Mercedes-Benz W107 500 SL - A winning package | Tyrrell's Classic Workshop

hello and welcome to another tyrells classic workshop once again from lusting around the country lanes in very very valuable lamborghinis become slightly more down to earth but still with something very interesting the mercedes w107 the vargan 107. here it's the roadster the r107 and they made the coupe the longer wheelbase car the c107 and this car they made so many of them they made 300 000 of these cars over 18 years which is a fantastic amount for a sports car very sort of niche car really and two-thirds of those went to the us and if i think back to the the 1970s the early 80s when as a kid i used to watch all the american tv series and heart to heart dallas colombo the the roadster in particular the r107 was the absolute epitome of success and wealth really and everybody who was anybody drove around in one of these beverly hills cop the first movie had one prominently in that and they with good reason they were a great car they were based on the underpinnings of a mercedes from the 1960s incredibly enough the w114 which came out in 1968 the sort of mid-range saloon it would be the e-class now i would guess in modern terms um so they used that right the way through the basic chassis the of course developed it along the way but they stopped making these in 1989 as i say an 18-year production run which is a great testimony to how right they got it first time the early cars suffered with corrosion quite considerably mercedes used a plastic skin that they sprayed on the underneath of the car it was white and then covered with a film of black to make it look less obvious and what happened was the plastic skin would eventually split with stone chips or a jack being used to jack it up in the wrong way or something like that once it split moisture got underneath the skin and the thing just rusted away inside quietly without hardly anybody knowing about it the sills were a common area of rust on them the front inner wings here just under the the the hood the bonnet at the front here dirt and moisture used to gather there and rust them from the inside out and the bulkhead was a big rust problem as well water drainage lack of it used to gather in the bulkhead battery is placed there battery acid leaked down and they did improve this and they started to galvanize the bodies from the early 1980s and which made a big difference but nevertheless all these things notwithstanding a great car they gave the engine an update in the late 70s the v8 engine they took it from an iron block v8 to an alloy v8 when they first did that in 1981 it was a bit of a mess the engine actually temporarily uh they they use various design flaws in the engine single row timing chain and they also got the very unusually for mercedes-benz and i know this from personal experience because i had a 380 slc a customer with one they got the bore to stroke ratio wrong on the pistons on the very early 3.8 and they used to wear out and burn oil prematurely after 18 months they altered the ball to stroke ratio and from then on right through the 1980s all the v8 engines the 380 the 500 and the 560 were okay they'd go on to big mileages mercedes insist on using phosphor bronze valve guides in their engines which are very soft and wear if you do a top end overhaul on a merck engine from that sort of a era the exhaust valves and the inlet valves will have a lot of play in them when you strip the cylinder heads down this is quite normal for mercedes and i remember in the early 90s i took the cylinder head off a jaguar aj6 engine a four liter that had done a hundred thousand miles and it used cast iron valve guides and there was no play in the inlet or exhaust files after a hundred thousand miles so mercedes didn't always get it right but they did get a lot right more than most other manufacturers really this is the the sort of sweet spot of the w126 range this is a 500 sl euro spec car this is a british car it's right-hand drive this car is actually all original it's never been restored never had any paint work every last piece of this car apart from normal service items is factory original and the car's done 23 000 miles from new still with its original owner who bought it brand new really really lovely car it's now 36 years old and it's wearing its years very well it's got almost every factory option on this car the smoke silver paintwork which is one of the best color schemes it was a staple of mercedes right the way through to i think smoke silver was around for 30 years something like that it's got the brazilian hat alloy wheels as they were called which uh people with time think those chrome mercedes hubcaps are very agreeable which they are but for me these fantastic alloy wheels which are a factory optional extra really do set these cars off very well in 1982 they did make one update to the engine they went for what was called at the time the energy concept and what they did was they used ultrasonics in the induction system of the engine for the first time to actually atomize the fuel in the engine successfully and it made a huge difference that with a couple of other things changing the gearing literally they got sort of nearly 25 percent better fuel consumption just at a stroke by doing that incredibly clever really and a lot of modern cars have followed suit they use ultrasonics in the inlet system as well this engine as i say it had its problems when it came out in the very early 80s but once they'd got those ironed out mercedes really dropped the ball with engine design in the early 80s the mercedes 190 engine was a bit of a catastrophe as well it had a single road timing chain used to have to change those every 30 000 miles as a service item no excuse for that really they went on to the obvious later modification which was to put a duplex chain back on them again as they should have had from the start but we forgive them a few mistakes along the way because these are great cars so i'm going to explain about the induction system and why they could suddenly win 25 less fuel consumption at a stroke this car hasn't been validated all the cars that i do videos about are simply as they come in and as we do work on them this is a working workshop