Mercedes W123 decision - Will I Weld or scrap it?

hello welcome back to furious driving and it's good news for fans of the w123 good news for fans of criticizing me doing welding bad news for me as i've got to do some welding i have been i have been looking quite closely at this gaping hole in the w123 and talking to people online looking at pictures online it turns out this is a really common place for these cars to go they seem to do it all the time even very solid cars seem to have rust in these corners so it's a really well unavoidable problem um that you have to face if you're owning a one two three i'm more used to rover p6s and any rust in the bulkhead is basically game over in a p6 so right because i've put a lot of effort into this car so far and i always wanted to see it run when i first started the project about 18 months two years ago it was just a thing to see if i could make the car start that was my big ambition and i was going to sell it on as a running car just to have it out of my life having achieved that much with it then that took a lot longer than i planned and the whole thing became far more convoluted and i became more invested in the car if you like so now here we are i really want to give up on it and we're going to keep on going why should the fact has got the structural integrity of a paper doily stop us on this ridiculous project right let's go and find some spanner edges to turn oh and if you haven't already hit the like or subscribe button leave a comment then please do it makes more of a difference than you can possibly imagine if you don't know about the youtube algorithm so there we have it it's good news the mercedes is definitely gonna well try and be saved as well as we possibly can now talking to people online talking to people in the comments i know there's a lot more that needs to be done first of all as well as repairing that area we've got down there i've got to take up all of this sound deadening which is just horrific stuff i've got to take out these seats to make sure there's nothing rotted underneath the chairs themselves because everything underneath here could potentially be rotten it looks solid from underneath but that's no guarantee people have suggested using dry ice i'm not quite sure where you get dry ice from i've looked online i think amazon probably do it i i'd have you just bite up in a bucket and spoon it on and as it dries hit it with a hammer or hit it with a chisel a whole lot just explodes out but i do like the option of it falling off the floor in big chunks rather than being glued on forever and me getting under my fingernails for life so that's a big option that's definitely something that's going to happen well something like that's going to happen but we are going to do our very best i am fully aware that i'm expecting to find more rust and crust inside this car because it's an old car has been sat for a long time and these w1t3s do rot way worse than i had first realised when i first got into this thing when i know for a fact it's got this area down here is doing so potentially there is more rock in the silver but it still does feel pretty good i know it's got bubbles of rust in the surface this is a surface at the moment we've got surface rust there around here on the back this has gone through i imagine someone's filled it very badly so this glass is pretty gonna have to come out so i can repair this properly i learned the other day that there are some hidden screws i think you have to pry this color section out then there's screws underneath it ah more things to break as i try and remove them so yes there's lots more to do but hopefully we can get all done but before we start digging into the crust fest that is my floor let's take a moment to talk about auto dot club the auto delt club is an online repository of automotive maintenance and knowledge follow the links in the description below to find hundreds of video tutorials on all kinds of jobs on loads of popular cars and some not so popular ones maybe not putting a new floor in a 40 year old mercedes but changing the disks and pads on an old merc no problem so if watching this channel hasn't scarred you emotionally for life you can learn how to look after your own car yourself by watching these videos not watching mine that's where it goes wrong and if you register on the site there's a handy garage section where you can keep track of your car all cars service and maintenance schedules which for me is invaluable because let's face it i haven't exactly got a sensible number of cars here right let's get back to putting some floor in this car i'm going to carry on with dismantling this against the accelerator pedal off the back of here because i'm trying to work out how these captive nuts work because they weren't captiving when i was trying the other day maybe if i can get a screwdriver in the side of the captivity cage i can undo them and mark up how far these bolts go from the edge of or that shape just there so i put the accelerator back in the right place that's not doing anything useful is it take two again fail no you didn't see that again fail you didn't see that because the camera was panned in too tight but i just dropped my spanner my socket sorry and it fell through the floor of the car right let's un-captive these captive nuts because it's never coming off of them otherwise i would have thought a job this big will be held up on two tiny bolts holding the accelerator pedal in place oh that's broken i guess i'll just use loctite i don't know if you can see me through the hole or not we're going to give this one last try before we bring it angle grinder again i'm lying on the automatic thing stopping under my shoulder it's only so long i can waste on two tiny bolts are in the way it's