PeachParts Mercedes-Benz Forum - View Single Post

Squiggle Dog · #7 11-06-2008, 06:26 PM

I have been wanting to do this conversion for a long time. I was not much into cars until I visited a museum in Germany when I was young. I saw some vintage Mercedes and I liked the styling and wondered why they were not still built in that way. I would sometimes see Syrian Mercedes fintail taxis driving around and they really caught my eye. I told myself that one day I would have one.

A few years ago I needed a car and bought a 1980 Mercedes-Benz 300SD for $400. It was a great car that rode nicely and got great fuel mileage, but started having electrical issues (windows not working, lights shorting, heater not working), so I sold it for $600 on eBay.

I thought to myself how nice it would be to have an older, simpler fintail with that simple 5 cylinder diesel engine in it. I thought the idea too unrealistic at the time until I discovered how inexpensively fintails can be bought, and I saw someone on the internet who had done a conversion: http://fatfranz.wordpress.com/

A couple years ago I picked up mine for free on craigslist. It had had an amateur restoration and new brakes and tires. The owner had the head rebuilt, only to set the timing wrong and destroy it. He was moving that weekend and I was the only one to actually look at it, so it was given to me. I towed it home with my 1965 International-Harvester Travelall.

I ended up buying a parts car for my 1979 300SD (another free craigslist find) and decided to use the engine from the parts car (I have all paperwork for it and a compression check showing near 400PSI for each cylinder) for the 230S which was in need of an engine. I knew the 300SD engine would work in the 230S with the automatic transmission, but I wanted to keep my 4 speed on-the-column manual transmission. So I did some research and figured out how to make it work.

Now I am in the slow process of putting it together as I have time and money to (rainy Washington weather permitting). I have plans to run it on B99 biodiesel as I do my 1979 300SD. I am going to rebadge the trunk of the 230S to say 300SD TURBODIESEL. It will, after all, be a 300 now with a 3 liter engine. It is still an S class. It is now a diesel, so thus the D at the end. And it is a turbo diesel, so there it is.

Oh, one thing I must do is change the rear swing axle gears because I have a 4.09 ratio, where a 2.88 is what the 300SD has. It will be zippy around town, but slow on the freeway.