560SEC Improvements

I spent the afternoon going over the 560SEC, making small improvements and evaluating the car. The first order of business was to look at the original factory wheels that came with it. As was the norm back in 1987, there are five factory alloy wheels. They were in a really sorry state when I removed them from the boot of the car. They cleaned up much better than I thought.

The tyres are quite cold, but in terms of the wheels, two of them are in reasonably good condition, two are in below average condition and one is in […]

300SE Odometer Repair Update

Back in early 2017 I fixed my broken odometer. The 300SE odometer repair was successful, but there were two things I needed to follow up on.

The odometer was reading 10% low. I could hear the gears, especially in cold weather.

In addition, some time after I repaired the odometer, one of the bulbs that illuminates the instrument cluster at night failed. The fix for all these things required the removal of the instrument cluster. The procedure to remove the cluster and the speedometer is covered in my previous article.

The low reading was attributed to having the wrong gear. […]

W126 Odometer Repair

My ‘new’ 300SE suffered from a common problem with Mercedes of that era, a non functional odometer. The mechanical odometer is driven by a small electric motor instead of a traditional speedometer cable and associated gears. This is because the speedometer is electric yet the odometer is mechanical. This combination was common in the late 80s and early 90s before cars moved to fully electric speedometers and odometers. The Series II W126 uses a VDO odometer unit shared with many Mercedes and BMW models of the era. There are a number of articles on the internet that already cover W126 […]