I’ve been slowly tidying up my W123 since I purchased it.  However, I had a couple of last things I wanted to do before the event.

Cleaning the wheel wells

The wheel wells of a Mercedes-Benz of this era should be body colour.  Many people assume they are supposed to be black.  That is mostly because they are normally so caked with dirt and grime.   Some even get painted back due to that wrong information.

It seemed like a good idea to remove the wheels and clean all the dirt and junk out.    I found a toilet brush (that hadn’t been used in a toilet) with its long handle and plastic bristles good for this task.

I had done one of them before when I had to remove a wheel, so I only had three to do.  You can see why these cars rusted out in certain climates.  In both the front of rear there are so many places for dirt and mud to accumulate.  All you need is a bit of road salt for it to eat the car from the inside out.

For example, at the rear there is a sort of ridge or lip that allows a whole bucket full of dirt to get trapped up there. This can’t be easily seen unless the wheel is off.

Removing a stain from the boot lid

I had noticed a stain on the boot lid of my car.  It looked like something had dripped onto the boot and then left a stain.  It was probably either some hard water that dripped from a parking lot, or perhaps bird droppings I had not removed fast enough.

Given there were some swirl marks in other places on the car, I though it would be a good opportunity to give the whole car a bit of a polish.   I started by masking up the rear of the car, before getting out my polisher.

The problem was, I hadn’t used it in 10 years and the fitting to attach polishing pads had perished and couldn’t be used.  So I ended up using a pad in my hand and polishing the boot lid manually.  I think I was able to get it done well enough to get rid of that stain, although I wasn’t able to do the whole car like I planned.

At some point in the future, I’ll do the whole car properly.

Regassing the AC

The AC had become tepid, no good for a drive to Canberra in the height of summer.  I used my blacklight to see if I could see any leaks, and I couldn’t.  With that, I took the car in to be regassed and since it held vacuum, we did.  At this stage I’m not sure where the minor leak is from.  Perhaps under the dash.

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I achieved good results on the roof, but overall there was much to do.

Today I used stage 1 on the bonnet and front wings.  Took a few hours but much better than before.  In the first photo you can see the front 1/3 of the bonnet has been done – compare the reflection of the flurecent lights with the rear of the bonnet that had not.

In the 2nd photo, you can see the results of the entire bonnet finished with stage 1.   Stage 1 is the cutting compound and stage 2 completes the job.

I still have to do the doors, rear wings and boot lid.   I will probably also touch up the roof again too.

This paint job will never be show quality, but with enough elbow grease, it should look very good from a few meters away.

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Overall the car is looking much better.  Despite going through the paint in a few places where it was very bubbly, there is now some shine on the paint and the rear wings especially are not a matte finish anymore.   I will do one more go of the stage 2 polish when I get some time.

I also spent some time trying to work out why my new Radio keeps ‘rebooting’.

The Radio requires two 12v feeds – one that is always on, and an accessory feed.   I had connected both to the point behind the dash were the Citroen manual suggests that radios etc should be wired in, and the accessory feed was going through a spare dash switch so I could turn the radio on and off.

Given that it was an original Citroen switch (I think for Hazard lights) my first try was that perhaps the radio was trying to suck too much power down that wire, so I put in a small relay that was rated 30A.    The radio is still rebooting so my next step will be to wire the 12v directly to the battery.   That will be quite a big job unfortunately!

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