Mercedes Benz W123 280E 1986 restoration

The first time when I saw this car in my best friend's house

I never thought that it will take such a great effort to restore this car. Firstly because based on my research, parts availability is abundance and secondly my car condition was really intact, the first owner is protecting the car with anti rust treatment.




Straight body, thanks to Ziebart antirust formula

 

]But it turned out that I had to take an epic journey (seriously) to get it done. One of the reasons is because there was no project manager assigned to supervise the whole restoration process. So I have to juggle in between my hectic schedule to supervise the progress.

Roof fabric is still in great condition

In general we can divide the restoration process in two five main criteria;

1.       Body and paint.

2.       Engine and wiring.

3.       Suspension system.

4.       Interior.

5.       Detailing.

My strategy was to restore the body first, and while stripping it off then started to restore the engine, electrical, suspension system and interior.

Will completely restore the engine

Apparently if you have high standard reference in restoring car, you really need to spend time to brief all the mechanics to make sure that they have same understanding, and to get the best result possible.

The biggest challenges are many of the restoration team members is not professional enough, they don’t provide you with detail timeline, cost proposal and there’s no regular progress report informed to you.  

To make things worst, many of them don’t have quality control system which ended up in you spending more time to check and ask them to rework to match the quality you requested.

Will update you guys with the final result.