Double Duty
Double Duty
Double Duty
Today’s entry will cover yesterday and today, as I was just too wiped out to do an entry at the end of the day yesterday.
So on Friday I wanted to take care of the last major issue to make the car a reliable driver - rebuild the steering coupling. The bushings in the coupling had long wasted away, making the coupling sloppy as heck and steering somewhat “imprecise”, to say the least. A new set of bushings is under $10 from Mercedes, far less expensive than replacing the whole assembly for several hundred. The labor is pretty much the same either way.
The rebuild of the coupling is a fairly simple job, however, getting to the coupling is a significant undertaking. As in removing the steering gearbox significant.
So I got the front of the car in the air and started in. The coupling didn’t want to come loose from the steering shaft, so I just dropped the steering gear and rebuilt the coupling “in frame”. Not a big deal - or so I thought....
After probably 30 minutes of wrestling, prying, cursing, etc., I finally got the steering gear shaft into its respective side of the coupling. However, in all the wrestling I failed to maintain alignment of the steering gear shaft, so when everything was said and done, my steering wheel was now 170 degrees off while the car was going straight down the road. Grrr.
Realizing that this was not a job I wanted to repeat in the same day, I cleaned up and came back to the car to do some low impact cleaning jobs.
I removed the wood trim from around the windows for refinishing. It’s in pretty bad shape.
Then I set about cleaning door cards. Most cleaned up nicely, but the right side door cards both have some sort of strange staining or discoloration I’m not sure how to resolve.
Staining on passenger side front door card.
One of the things I really enjoy when working on cars like this is finding items that might seem insignificant but give some connection to the car’s past. Like this box of matches I found in the front ash tray from the “Fish Market” restaurant in Palo Alto, CA. I need to check and see if it’s still around...
I disassembled the horn pad and used some Leatherique “Prestine Clean”.. Wicked stuff - look at the difference between left (dirty) and right (clean). George makes some really great products, I wouldn’t use anything else on my interiors. You’ll see more Leatherique when I clean up the upholstery in the near future.
One of the negatives about cleaning at this level is that sometimes you do more damage than good, or aged parts just don’t hold up well to cleaning or handling.
I removed the tristar from the center of the horn pad, and when I took it off, some of the backing paint peeled off. I can fix this later on, but it’s a little bit of a bummer when this happens. It’s almost unavoidable when working on cars this old.
You can see some discoloration and areas where the backing paint has lifted on the bottom of the tristar.
Next, I turned to the trunk badge, which I had cleaned earlier but needed detailing. Most folks never notice that these numeric and letter badges have a black painted area between the letters and numbers and the chrome “underline” below. Over the years the elements take their toll, and the black paint disappears. I go in with acrylic paint and paint this accent line back in, which I think looks really nice.
Before:
After:
After this I did some more polishing on the trunk lid and the left side of the car. That has now been polished and wax. With that I called it a day.
So today I go back to tackle the steering gear and alignment again. After doing some studying, I found that like later models, the steering gear has a provision for a “centering pin”, essentially a bolt with a point on the end that you can thread into the steering gear when it is in the center of its travel and lock it there.
So after a trip to my wonderful locally owned Ace Hardware and their “majik boxes” of all sorts of weird and wonderful hardware I had a bolt I could fabricate into my centering pin. I got this done and installed it in the steering gear.
With that done I was able to drop the steering gear, get the steering wheel in the proper position, then reinstall the steering gear centered so that when I an going straight down the road my steering wheel is properly oriented. Sounds simple, but this took a good hour. In the midst of all this I cracked a power steering return line which then caused about half of the power steering fluid to leak out of the system. Oh well, I was going to drain and refill it anyway, so not I have a reason.
The one thing I had planned on doing today was to replace some short pieces of fuel hose under the car. At least one of them was seeping and causing the garage to smell of fuel, not to mention possibly being a hazard. Fortunately, the car had sat long enough so that I didn’t get a gasoline shower. It looked like one of the clamps had been overtightened and cut into the hose, causing it to seep.
I noticed when I was under the car that the drive shaft center buffer was pretty much toast, which wasn’t a surprise. Another item for the list....
Lastly, I replaced the cracked power steering return hose and disassembled the reservoir and filter.
Yeah, it was a little grimy to say the least, not to mention the incorrect filter was installed. But - at least there was a filter in it!
Correct filter on the left, later model filter (incorrect) on the right. That round plate on the right of the previous picture is actually inverted to hold the filter in place. Whoever put this filter in just dropped the plate in on top of it.
Wiped the crud out of the reservoir, installed the new correct filter and refilled the system with fresh Mercedes power steering fluid. I’m sure it’s feeling refreshed now.
While I was killing some time waiting to go to FLAPS to get some fuel hose I also installed a firewall grommet for the windshield washer hose,and new windshield washer hose from the foot pump to the washer reservoir bag and the nozzle on the cowl. I wasn’t sure which connection was which on the bag, so I held off connecting the hoses at this point. Something I’ll need to research. Pictures of this in my next entry.
Saturday, December 29, 2018