Spac’s Adventures in Mercedes

Spac · 2020-09-16T06:11:19+00:00

Paid $200 for this including delivery. It is an M271.980, same as what’s in my car. 200,000km old, blown head gasket. I grabbed it because I figured it would...

Spac

Relocated accelerator pedal. The rod is shortened and straightened.

Here’s an unmodified one for comparison.

Brake pedal bent over to the left to restore the clearance.

Another terrible photo, but it shows the brake pedal moved to the left, and consequently down a bit. This should be a good thing, because the floor level will be about 20mm lower than original.

I also bent the clutch pedal over, but it moved upwards… I am going to leave it for now, but will probably extend it later.

Another terrible photo, but this is the frame for the false floor. If you look carefully, you will be able to see the foot rest hidden in the shadows ahead of the rag at the top of the photo.

Spare wheel stopper. This will be welded to the top of the transmission tunnel, and is designed to stop the spare wheel moving forward in a front-on crash.

Just a “state of play” photo.

Update…

Spac

Today’s stupid idea…

Making a sealed box so the fuel pump can live safely inside the car (rather than under the rear seat area), and so I can run the muffler through the space where the fuel pump used to live, to give a shorter, straighter exhaust .

With it all planned out in my head, there’s a solid five hours work in that… and I don’t have a lid or a way to attach the lid yet.

Evening edit…

Other news is that I have most of the parts for the throttle bodies.

The plastic bag are the spacers that are the correct length to make the throttle bodies match the MB ports.

Aluminium tube on the right has the same OD as the ITBs and only slightly smaller ID - close enough to die grind to match.

The only missing part is a big aluminium face plate to bolt to the head, but I will also need to extend the linkage arms … and then make the manifold…

Spac

Forgot this bit from yesterday…

Spare wheel mount. I talked about the spare stopper being useful in a crash, but it also will prevent the spare being bashed into the back of the navigator’s seat when it is being put back into the car.

Largest and smallest commonly available 15” rally tyres.

Top is 205/65, bottom is 185/60. Phone camera has exaggerated the difference in sizes, but you get the idea.

The 205/65s are the most common, especially if I am buying used, but I am almost certain that they won’t fit in the W201 wheel arches. Specifically, they will rub on the inner wheel arch on the front (behind the headlight).

I will be using 185/65s if I can get a supply of them - only Hoosier makes them in that size.

Next option is 195/60, but only MRF make this size…

So I am kind of expecting to end up with 195/65s.

This morning was spent getting the material for the rear rollcage legs and making the firewall plate to block the hole where the heater box used to be.

This was procrastination while I avoid making the aluminium rear parcel shelf, which is harder than it would have been if I had thought about it before I welded the cage in.. and will be much harder if I don’t do it before I weld the rear legs in…

Evening edit:

Rear parcel shelf needed raised sections to clear the hinges.

Some windscreen goo seals it up.

Will need to work out how to secure it to the bodyshell, because the potential for rattles is very high.

I think that I will be able to get some screws into the front edge, but there’s no room to drill holes at the rear.

Am tempted to just glue it down with a bunch of Sikaflex, but am not ready to commit. Will also paint it matt or satin black before fitting it to the car.

Firewall cover plate fitted. Will goo it up once the paint is a bit harder.

Very early mock up for the heater unit. I think that I will raise it up a bit, so that it is mounted off the aluminium plate, which should help stop the plate from drumming.

Overall feeling pretty positive about the whole thing. The cage should be finished tomorrow, and maybe I can start refitting the dash and pedal box permanently.

Spac

Cage is so close to being finished… harness bars and one rear door intrusion bar left to go.

Even a 205/65 tyre fits through the gap.

Not so clever part is that I forgot to drill the holes in the fuel pump cover flange before welding the bar in, and now that is going to be a turd of a job.

Tacked the bar to the wheel arch. Not sure if it will do much, but felt like it was the right idea.

So close. The rear legs (top corners of the hoop to the rear wheel arches) were awful to make. Basically, most bars you get one end close (roughly mitred) and lay it in place and work out where & what angle to cut the other end.

