When I took delivery of the 1995 S500, the horizontal surfaces were toast, to put it bluntly.  The 020 Black from a repaint had completely failed.

I had several professional detailers look at the finish and they took one look and immediately said “repaint”.

For the cost of the car a repaint was not in the cards, so I started researching paint recovery.  I had recovered finishes on older Mercedes’ cars with some pretty extreme techniques, and I was willing to do the same here.  I knew it would take a tremendous amount of work to accomplish this, and that I might not even be successful. but at this point I really had nothing to lose.

I found a detailer who had chronicled his recovery of a failed paint job on a W126 here, and took his experience and applied it to this car.  Here we go....click here to see the process and results.