| Yesterday I did my first proper drive in my 1981 Mercedes 240D. More information about the car can be found here. My overall impression is that the people who talk about the performance of the 240D automatic on the internet have clearly never driven one. I’m used to driving fairly powerful cars like my 220KW 560SEC but I didn’t find the 240D especially slow around town. I drove around my local area in a mix of heavy traffic, back roads and bigger roads with a speed limit of 90km/h. At no time did I feel like I was holding up […] With the 240D now registered and in the garage, there were a few simple jobs to undertake. The first was a set of floor mats. The original carpets were in such nice shape I wanted to protect them. I though the ideal floor mats for the 240D are the dealer fitted thick rubber mats from that era. Its likely what the car had when new. I had one more partial set of those mats in my parts storage – just missing a drivers mat. For the drivers mat I had to substitute a cheap generic mat. If I can’t find […] Sometimes you don’t go looking for classic cars – they find you. While I have always wanted to try a W123 diesel, I wasn’t specifically looking for one. However, when I saw this 1981 Mercedes-Benz 240D, I thought it was something special. I was able to secure it for what I thought was a very good price. The main thing that appealed to me was how original the car looked. So many of these cars had a very hard life and are still running in spite of that. This car looked like it had been used carefully and had been […] A few months ago, I started replacing the blower on my W124. I figured this would be a simple job and I would be back up and running a few days later. Little did I know that that the car would be off the road for months. In part one, I removed the old W124 blower motor. I was not able to install my replacement motor, because it did not fit. I figured the issue was with the aftermarket part, so I ordered a brand new genuine W124 blower motor. This arrived, and it was much better, but still […] I’m back in the USA for an annual conference I attend. I normally have a free day before it starts, to get acclimatized to the time zone and to allow a buffer for flight delays. The conference is in Las Vegas, which has become really expensive. I’m not all that interested in spending money on overpriced entertainment, or gambling when I could spend money on needy old cars. Thus, I headed back out to the self service junkyard. This year I didn’t think I would end up going. A few days before my trip, I checked the inventory at […] I just got my 450SLC back from having the timing chain, tensioner, camshaft oiler tubes and valve stem seals replaced. These are all jobs that any owner of a Mercedes V8 of this era will need to undertake at some point. The primary driver behind this was the need to replace the valve stem seals. A couple of my sparkplugs, #1 in particular, would regularly foul up. I didn’t have a lot of visible smoke, but I did see the odd puff of smoke taking off after a period idling. This is a pretty common problem in these engines. Age, […] 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. […] | |