In this case, because I had already fitted the diagonals in the hoop, it was very difficult to get the legs anywhere near the right position and I had to sneak up on the cuts very slowly.

I got one to the point that I thought was just a tiny bit long, and then worked on the other leg - so I could shorten the first leg to match the second if I overshot.

Anyhow, when got the second leg right, it was over 30mm shorter than the first! I shortened the first leg to match and suddenly the world was good again…

I also got some contamination in one of the rear V legs. I welded 90% of it just fine, and then the last 10% popped and farted at me and generally made me unhappy. I will grind it back tomorrow, and reweld if needed.

Spac

Not much done today.

With the help of the 11yo (she fits in the boot better than I do), I did get the parcel tray in. Lumps of steel are to hold it down while the sealant dries.

Spac

Cage

Finished.

Well, there’s still a bunch of spatter removal and painting to do, but it is done.

Because the harness bars don’t meet the hoop or diagonals in the same spot, they look entirely uneven/not parallel, but I have checked a dozen different ways and they absolutely are even.

The driver’s harness bar is a tight fit. The hoop is actually getting wider as it goes up to the bottom of the door glass, so it had to be pushed into place with a mallet.

The diagonals intersect slightly to the navigator’s side - about 10 or 12mm over - and now the uneven harness bars make it appear that they intersect about 50mm off to the side. Again, I spent ages convincing myself that I hadn’t screwed it up!

It will probably be impossible to see once everything is back in the interior, and nobody who hasn’t read this will probably ever think to look, but it is one of those things that I needed to fret over for a while…

It owes me about $1500 in materials and consumables. Could have been slightly less if I had been more organised and purchased things in bulk from suppliers in Canberra rather than the overpriced local suppliers, but it would probably still only be $50-100 less.

I started on it 16 days ago, and most days have involved decent hours on the car, mostly (but not exclusively) on the rollcage. Realistically, I would say that I have around 80 hours in the cage, but that could be trimmed down significantly by being more organised with materials and consumables, by not needing to get the roof V remade, and by my cage guy not getting Covid.

There was also a lot of time spent thinking and second guessing myself, that will be minimised next time.

Retail price is around $4500 and up, depending on who you ask, so I guess that I have “paid” myself about $1500/week. Which I am pretty happy with.

Spac

This is how much tube I had left over…

Did hardly anything today. Cold, wet and doctors appointment. I decided not to weld the dash support bar to the rollcage.

Instead, I welded a plate over the hole in the support bar.

Spac

Driver’s false floor almost finished. Still need to cut the hole for the accelerator pedal…. And work out how to install/remove the retaining clip.

Lots of progress on the fuel pump cover too. Both parts were slowed down by my ham-fistedly breaking the good M5 thread tap.

The other tap is badly worn and seems to be cutting maybe 4.8mm threads…

Will buy a new one tomorrow.

Biggest hassle from here is working out how to drill the holes that are obscured by the rollcage members.

I have managed to drill and tap the holes below the rear door intrusion bars, but am less confident about the holes that need to go under the diagonal.

I also got the material to make the intake manifold flange today.

Spac

Floor done. I even got the hole for the pedal right on the first try!

Pleasing:

I will seal up the gaps with some silastic on the final fit.

Fuel pump cover also finished. The three screws on the near-right of the photo are progressively more crooked as they get closer to the hoop. The last one is pretty terrible but I couldn’t come up with a better idea.

The whole panel is curved. I had planned on putting a bend in it, but this is stiff and doesn’t drum/resonate so I will leave it as-is.

Also began gooing up the firewall where the rollcage goes through. It is a messy, crappy job, as predicted.

Evening edit:

Actually putting things back together. Heater unit is rubber mounted. Not exactly sure why, just seemed like the right thing to do.

I was pretty sure that I was going to a pedal box when I did the strut tower bars… The booster scrapes on the way in, but there’s a tiny amount of clearance once it is bolted up.