this is a working business every day and if i do seize the opportunity to do a video on a car it probably hasn't been valid or detailed to the nth degree because it's part of my working day it's part of my working life we just take these cars aside we do a video on them we don't particularly forward plan necessarily it's just as the chips fall and as the opportunity presents itself so the engine compartment is grubby but i'm going to take the air filter off and just delve into a little bit about what made these cars so smooth and so powerful and so comparatively economical when the u.s went into sort of a major emissions mode in the 70s and 80s they were sort of dark years for the for the american car consumer that the 70s and 80s because increasingly stringent government regulations particularly in california on the one hand they were saying we want cars to use less fuel but on the other they were saying we want them to be less environmentally damaging as well and it was a very difficult compromise to strike american auto manufacturers struggled really with horrendously complicated carburetors on their engines to try and keep keep all the plates spinning with regards to fuel consumption and emissions and everything else and poor quality unleaded fuel the mercedes fed rather better because they were sort of ahead of the curve already with fuel injection and more emissions systems but even mercedes struggled in the late 80s and what they did was brought out a model called the 560sl which was initially just for the american market it eventually ended up in japan as well but the whole reason they brought the 560 out was to compensate for increasing emissions problems and fuel consumption problems so they they took the engine out to 5.6 liter as the name suggests um it sounds very impressive but actually they weren't as powerful or as potent as the 500 european versions so this is the fastest and most pokey of the lot of them really the 500sl eurospec i remember i was shocked when i actually drove a u.s spec car i was on a singing engagement um in the southern states of the us i flew over there and my host picked me up from the airport in a mercedes 420 se which was his car 4.2 version of this engine i'd driven plenty of 420 ses over here um and his car just drove like somebody had put a tennis ball in the exhaust system it was terrible and that's how they were oh we didn't know we were born in europe with these beautifully smooth powerful cars this 500 develops 245 brake horsepower i think so it's not quite 50 brake horsepower liter which is very low tuned but it does the job very well it hauls this car along very well there are one or two particular things that i like about the 107 one of them is the way the doors close they called this car when they first conceived it it was a sort of standing joke in mercedes they called it the panzer vargan um in other words the tank the panther tank car uh because it was so over engineered bodywork wise particularly the structure and as you you'll see later when i drive it there's no scuttle shake on this car there's no shaking of the steering wheel when you go over a bumper as you normally get in a lot of roadsters very very strong car and the doors are um like bank vaults so i'll just show you if you just close the door clunk and even the door handle is a beautifully engineered item it's actually got bob weights on the back of it that turn when you pull the handle and it can actually gives you that feel that real quality feel um which you can't do without extremely obsessive engineering to engineer a door handle to feel weighty as you open it but but smooth and light i mean just really really obsessive engineering and car manufacturers have got this far more licked now than they had years ago they can build in quality to even fairly cheap cars by putting sound insulating panels on the doors so that they sound right when you close them and things like this but you can't replicate this i'm just going to do it again clunk i'm going to do a sort of buyer's guide to these cars as well so if you are in the market to treat yourself the car you've always promised yourself uh i think a car manufacturer used that as a strap line some years ago actually but i can't remember who it was then i'm going to sort of point out a couple of things that that you should be looking for when you buy as well as to protect your long-term investment one of the things that's very recognizable on the uh the w107 whether it's the r107 the roadster or the c107 is the daughter is the door trim architecture and they have what you can various types of interior trim on the 107 you had the mb checked cloth you had the text which was like the vinyl or you had leather or you had velour there were four different types of interior material that you could have on these cars this car's got factory leather because it's a high-spec car and so what mercedes do is they it looks like leather it isn't actually it's perforated tex vinyl but it's welted it's welded into the door trim here and here and and bearing in mind the youngest as i as i mentioned this now the youngest 107 is 31 years old now um how these have fared is very very very telling for the car's history and lots of people replace these that you can count the number of people in the world who can replicate this welding this welting on one hand very very few people get this right and to see this on a car now a 107 is very very unusual the original door trim it's quite nicely done um but it just it gives some idea as to the life the cars had has it been pampered or has it been subject to a lot of uv light cracked dashboard tops door trims things like that or is it like this car where it's been remarkably well preserved and time warp looked after something else to bear in mind on them is the play in the steering uh the the steering is quite an antiquated system on this car it's a recirculating ball steering system not a rack and pinion and you can actually adjust the steering box on these cars for players as you drive them as you park put pressure on the steering box they wear inside a bit which is quite normal in my experience 60 70 000 miles on a 107 you need to be adjusting the steering box because there's too much play in it