Greetings, and welcome to the forum. There is a huge amount of know-how to be gained here...
Other than Southern Star, I am still not aware of anyone locally to work on MB's. I ended up using Jonathan at Blue Ridge MB in the Atlanta area to do some major work, though he is over 100 miles away:
Blue Ridge Mercedes
As far as painting, I have a friend that I haven't seen in a while, but he has done tremendous restoration work and paint jobs on both automobiles and Harleys. I'm not sure if he's still in that line of work, but if you'd like his name, PM me...