I wanted to ditch the booster because of the hassles getting useful vacuum from quad throttle bodies, but Petey has offered me the vacuum pump that was in his 240, so I will give that a go.

I also recovered the dashboard. Surprisingly easy job, TBH. I bought this fabric many years ago, and it has been floating around ever since.

As well as hiding the cracks, it should not tend to reflect on the inside of the windscreen.

If everything goes to plan, I will have the dash bolted in tomorrow, ready to begin wiring (which is totally different to saying that I will begin wiring…).

jamesinc

Your work is starting to look quite professional imo

Spac

jamesinc
Your work is starting to look quite professional imo

Thanks!

I am perpetually frustrated by how slowly I am working, but I have both the time and the Ritalin to actually not rush through things, so am making the most of it.

Spac

Dash is in. Bastard of a job because it is squashed between the front legs of the rollcage, so my nicely aligned bolt holes weren’t aligned any more.

It is very secure, partly because the way I cut & rejoined it, mostly because Mercedes.

Glovebox sealed back up, with a plate that was as fiddly to make as you’d expect. It’s actually a fair bit nicer than the photo makes it appear.

Remember how I said the dash was squashed into place? It has opened up the gap between the two fascia panels and now the lower mount doesn’t line up with the hole.

I think that I will ignore the gap, and remake the bracket.

Made a bracket for the oil pressure light. Have since painted it black.

And also fitted the cheap digital clock/thermometer. I am a little concerned that it will be too bright and distracting at night. Will relocate it to somewhere lower if it is.

Spac

Oh so much fun with door latches!

Photo looks pretty benign, but is the end result of a couple of hours of head scratching and plenty of “if this doesn’t work, then I will just pull the latch out of the spare parts car”.

The homemade aluminium lever is the new internal door handle - push it forward (to the right of the photo) and the door opens. I have also functionally disabled the locking mechanism and removed some redundant parts, while also keeping the child lock permanently off.

With a slot cut in the door for the new “handle”.

It all works perfectly!

And the point of this exercise is to make the new aluminium door trim a lot simpler and easier to make.

Hardest part by far was the little cut out around the latch, and then I forgot to take a photo of it…

Plenty of nutserts doesn’t stop it from drumming terribly, and will be insufferable on transport sections. I will sikaflex it to the door after the windows are sorted.

Got the latch sorted on the rear driver’s side door, but didn’t have the material to make a trim (and wouldn’t have had the time anyway).

Bigger slot on this side to make refitting the latch significantly easier.

I will do something more conventional for the front doors (that are actually likely to be opened from the inside), but making sure that they don’t rattle will be a challenge.

Quick little bracket for the lower part of the dash. Have to make another one for the other side tomorrow.

How the dash is looking. All of the panels, the glovebox and lower section will have to come out for the wiring, but this is good for my motivation!

I am going to need a second fuse box. Basically, there will be a fuse box for everything that is on when the ignition is on, and a fusebox for everything else.

I already own a second one, so it will just be a matter of mounting it. I think that I will remake the blue bracket longer, and have it tie also mount to the top of the transmission tunnel.

Spac

Intake manifold flange plate…

But lest anyone think that it “just happened”…

And I still didn’t get it all spot on, note the elongated hole….

It really was quite the hedfuk. I was paranoid about the two dowels, but they actually made life much easier.

Essentially, I used the outside surface of the 11.0mm dowels as the reference point, and broke everything into vertical and horizontal planes.

This made getting the top four bolt holes quite easy: I knew they’re all in a straight line, and it was relatively easy to measure the distances between them.

I definitely made my life more difficult by not being confident enough to mark everything out at once, because then I had to use edges rather than the previously marked centres… but I was learning as I went, so I will know for next time.

For the three lower, rear holes that are co-linear, I have some 8mm bolts with 11mm shoulders on them, so I bolted them into place to give me a known reference to the centre of the holes. Then I could measure the vertical and horizontal distances from the dowels and it was relatively easy.

