Hullo and welcome to Wheeler Dealers! The show where I try to find, fix, and then sell on, motoring icons. In this episode I'm taking on a Mercedes with attitude. The C55 AMG. I wasn't really planning on starting another project at this time, but I have a problem with internet car searches.. I can't stop doing them. It was during one of these searches that I stumbled on this car on an internet auction site. The price was right, with a couple days left, and whats more was the car was local to me. I added it to my watch list and decided to take a look at it after work that day.
After checking the car out in person I decided to bid on it, I waited till the last day and tried to snipe it. But oh dear, I was outbid by someone with a proxy bid higher than I wanted to go. But I wasn't about to give up, I rang up the salesperson I had talked to when I saw the car, and told him if the other buyer backed out I was still willing to purchase the car. After a couple days time, he called me back and told me the car was mine! I went by and handed him the $3400 that was my final bid.
Here's what the car looked like at the dealership.
So right off I knew I would be needing some new headlights, grill, hood and front bumper with all the grills and fog lights. It took me a while but I was finally able to track down a silver hood, and front bumper with all the grills accessories intact, but Mercedes parts don't come cheap, these set me back about $1900, but thankfully they had another salvage yard 2 hours closer to my house that they shipped them to for free.
With the parts in hand it's time to break out the spanners and start turning some bolts!
The old bumper cover came of with just a couple screws and clips removed.
Here you can see that this bumpercover has been repaired before. It was to far gone to repair again.
After that was out of the way, I was able to get to the bolts for the trashed headlights and remove them and also remove the radiator support bracket in the middle.
I had to remove the headlight brackets as they were in sorry shape. Thankfully the parts I bought had these with them. So six bolts and these were removed.
I was going to try and straighten out the radiator bracket but, it looks to be too far gone. I'll get one of those ordered.
With the headlights removed I could see that the washer fluid reservoir was not in it's bracket, some quick work with the spanners and it was back in place.
One of the new(used) headlights installed, I had to tweak the upper mount a little but the fit looks good.
The other used headlight I bought was said to have a "professionally repaired" tab on it. But while installing it, their repair failed. Looks like they just tried to superglue it. Since this tab also holds the bumper cover up it needs to be very strong.
I figured the best way to keep it in place would be to put some band around it and some JB Weld might be called for also. Looking through my stuff I had some leftover roof flashing that would make a good strap. A piece was cut off and affixed with a screw through the lower more solid portion of the tab.
Looks good. Need to trim this down though.
Job done!
With that tab fixed and ready to hold the weight of the bumper cover I installed it in the car.
So that's it for right now. I will need to order a radiator also as one of the plastic end tanks is cracked and leaking, and the AC system will need to be pressure checked to see if it's still holding a charge, the condenser took a hit but I can't tell if it was punctured.