May I suggest one of these http://www.mrheater.com/productdetail.asp?id=673&cid= I have one and it will warm the garage nicely in just a few hours you will be able to work in just a sweatshirt. I know you are not using the gas grille this time of year so you might as well use the bottle from it. I have used the kerosene forced hot air heaters but they are noisy and smell bad. The propane has almost no odor.

Junqueyardjim,
You do not need to remove the swaybar on a 123 to change the bushings! They can be changed in place if you are careful and patient. Much better than taking so much apart. RT

I almost bought one of those heaters you showed there, but I wanted the fan forced 35,000 btu one. :D Lottts of heat. Sucks a propane tank dry in about 13 hours of use....eh, can always buy more "compressed dino". It sounds sweet, its like a mini-jet engine and has 0 odor when running. Nice cool blue flame inside the "jet" part too. :D We even put our carbon monoxide detector in the garage with us, it never went off even when using the thing for 3.5 hours. Perfectly safe. Propane rocks! Hank hill was right! :D

HELP, HORRRIBLE event when jacking car!!
 

We finished getting stuff in the engine compartment out of the way of the sway bar on our SD tonight, then when we went to begin jacking it up to take the wheels off and set it on the jack stands etc....THE WORST POSSIBLE THING happened, the jack point on the driver side completely broke apart, crumbled, the whole thing is collapsed :eek: What formerly looked rust free is appearantly VERY rusty. We can't even jack the car! We tried using a floor jack instead of the MB jackpoint jack, and it crushed the rubber pad mount into the frame. I have inserted many pictures here, and we don't know what to do. Help?

A. Can we do the sway bar with the tires still on and it just sitting there? It looks to be possible, just more difficult/annoying due to less room, but the stuff is still accessible and the suspension level as if it were sitting on stands on the lower control arm, so I don't see why not.

B. HOW can we repair this rust catastrophe? Is it possible? Is this car(body) doomed????

C. The upper control arm on the drivers side looks to be bent or out of whack, I have pointed this out with some arrows in a picture below. It seems to be bent/pushed forward....is this normal when the sway bar breaks off, or is it bent and needing replacement???

This is horrid. We thought we'd be working on reassembly by tomorrow, now we're worried about the whole car's future.... :(

Pics:

http://www.tglmarketinginc.com/mbfor...y/5Z210054.jpg

http://www.tglmarketinginc.com/mbfor...y/5Z210055.jpg

http://www.tglmarketinginc.com/mbfor...y/5Z210056.jpg

http://www.tglmarketinginc.com/mbfor...y/5Z210057.jpg

http://www.tglmarketinginc.com/mbfor...y/5Z210058.jpg

http://www.tglmarketinginc.com/mbfor...y/5Z210059.jpg

http://www.tglmarketinginc.com/mbfor...y/5Z210060.jpg

http://www.tglmarketinginc.com/mbfor...y/5Z210061.jpg

Those upper control arms are not that expensive and they have a bushing up where the bolt goes through in the engine compartment. You will probably be able to shake the upper arm back and forth since it only has that one bolt holding it there. I'll bet your fine with that upper control arm. A new one comes with the bushing and ball joint and isn't too expensive if you want to replace it.

As for the rust, you need rockers and jack points replaced. People have had them done here but usually on other models. I know of alabassi who had them replaced on his 6.9. His were a lot worse though and the whole car was repainted. The good thing about rockers is they should not require paint work since they just have that rubber coating on them for color. I think the rocker panels are maybe $150/side or even less since you have a SWB 126. Look for a place called K&K Manufacturing. Do a search here because they well reasonable body parts for older MBs. You would just have to find someone to do the welding. Also, once you get the rockers cut out, you will see boxes that are the jack points, those are welded in as well. Hopefully once the rockers are out the rust should not be too far in or you would start to see it on the side of the floor pan. Try pulling up the plastic door sill and see if there is much rust there. The sill snaps onto the fitting where the rocker meets the body BTW, so that will give you an idea of what a rocker panel really entails. Let me know if you have any question and I'll find the member here who had the rockers done and will post his webpage here.

Thanks
David

http://www.alabbasi.net/450SEL.htm
That is the member who had severe rust repair done on his car. Yours wouldn't need nearly this amount but he has pictures of the rockers and jack points being replaced. By looking at them you should be able to get a better idea of what is involved in the process.

http://www.kkmfg.com/
This is the place that sells aftermarket body panels. They do not have 126 listed in their catalog but they also do not list 123 parts and another member here called them and they just did not have them listed. So, moral of the story is, call and see if they have rockers for a SWB 126. You may be pleasantly surprised.

The jack point boxes (or even the rockers for that matter) can be bought at any MB dealer. They should not be too expensive since there is not much to them.

Thanks
David

you should do a serious assessment of the other rust issues on this car and determine if it's worth it.

Hi,

I agree with David's assessment of your rust situation, but will take it one step further. You probably don't even need to buy the rockers. One of the points that David made is very instrumental in the completion of this repair. The rockers are located down low and are covered with the undercoating. Cosmetic detail here is minimal. (I am hoping here that the rust does not extend to the Inner rockers or structure of the round jack point) Basically, the repair goes like this: Cut away every bit of bad metal, preferably in a rectangular shape, so that the new metal is easy to fit, cut the new metal to fit, drill a hole where the jack point comes through, paint inside of rockers with some sort of rustproofing paint, weld new metal to old and weld all the way around the jackpoint, prime new section and undercoat. Good as new. I did this exact exercise on a BMW 633Csi about 10-12 years ago and the car is still being driven with no rust around the jack points. I recently did it on a 300D and a 190D. I have no doubt that these repairs will last a long time, too.