time to get more serious with this thing one down i was expecting it to come off a bit more dramatically than that more melty stuff but now you can see how thin and perforated the metal right behind where this needs to be connected up to is well that's actually quite solid around the pedal itself hopefully i can just cut around that and keep this mounting point in the same place and then there's just this eight millimeter which holds this bracket up here although without it's still fixed further up behind the dashboard right let's see if we can make less of a mess than we already have of this mess um things to be aware of i've got a screw sticking out just here this is one of the ones that's holding this plastic arch liner up um so i can go there is a hole just here which was a drain hole um which clearly was bunked up and wasn't working as it should be because that's why the water collected here i assume that's why these always rot out in the same place so be aware of putting that back because when the arch liner goes back in pretty don't you see or not there is actually just here which connects up to it and i assume and drains just straight down out into the wheel arch area right just here i need to be very careful because the throttle pedal is still sat behind this i'm actually going to find something to chuck it away from the bulkhead with ow i need a small cut-off disc or something right i'm gonna use yeah sorry to take a bit tighter in these corners this is double layered ah so we've got the uh inner wing coming down here and we've also got the bolt bulkhead the yeah the bulkhead behind it as well so that's kind of fragile yet more goopy stuff that needs to be removed because it'll catch fire right that's a weirdly irregular shape but it is all as far as i can tell back to solid metal apart from just here where i can't get the blade in brick quality i'm going to get the um i'll buy a brush and the grinder on there and see what we need to find uh yeah someone did say something about undoing this panel here i'm not sure about that though okay you just missed me doing a lot of wire brushing all around here all up in here getting it back to some nice clean metal unfortunately got recording interrupted yet again um incidentally if you're interested in the behind the scenes of this channel i did um rent a canon r6 and a couple of lenses for a week recently and i've done a video about that on my other channel clickbait it's a link to that channel down below you can see what i think of that and uh well i might be buying a new canon r6 very shortly now luckily i didn't take that extra bracket behind the accelerator pedal off because that can now clamp the bit of cardboard up here however this is a very complex shape because as well as being all over the place in terms of the weird rusty shape i've had to cut it's also three-dimensional in four dimensions so here we go cardboard clamped first of all by that bracket there secondly by a ratchet wrench pushes against the brake pedal and thirdly the magnetic uh parts tray pressed up against the floor and i can with that make out roughly the shape i need so i'm cutting this a little bit on the large side because i've got a feeling i'm going to make a few adjustments after i've cut this shape out i was right well that's not a bad fit but it's going to take a fair amount of fettling to get it to exactly the right shape before i can weld it i can't even think about welding it until i've been able to get a smaller wire brush or something else maybe a drill attachment to get in there and clean all that mess up as well oh and i've just noticed more just here that's uh oops something else which is going to need a little bit of attention i found a drill i'd forgotten i had these uh wire brush cup things looking in the back of a drawer got the um painted on underseal is so thick on there just barely touching it i see why it's not doing much it's because this chuck is just slipping so badly gonna go get my cordless right see how much battery time i've got left in this thing i didn't charge it yesterday this is as blunt as bums this brush but stuff's all gonna come off though because it'll catch fire the moment we get anything remotely warm next to it here's a chunk of it this is how thick this stuff is it's probably ground through to make it all come off well i was doing a reasonably good job of shaping this into the right well right shape and trimming bits here and there and here and there and here and there and i've realized that i'd trim too much so i've got gaps here in the top corner gaps on this corner gap on this corner gap on this corner rod cut too much away so uh had to go back and cut a new shape out and start over again which is not a lot of fun never mind with my gloves gone probably one of the slowest parts of all this whole operation is shaping the metal if it's not a flat thing because this is a lot further away here than it is just here the whole lot curves in every way you can imagine oh let's turn the audible back on again let's start shaping some more so i've been going a little while with the tack welding along here and up there as well and on the inside it's holding the shape pretty well only two minor things that have gone wrong first of all when i first started i had it held in place with a big magnet which made the initial world scope and a couple of tiny little holes in there and secondly where it's all been heated and contracted it's actually pulled slightly away from this nice neat straight edge it looks a bit messy and ragged just there but that box shape is actually meant to be there there should be a large square hole one there which is still factory and one there which i've left cool so it's kind of not going terribly where's my gloves gone [Music] oh my