Sorry I've been terrible about updating this. Between kids, house, cars, winter colds, etc, I've been feeling a bit beyond overloaded. Spring is here and brings with it excessive optimism. This part-out was planned to be a fast, high dollar deal with the car stripped and gone inside of a month or two and all the parts listed on eBay as I went. Nearing four months later and much of the car is still in one piece. Motivation is way harder to come by (a) when it's cold, and (b) when you're doing something for money instead of just fun.
My plan was / still is to try parting out a few cars for money and use the money to fund home improvements. The idea being, I can part out cars in the evening when it's not practical to be doing noisy construction projects on the house, and I might be able to make more money parting cars than the comparable amount of work on the house would cost me. Well, so far I've been terrible about making time to work on tearing the car apart, but then again I've been not great about working on the house either, so maybe it's working out as expected just more slowly.
One thing I've discovered is that even tearing apart a modern Mercedes is not easy. Fasteners are buried, they use so many different types and sizes of fasteners it's ridiculous, and they have special tools for a lot of things. So far in my work, I've used more sizes of sockets than I've ever used just tearing apart a car, I've used e-torx, torx, metric hex, 12-point, passthrough sockets, and even bought a special Mercedes "instrument panel removal" tool. It's trying, and I may not continue with the Mercedes idea unless things get a bit smoother.
I had a quick brush with selling the whole car, and was ready to accept the guy's offer, but he realized that many of the parts he needed would not fit his car. Instead he bought all four doors. I gave him a big discount in order to gain some momentum, but it was still $500 which is great. All four doors had at least some cosmetic damage, and one window was broken. Most of the value for me was in the components of the doors. I may have been able to get about $1200 out of them separately, but he picked these up and got them out of here without shipping which is worth something to me.
On top of the doors, I've sold the radio amplifier, the one mostly good headlight (had one broken tab), washer bottle, the one good hood hinge, the hood struts, trunk floor / carpet, the trunk mounted fuse panel, spare tire, driver's front hub, suspension, lower control arms, axle, and the accessory belt tensioner. Total take so far is $1,555. Still under what I paid but it's getting close and I have lots left to sell. I have $1500 or so worth of parts already pulled and on eBay.
Workflow wise, after the kids are in bed and the house is cleaned up, I spend an hour or two pulling parts. As I pull them, I take photos of them and put them on my dedicated Mercedes parts shelves. Set up just for this part-out:
Then in the next day or two I instead spend my evening posting the parts for sale on eBay. If there are orders, I spend my evening packing and shipping the items and then get to pulling a few parts. I've not spent much time at it yet, as discussed the motivation is sorely lacking. But this is what's left of the car at this stage:
I need to step up my game. With the warmer weather, I really am feeling more hopeful that things will move faster. Plus as momentum builds from more and more sales I've been feeling a bit more encouraged. I need to get more high dollar parts up - set some goals. I want to get the exhaust and rear end pulled - those are a couple big dollar things - but the access to the catalytic converter bolts is pretty bad. I need to get rougher with the thing - the shell is going away at the end anyway so why not bash it out of the way? Old habits die hard, though, and I find myself being gentle on things I don't need to protect.
Purchase price with fees: $2,428 (ouch, those fees)
Towing: $62
eBay fees: $90.50
Total cost so far: $2,580.50
Parts sales: $1,555.00
Net so far: $-1,025.50
So although it's negative, I feel like positive territory is coming fast. I think every project has a "dark days" episode, and I'm hopeful that it's in the past for this one. We shall see!