Good luck,
Tom

the upper control arm is pressed forward because of being driven without the sway bar connected. the bolt fell out of mine a while back and it was doing the same thing. it will move back when you drive forward.

Is it possible to do the sway bar with the car sitting on its wheels? It appears it would be....just more annoying. We'd like to do that and get it back to being able to be driven, then get the rocker panel taken care of. Overall we're pretty sure thats the only majore rust like that on the car, we took care of all the rest of it over the past year or so.

The next big moment is to see if the nuts come loose on the sway bar brackets without breaking or something.....

Let the nuts soak in PB Blaster for awhile before attempting. If there is not much rust around the stud, the nuts should give way. Just go at them slowly while carefully watching the nut and stud. If there is much rust, you will see the whole base down there start to twist, ask how I know. With enough PB Blaster and time, you should not have a problem.

Thanks
David

Pete's right, my SD is rusted like that around the jack points. Thats why its my winter car, let the salt eat her for another couple of years and off to the crusher.

That is the only jack point with rust like that, the others are fine/solid. This car is a year round driver, and when its on the road it drives awesomely because the prev owner had suspension work done on it, and the engine/tranny are absolutely perfect. Also the climate control was redone (works flawlessly, except for the failed A/C compressor) It also has an absolutely mint interior. Its worth trying to keep it on the road another 5-10 years or so. We want to see it hit and surpass 300k.....

Successful Day of Work!
 

Tonight we got back to work on the sway project (we're ignoring the jack point issue for the moment, didn't need to raise the car anyways)

We pulled the cables going across out of the way, and the brake line, and removed the brackets successfully, with tons of PB blaster. The nuts were in OK condition, the permenant bolt/threads are just fine and in great shape, thankfully. Brackets came out with no problems, then we pulled the sway bar, wasn't all that difficult at all. WAY easier to maneuver that thing than it is to do the oil cooler lines, those took me almost an hour to snake in back when I did them on my car, the bar took about 3-4 minutes to get out.

My dad then went to work for about an hour on the surface rust etc in those areas, and cleaned it up then treated it with the awesome rust converter stuff, its the purple looking stuff in the pictures, it dries to a super hard rustproof black surface. Tomorrow we'll be putting the new bar in, hooking the suspension all together and doing the brackets, then we begin the reinstallation of everything. Horray!!! Below are some pictures of the after-results of tonights work, I forgot to take pics of the sway bar itself, I'll put some in the next update, I'll get some good shots of how it failed/snapped, and also of the side that didn't, but was also in very bad shape/quite corroded.

Pics:

Our awesome heater that has given us an amazingly comfortable work environment:

http://www.tglmarketinginc.com/mbfor...y/5Z210045.jpg

http://www.tglmarketinginc.com/mbfor...y/5Z210047.jpg

http://www.tglmarketinginc.com/mbfor...y/5Z220063.jpg

http://www.tglmarketinginc.com/mbfor...y/5Z220064.jpg

http://www.tglmarketinginc.com/mbfor...y/5Z220065.jpg

http://www.tglmarketinginc.com/mbfor...y/5Z220066.jpg

http://www.tglmarketinginc.com/mbfor...y/5Z220067.jpg

Update....
 

So tonight we went ahead and were getting prepared to reinstall the sway bar and have that all done. Low and behold as we're going through our pile of parts from the stealership we find that, we were given a big order of VOLVO parts for some odd application...( a few HUGE bolts & a big seal ring & some smaller hex bolts...strange indeed $76 worth of stuff according to the sheet attached to them :eek: ) Also, the bolts given to us to attach the sway bar to the upper control arm are crud, they are far inferior material to the originals. We can mar them up and score the metal with a small screw driver!! :eek: You can't even make a scratch on the originals.... They also gave us too many metal plates for the rubber bushings. Here is a biggy: They gave us FOUR nuts the size/fit of the bolts that go into the sway bar on the upper control arm(17mm), but NO nuts for mounting the brackets to the car!!!(Huge 19mm) :mad: Those four nuts are useless, the bolt screws right into the sway bar! And why would they give us 4 of them???! So tonight we wasted just over an hour of propane and our time. We also have to touch up the paint on the sway bar itself, as they managed to mar it up in many places, appearantly its too hard to ship it in a sheath to protect it or something.... :rolleyes:

Tomorrow the stealership is getting an UNhappy customer visit.... :mad:

I did this exact same job on my 85 300SD 2 winters ago. I found nearly the same rust problems and issues that you have found. Mine broke on the same side as yours. A couple of things come to mind:
Don't bother replacing the upper control arms/bushings. I did and didn't have to.
You will have to use a giant prybar to get the new sway bar into the upper control arm. That may be difficult in your garage. Once you bolt in the new bushings and cap it will all line up.
Don't use any lube oils on the rubber bushings especially the bushings holding the sway bar in place on the chassis.
Be careful with the brake line on the chassis it's fragile and old.
Don't worry about the rust at this point. Jack it up from the middle front under the main center support. Might have to roll it back some in your situation. The wheels must come off to finish the job. I found so much rust on my car I simply refused to even worry about it. I sprayed in a can or two of Great Stuff foam into every frame hole I could find and every rust hole then sprayed some undercoating over that.
Overall one of the most fullfilling jobs to ever undertake for a 126 Chassis for a DIY'er. Keep up the good work.