neatest welds are always four millimeters away from the edge of the actual bit of metal always the way oh i'm fine oh there is just so much underseal rust retardant with not rust retardant noise stuffy deadening thingamajig that it's so hard not to set fastest bloody car as you work around it ow that's my shirt on fire but something has been really really useful is surprisingly these uh pry bars because i can get right up behind the pedal box area and nice little taps because it's all metal lined in the middle because i can't reach a hammer in there to gently tap things into the shape because i can't get a camera in there to show you what i'm doing but also i can't get a hammer in there to tap things into the shape i need them to be but i can reach behind the accelerator and the braking area and tap stuff into the right shape with this thing so should give a little more adjustment up there well that's pretty solid i haven't done this edge bit just yet and the car isn't on fire which is always a major bonus after you've done some welding it was briefly on fire for a second when i didn't notice a shard jumped let me just show you this and there's actually a crevice down there behind this this is the the hand release for the foot parking brake there's a little little canyon down there and i didn't notice it was just glowing redder and redder and yellow and yellow it was actually on fire down there but managed to to blow it out that was a little bit close but anyway it's um suddenly got a bit bright despite the fact it's quite late now i'm not quite sure how this has happened but i was happily welding away and all of a sudden this just kinked out and went a bit screwy this is probably me done for the day because it's already quite late in the evening believe it or not and it's going to take a little while to sort out so i'm going to sign off for the moment and carry on in the morning well all of that was filmed about three days ago and it has been raining ever since apart from one brief period when i went and did something other than welding yeah that's the way planning well works that or not so what you've seen today is this car is definitely getting saved i've not got through as much welding as i wanted to because the weather has not been on my side at all and there's one day when it was not raining but my son was off school six so i didn't get a chance to do any welding that day either um however we've got the main plate is now in place i'll carry on with that corner off camera i'll do that plate underneath the accelerator i'll record it i don't know if i'll put it into a video or if i just show you when it's done just see how long it takes because i mean that just one area because i'm not a fast welder it took me forever shaping and cutting and everything getting it all going so yeah that's just time-consuming slow slow business i know people have variously said to me i need to get a gazebo i need to get a uh a lean to i need to get born well all three are options i am on the waiting list for a barn or two so hopefully one of those will come available before too long and i'll have somewhere to store these cars out of the rain uh putting a lean to across it because it's actually quite a wide double space there's been a global timber shortage believe it or not so i've not been able to get um the bits of wood that i need to build into incredibly but i'm talking to builder neighbor and so possibly we'll get something built next month in august um which would be really really good um and thirdly i did actually go and buy a gazebo so i could carry on this video but foolishly i clicked the cheapest one i could find online without really reading the description and instead of being a handy pop-up one it's a build it out of lots of chunks of pipework one and it was incredibly flimsy and as i've mentioned many times here before this is basically a wind tunnel the wind whips down the little hill of my road straight across the countryside over there um oh it's getting heavy this camera so until such time as the developers put a thousand houses over there we've got countryside and it just whips across and so it wasn't going to stand up so i had to give up on the whole gazebo idea for the time being which is a bit of a shame so yeah there we have it i'm not sure what's going to happen in the next video whether that will also be mercedes or that be one of the other cars because i've got to get the welding done but also i i get pretty bored doing welding pretty fast so i might have some other things to attend to on the car instead just to keep my interest levels up as well as hopefully yours um also quentin quentin might come back quentin's still with the body shop unfortunately their painter has been off for a few days the car is fully prepped but um no one to paint it as he's been sick so things aren't going well uh of course we've all still got the alpha we've got the volvo got the mini they've all got stuff needed doing as well so we'll see what happens in the next video release in the meantime thank you for watching if you haven't subscribed already then please do then you can keep track of these ridiculous projects and find out what it's like to actually run a fleet of 10 cars trying to do everything yourself which is a very foolhardy thing to attempt in all honesty um thank you for watching and join me again next time well we'll picturing i don't know what who knows what we're doing frankly thanks for watching take care goodbye

Channel: furiousdriving

Views: 16,098

Rating: 4.9488816 out of 5

Keywords: car, cars, blog, vlog, retro, classic, classic car, retro car, motoring, Mercedes, W123, Merc, restore, restoration, welding

Id: GRgQsdxBrGo

Length: 19min 52sec (1192 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 06 2021