The front two holes are not co-linear with any of the other holes. The lower, more rearward of the two wasn’t too tricky once I worked out how: I used the three holes behind it as a reference by laying a ruler on top of the bolts, and measuring the horizontal distance between the rogue bolt and the others.

I then used a second ruler laid parallel with the first and measured the vertical distance between the two rulers.

The forward-most bolt was a turd to get to. I marked off the vertical distance from the bottom of the dowels and that was OK.

For the horizontal distance, I referenced the not-perfectly circular port, and was close… but ballsed it up by about 1.5mm…. Hence the elongated hole.

Spac

Dummied up the throttle bodies. Looks like replacing the oil filter will not be obstructed, which is nice.

Started getting my head around the airbox.

Thought is that I turn this into a complete box, and feed air in from the bottom (blue texta) from an air filter where the green blob is, via a hole in the dummy firewall (red blob).

The box is 9-litres if I complete what is there, but it will lose two or three litres when the corners are trimmed down so the bonnet can close.

I have heard that you want the airbox to be ten times the volume of one cylinder (so 5.5 litres in this case). I don’t know if this is a hard-and-fast rule or a good idea or what.

I can make this larger, by pushing the back wall of the airbox closer to the motor.

If anyone has any input on this, then I would be interested to hear it!

Bit of fiddling around with the fuel lines. Mostly just trying to work out if the braided line was long enough (the supply is, not sure about the return).

Space is tight around the front corner of the seat, so I will weld a short length of the yellow tube into the original seat mount.

And then mounting the fuel filter in the box. I am going to need to fit a banjo fitting to the outlet of the pump, and then loop a flexible hose to the inlet of the filter.

All of this was because I wanted to work out where to put the battery, washer bottle, catch can and vacuum pump on the shelf between the two firewalls.

Made the second lower dash support bracket ridiculously over complicated. I tried to make sure that it wouldn’t get in the way of my foot, but it sort of got ugly and I was too stubborn to start again…

This is the photo I meant to post last night, of the dash with the glovebox lid installed (loosely).

Spac

A solid day’s work on making new driver’s seat mounts.

Short version of a long story is that I wanted to lower the seat and move it to the left.

So I bought some 100x100x6 aluminium angle, and here we are… I had to relocate the outer rear mounting hole inboard, which is where most of the time/brain power went.

The square section tube must have a crush tube in it, and this was a lot more difficult to achieve when it was already welded into the car. I ended up welding a “rod joiner” into the SHS and then welding a 6mm plate over the top. Then the bolt goes all the way through the SHS and there’s a nyloc nut on the bottom.

It isn’t 100% what the rules specify, but it is better/stronger.

The left hand mount is not quite finished because I still need to trim down a couple of bits, but close enough.

The old black steel mounts weigh 1kg each, these are 1.2kg each. For the increase in strength and stiffness, along with the better ergonomics, it’s probably the best 400grams I could put in the car.

Also welded in the tube for the fuel hose to run through on the nav’s side, but forgot to take a photo.

And spent some time working out where the harness lap belt mounts need to go. Apart from the driver’s outer mount, they are all going to suck.

On the navigator’s side, the seat being mounted almost directly onto the floor makes the adjuster want to be right where the harness passes through the seat. This means that I have to mount them to the floor (where they can be damaged by rocks).

I am considering raising the nav’s seat by maybe 20mm if that is enough to avoid that problem.

On the driver’s side, the ideal mounting points are right on top of the SHS lateral mount. For the outboard side, I can put it on the front of the SHS as a decent compromise, but on the inboard side, it needs to go behind the square section which compromises the angle (but still within the acceptable range).

Spac

In today’s episode of how to make something simple into something complicated…

This is an RX7 aluminium jack that were the old hotness for rally cars. This one came with the Daewoo.

I spent the morning modifying it: Bigger, thicker base plate, plus the top modified to fit into the W201 jacking point and a (possibly redundant) load spreading plate.

Brackets are to be welded to the spare wheel mount to locate it in the car. Put the jack into place, wind it up into the hole and it is nice and secure.

Was very happy with how it all went.

And then, on a whim, I realised that I had wasted the entire morning! ?

