| I am currently in the process of installing a Becker Mexico Cassette in my 1977 Mercedes 450SLC. In part one, I covered buying and testing the radio. In part two, I covered upgrading the speakers, and in part three I covered the wiring. This part will be all about actually installing everything. My first task was setting up the control button and microphone for the Tranzit BLU. The control button makes this a truly hands free system. It is used to control the functions of the Tranzit BLU such as accepting calls, hanging up, skipping a track and so on. […] I am currently in the process of installing a Becker Mexico Cassette in 1977 Mercedes 450SLC. In the first part, I covered buying and testing the radio. In the second part, I replaced all the speakers in the car. In this part I am covering the removal of the old Pioneer CD player and cleaning up the wiring in the car. The challenge is that in the first 10-20 years these cars were around, they had all sorts of radios, phone kits, alarms and so on. Most of the time the wiring for these systems is incredibly shoddy. In many […] I am currently upgrading the radio in my 1977 Mercedes 450SLC. It currently has a Pioneer MP3/CD Player I had installed not long after I purchased the car in 2003. The Pioneer came out of my old 300E and was installed in early 2002. As well as the Pioneer CD player, the car also had Pioneer speakers. These pre-dated my ownership of the car. Looking them up online, they appeared to be late 90s vintage, and were sold as drop in speakers for Chrysler models. They had connectors I had not seen before, which must be the Chrysler connectors. […] Over the last 12 months or so, I have been focused on getting period correct Becker radios installed in my Classic Mercedes cars. I had never experienced these radios until I purchased my one owner 560SEL back in 2020. It was owning this car that made me realize how well they work in the car. I’ve started to view them as part of the overall experience of owning these cars rather than just a way of getting sound. Last year I started to source the right radios for the cars I owned. I originally planned to start with my 450SLC, […] National Motoring Heritage Day occurs every year on the last Sunday of May. The goal is to try and encourage as many classic, vintage and veteran cars out as possible and display them at various shows and events. One of the biggest is held in Berry, where they anticipate around 600 cars each year. The Mercedes club normally attend this event and this year had capacity reserved for up to 30 cars. The 2022 event was cancelled due to weather, and I last attended the 2021 event which was excellent. That year the club combined it with the 50 years […] I recently bought an additional set of W124 Gullideckel wheels for my 300TE. The wheels on my car look quite good, but the price was reasonable and its good to have a spare set. I have lots of spare W126 wheels, but they use a different offset. I like how the factory wheels look on the wagon, so I have no plans to swap them out for a period option. The period AMG wheels look great on the C124 though. I hadn’t thought much of those wheels until this week when I decided to get a new set of tyres […] Today I attended a MBCNSW event dubbed the Longroof Long Lunch. I wasn’t actually planning to attend a car club event today, but due to the torrential rain forecast for this weekend, I ended up with a free morning at the last minute. Despite the weather forecast, all the torrential rain fell overnight, leaving both days quite nice. The premise of the event was to celebrate the Mercedes-Benz wagons. Obviously any club member could join, but the focus was for wagon owners. I think its great the club is starting to embrace these sort of niche events. There used to […] Last night was the monthly MBCNSW night drive. This month was a repeat of one of the best drives we did last year. The route takes some of my favorite driving roads in Northern Sydney – nice and twisty with almost no traffic. The weather leading up to the drive had been excellent, but heavy rain is forecast for this weekend. A perfect opportunity for club members to get their classic out for a nice autumn drive before the weather changes. All these factors aligned and we had a line up of some of the best cars ever made […] I’m currently in Las Vegas, USA for a work event. The event starts tomorrow so I had some time to get acclimatized to the time zone, and a buffer in case of any flight delays. While most things in America have become very expensive in the last couple of years, self service junkyards are still very affordable. This is far preferable to the overpriced tourist traps I could have gone to. I did some searching online a day or so before I left Australia to see if there were enough cars to make it worth my while. Its not an […] The Becker Mexico Cassette is the radio most often associated with Mercedes-Benz cars of the 1970s. At least in Australia, it would progressively become standard in the various Mercedes-Benz models until the end of 1978. There were a few different varieties of this radio over the years, the instructions below are from an 370 M series radio, originally fitted to my 1977 450SLC. For 1978 in Australia, the Mexico Cassette moved to the 485 model for that year only. The Mexico Cassette was always standard on the 450 models, but optional on other cars in the early 70s. At least […] | |
