Slow Fleet – Mercedes 500SE May 2015 Part 3
Latest Costs: £133.15
Miles this period: 75
It’s come to the last instalment before I run out of time before going to France. If it isn’t finished, it will have to wait, if it doesn’t work it can’t be used and if it is decidedly iffy it will be forgotten until I return…
The obvious thing to do first was the radio, It didn’t require lying under the car. Halfords had a half price mechless deck, for £50 I could at least listen to Dire Straits if I got stranded somewhere. And in all the excitement I forgot to take a picture of it. Probably because my hands were bleeding having scraped them trying to persuade the cables to go into a void about half the size. For such a big car some bits are pretty small…
Whilst I was there I bought several bulbs, actually a complete set for everything listed for the car. It works out better than one of those bulb kits and I’d got the GE healdight ones. It’s not that they just fit the Merc, so the total cost this installment is a little high.
The good news is that along with all of the other things the new pulley and belts arrived so I could reassemble missing collection of things under the bonnet. I wasn’t surprised it was missing some as it looks like the old pulley bearing broke up and the support dropped wiping out two of the belts. Made a strange metallic sound when revved too…
Whilst the bonnet was up I fitted some new wiper blades, it really needed some. You can’t lift the wiper with the bonnet down, must be some sort of aerodynamic thing, it hides the wipers well.
Another job was the leaking boot, I was wondering why the carpet was wet on the right hand side behind the wheel. But investigating it previously the floor was good, so must be recent.
Applying some Granville windscreen sealant seemed to work, and a quick test with a bottle of water after curing and I had a watertight boot.
Whilst I was under the car previously dealing with the brakes I noticed the left floor of the boot, behind the wheel was a bit easy to deflect, so I pulled the carpet up and found this…
It’s not perforated, but fairly thin and eventually it would have gone. I think it’s held together with the underseal…
I couldn’t risk anything heavy going in there so I fashioned up a sort of cover out of hardboard, whist I work out what to do with it. Of course a cardboard template was done first.
With all that sorted I thought I might have a go with the air con, and as suspected (and confirmed in the history) that the gas had escaped. The light comes on with the button though. I planned a visit from Cool Car in Tamworth to deal with that, if it’s fitted it might as well work. This meant taking it to work one day to enable access to it, so I burned up about 2 and a bit gallons each way… and of course everything worked, until all the gas escaped. Turns out a nut had disintegrated on a pipe and had gone awol leaving only the thread. Oh well, Dave charged me £20 just to cover his travel expenses, which was really decent of him. I can’t recommend him enough.
The last job was to pull off the remains of the rear mud flaps, they scraped the ground going in and out of Jalopy HQ and were starting to take on a different shape. It didn’t help that the stiffening bracket wasn’t there. Besides, it would further help the aerodynamics and stop them from breaking the rear bumper.
Well, that’s it, there isn’t anything else I can get sorted in the time left. It’ll have to do, wish me luck.
