whitlam Park is the same location that is used for the annual German car show. It is a bit small for that event, but probably better suited to a simple cars and coffee. I would […] I recently drove down to Canberra in my 1965 250SE. This was the first time I had taken the car on a longish trip in a couple of years. The main reason for that was the running issue had been experiencing with the car over the last few years. I finally solved this issue last year by fitting a new electronic distributor. On the way down I noticed how bad the ride was. The car was quite bouncy and not very enjoyable to drive. While the car didn’t do any long trips, I was using it quite a bit on […] I’ve known that the blower motor needed replacement on my 300TE since purchase. It didn’t like to work on low settings and would make pretty bad squeaking noises. The second to last owner had even planned on replacing it, but ran out of time before he sold the car. I had it on my list to do and ideally planned to do it before the trip to Tasmania in December/January. I looked into this and found an excellent video from ‘MMWA’ on youtube on how to replace the W124 blower motor. If you own a W124 and you don’t subscribe […] | |