it feels too slack at the tiller it's done with a five millimeter allen key under the bonnet you can just get at it with everything in situ and usually you have to unscrew the screw to take up the clearance not screw it in as you do in a normal steering box just a mercedes quirk but it does transform the steering doesn't need doing on this car because it's done such a low mileage 23 000 miles but a lot of 107s you can really make a difference don't over adjust it but you can make a big difference to the way the car drives just by readjusting the steering box on them let's have a look at the fuel injection system let's have a look at the engine yeah so we're going to take the air filter off the middle here the air filter's situated inside here here's the air intake and on the euro spec 560s the 560 sel and the 560 sec the 126 series they were up to 300 brake horsepower because they weren't particularly bothered about emissions problems and they had to actually had two intakes that's how you can tell a 560 under the hood under the bonnet quickly because they flowed more air so they needed a second air intake but this is still the most powerful 107 so we just pull all this off carefully one of the reasons why this engine is so grubby is the fact that mercedes-benz sprayed a protective wax on them from the factory this wax here and this engine has never been detailed or valid um yeah not great but it means that the original wax is still on there from 1984 which is quite quaint really in its own way um so here we have this uh what looks like a mechanical tarantula in the middle here this is called the fuel distributor or fuel metering head and bosch very cleverly and this is the sort of thing that only a budget of millions of pounds of research and development can do really but bosch discovered uh in the early 70s that this type of injection system could work it's what's called a constant injection system cis so you've got a flap here which uh the engine sucks the air in this is the throttle down here underneath the throttle plate is down there the engine sucks all its earth in in through this flap which has a pivot and then there is a needle working in the middle of this to it's literally immersed in high pressure fuel and it meters the fuel out to these eight pipes to the eight injectors one for each cylinder but they're actually working all the time and this is where bosch's cleverness comes in they realize that for the for the emissions requirements and power requirements of the period it didn't actually matter whether the injection was sequential i before that cylinder is about to fire it gets an injection of petrol so it sucks it in they realize that if it was working all the time just slowly injecting petrol into the the inlet truck just before each cylinder it didn't particularly affect exhaust emissions um or power and that's how this system works so it's very simple it's just a constant supply of fuel with a needle in there no moving parts apart from the needle that's it and it just slowly injects a constant supply through all eight pipes so you've got these two pipes along here above the injectors this is the idle air valve here the system it's called a cage atronic and it uses ultrasonic high frequency air to actually atomize that constantly injected fuel efficiently and it's all about how well the combustion process happens in the combustion chamber as to how much or how little fuel you use and they managed to win a lot of efficiency by using this ultrasonic air to to really atomize the fuel as i say instantly won them along with a couple of other modifications about 20 percent uh reduction in fuel consumption for any given horsepower which is incredible really but the earlier system that was fitted on the very first of these v8s between 1971 and 73 was called digitronic the amusing part about this is the djtronic was actually the engine was more powerful for any given so the four and a half liter digitronic the 450 sl was more powerful than the later 450 sl with cageytronic uh obviously mercedes didn't advertise the fact that their later engines were less powerful than their earlier ones this happened with ferrari as well by the way uh the 355 the early 355's with the bosch 2.9 motronic management system were more powerful than the later 355s with the bosch metronic 5.2 ferrari didn't tell their customers that the later three five fives were less powerful happens more often than you'd think just an interesting buy by curio really so what i'm going to do now is start the engine and let it idle i'm also looking at this breather pipe here just make sure that there's not too many oil vapors coming out of this pipe because if there are then that means the engine's got problems it should just have a nice steady flow of vapour out of there which would normally go into the air filter and be sucked into the engine so we'll start it up let it idle and it will be as smooth as silk this motor i have no doubt yeah you can actually hear the idle valve uh the the acoustics of that ultrasonic air i was talking about coming through the idle valve we can do a close-up of the sound to let you hear that but as you can see the engine is beautifully smooth it's ticking over about 500 rpm just lovely this is the way they should be yeah the quality of this car as a model just shines through and through and through um the the solidity of the thing just oozes from every pore really uh this as i mentioned earlier about the steering box needing adjustment it makes all the difference on these cars and in fact of course this one's only done 23 000 miles so it doesn't need adjusting the steering box on it and for um what is really a very old technology a recirculating ball steering it's remarkably direct mercedes-benz really did at this time i mean motoring journalists complained about the size of the steering wheel which is enormous but they got the steering feel weighting and um ratio between input of wheel and movement of front wheels just right really it was a model from which other manufacturers could follow but the the thing about it is okay the suspension is not the hardest in the world we accept that but there's no scuttle shake from this car there's no um you know scuttle shake is a really