This is the standard W201 jack…

That said, I am thinking that the Mercedes jack is going to be a turd to mount to the car, and they are a shit to use.

More thinking required.

After that screw up, I tried something easy: block off plate for the hole the AC drier lives in. (This is behind the LH headlight).

Also the photos of the fuel hose tube from yesterday.

Stays on the driving lights. Based on $5 Bunnings balustrade turnbuckles. They are offset outward in an attempt to brace the lights in both planes. I will buy another pair of turnbuckles when I am next near Bunnings, and run them to the lower pair of lights roughly parallel to these turnbuckles.

Hooked up the shifter linkages and discovered that the shift lever hits the fusebox in 1st, 3rd and 5th gears.

Ok, so the fusebox has to move. This solves my question “where do I put the UHF?”. AMSAG rallies demand a UHF radio, so this is better than on the side side of the transmission tunnel like I had kind of been assuming that it would end up…

Pretty happy with how it went together.

The gear lever is too short, so I added some extra length. Took some resolve to cut into a super-rare Mercedes manual shifter …

Forgot to take photos of the process, but I put some thread on the stub, wound down a rod joiner and tack welded it in place, and then welded most of a bolt to the top section of the original lever.

Photo also shows the very beginnings of the hydraulic handbrake lever.

I also finished the driver’s seat mount, but didn’t bother with photos because it looks the same as it did yesterday.

But it does allow me to stew over the location of the belt mounts.

Spac

I went with Plan A on the jack.

The threaded stud sticking up through the jack’s base plate is a bolt in the car’s floor, which locates the base of the jack and (more importantly) blocks the hole I put in the floor when I was overly enthusiastic with the spot weld drill…

It can also be used as a secondary way of securing the jack if I encounter a zealous scrutineer at any stage…

Handbrake progress.

The handbrake master cylinder will be mounted on the rearward end of the yellow tube, out of the way.

Gearlever is in 5th gear here, so plenty of room, but it does suggest that I will benefit from extending the arms on the bottom of the shifter to make it a shorter throw.

That’s all for today: a long time mate came over for a visit and we spent most of the day catching up and generally talking crap.

Spac

Didn’t have a gulag at hand, so had to use spare child labour in the garage today.

He’s cutting out the plates for the harness mounts.

Got five made, and three of them welded into the car. The other two have to wait until CAMS gets their shit together: they updated the harness regs for 2022 to give much needed flexibility in the location for the mounting points for the crotch straps, but now the link goes to the 2021 regulations.

This one was a PITA, as predicted.

Seems to have worked out OK, though.

Also began on the navigator’s footrest, but it is boring, so no photo until it becomes more interesting.

Spac

Handbrake mounts done. Fitting everything in around everything else reminds you that these are not large cars - somewhere around the size of a 1600 or 180B Inside.

First photo is the dummy fit, second is welded in.

Angling it all inward at the back, gives me more elbow room if I get into making pizzas mid-stage.

The master cylinder mount probably deserves some explanation. If is based on a Chinabay kit that I somehow ended up with, but I have turned the bracket around and shortened it.

Last time I had a hydro (the 164 in 2007!), some scrutineers would demand a cover over the lines, so I have also drilled some holes (blue arrows) to allow a cover to be fitted.

I chose to weld it to the bodyshell, against my habit of bolting everything in. The logic is that it weighs the same, but a welded part contributes more to bodyshell stiffness/strength. Between this bracket, the factory handbrake mount, seat mounts, harness mounts, original seatbelt mounts and the centre bearing mount underneath, this is now a very strong part of the car.

Finished the mounts for the navigator’s footrest (still boring).

And primer for the other bits.

I am going to add some tags from the rollcage to the upper seatbelt mounts on the B-pillar, and I think that will be the last of the welding inside the car.

oh… except for the crotch strap mounts. I rang CAMS this morning and the technical guy was immediately defensive and stroppy, and ended up being virtually no help. I think that I am going to just follow the shitty old/current/2021 rules and have it irritate me every time I think about it.

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