Update by Tim Suddard to the
Mercedes-Benz 230 S project car
May 1, 2013
With the body stripped and painted, it was time to tidy up the trim.
The place looks like a disaster, but we're just getting organized.
Elbow grease and a lot of steel wool is what it takes to prep most parts. These are the sill plates on our old Mercedes.
With the body at the paint shop, the next step was to start prepping pieces to put back on the car. Reassembly is a lot quicker and easier if you have your clips all organized, your trim pieces straightened, cleaned, polished and ready to go.
Fortunately, most of the trim on our car was in remarkably good shape. The aluminum, chrome and stainless moldings required only some straightening and some light buffing. The aluminum pieces are anodized, so we had to be careful as to not buff through this finish. Stainless pieces can be straightened, filed, fine-sanded and then buffed.
The rocker moldings are made of this material and were in the worst shape. We sent them to Autocraft, a local restoration shop we deal with. Leo Lansen, the owner, is honest, reasonable and loves these old cars as much as we do. It cost us $300 to have our mangled, dented rocker moldings made new again, but we felt that was fair.
Other than the chrome bumpers and grille that we sent to Graves Plating, these were the only pieces we needed outside help on. Between our original parts and our parts car, we were in good shape on trim pieces. Considering how much bright work there is on a W111 Mercedes and how rare some of this stuff has gotten, we were lucky.
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