really unpleasant phenomenon in open top cars and it comes as a result of the fact that there's no strengthening over the roof to make the body shell work as a whole all you've got is the uh is the floor and the center console and the sills to keep it um actually solid and the scuttle this area of the car moves around in reaction to the front wheels in particular and there's none of that on this car it just feels like it's absolutely hewn from the solid and uh being the 500 sl the the 5 liter v8 um it also does go um it really does beautiful acceleration really effortless quiet those hydraulic tappets that constant fuel injection system all doing their thing and working together really really satisfying drive still yeah but one of the things about cars of this era is that they are very under geared um modern we've got up to eight speed automatic transmissions now um or they're about seven eight nine depending on the uh the make and model but this is uh either three or four speed depending on the model year of the car which means that when you're actually driving along at um sort of 60 70 miles an hour which illegal cruising speeds in the uk it's um it's not not as high geared as a modern car so it's doing it's doing uh that's about 60 an indicated 60 miles an hour and it's doing just under 2000 rpm a modern car with a big engine could easily uh be doing those rpm at sort of 70 plus miles an hour and that was why these cars were were so uneconomical for their time they they if you were cruising in the engine was just working it was revving it wasn't under massive load but it was revving far higher than it needed to be and that's because they didn't make automatic gearboxes that could uh keep up with it the cars of the 70s and 80s were under 60s were um far too low geared at cruising speeds they didn't have the bandwidth from a reasonable first second and third gear to have that extra fourth or fifth gear to bring the cruising revs down and going back to what i said earlier about the mercedes energy concept they did alter the gearing but this this car is actually um post energy concept it's a later car and it's still quite revving quite a lot for a given speed yeah the performance of these cars is great really that lovely silky smooth five-liter engine in this of course its most potent form this v8 for the european and american markets so we're down into first gear there 1500 rpm beautiful absolutely beautiful uh just a really smooth linear power curve and this was one of the first european engines to idle at very very low rpm um the going back to what i said earlier they they've always been a low rev but in the 1970s when this engine was the m116 the 350 and 450 engine it was sort of idling in neutral at 725 750 rpm um and then when they gradually refined it into the early 80s the all alloy engine this one the m170 um the idle speed came down to sort of 550 600 rpm which was very low some american cars had idled at that but even even rolls royces of the period uh it took them until the late 80s till the injection cars came out in sort of 1987 um to start idling as low as that and this car just uh wafts along pick any reds you like doesn't matter it's really smooth and tremendously tight feeling and just a very very safe car i mean this tremendously engineered windscreen frame here which would go some way to protecting you in a rollover situation and yep she's all there it's just uh lovely to drive this car still we'll just try that five liter v8 performance beautiful beautiful yeah just a linear power curve all very relaxed but still comes in with a naught to 60 time in this model the 500 sl the euro spec car with the sort of non-strangulated engine for emissions equipment still comes in at just over seven seconds not to sixty a hundred and forty mile an hour top speed which is pretty respectable for uh a luxury car of this era this car was built for for crossing continents it was built for uh you know two people you could have an extra two seats in the back as a factory optional extra but they were next to useless unless you had kids under 10 years old or something like that but as a sort of two people continent crossing luxury express this car was hard to beat uh it had comfort uh good heating and ventilating system um air conditioning wasn't as de-rigged in europe as it is now even the most basic car has air conditioning now um this car doesn't uh but it does have a good ventilation system again this was very very advanced uh when they introduced it in 1971 face level ventilation came in in the 1960s i think the ford cortina was the first car to have it um but this is 1971 and this is still pretty pretty advanced and just a great car to uh to cross continents with really really big trunk big boot uh good good fuel range again fuel consumption not fantastic what would you get out of this cruising on a run probably 22 23 miles per gallon maximum i would say but it is of its era and going back to that that the gearing it's just not geared for economy no cars of this period were they still had work to do on the the automatic gearbox technology to catch up but all in all a great drive a great drive really really enjoying driving this car well that concludes another tyrell's classic workshop video i hope you've enjoyed it please do like please do subscribe please do share it's the lifeblood of the channel and we'll be back with something different very soon

Channel: Tyrrell's Classic Workshop

Views: 113,636

Rating: 4.9844718 out of 5

Keywords: Iain Tyrrell, Tyrrell's Classic Workshop, Classic Car Expert, Classic Car Restoration, Classic Car Insights, Classic Cars Cheshire, Mercedes, Mercedes-Benz, W107, 500 SL, K-Jetronic, Buyer's Guide, Road Test

Id: YIuHE27eCPU

Length: 29min 51sec (1791 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 29 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/blitztenn]

I wouldn’t mind having one of these in my garage. My aunt had a 450 SL and she let me drive it, just great for cruising in style.

[u/[deleted]]

That door clunk is incredibly satisfying because of the build quality.

[u/GentlemanShark1]

Absolutely love my r107. With a stick and proper suspension/steering set up, it gets damn near close to feeling like a vintage sports car.