For those of you lucky enough to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, Autobahn motors in Belmont has 3 ground up restoration cars for sale. A beautiful 19955 300SL Gullwing, white with red leather interior and matching red lugage. This car is incredible. I wish I had the $215K they are asking for it. THe next car is a 1963 300SL Roadster. WIne color exterior and tan interior. THis car has the aluminum engine. This is selling for $240K. The next one is a perfect 1971 280SL with grey leather interior. Funny I can not remember the exterior. It is perfect. The engine is brand spanking new. Everything is perfect except it is an automatic. It even has the Becker Europa Stereo with the sstock speakers in the foot wells. This is going for $41K. I went there this weakend and they make the new cars look boring. Both my kids like the white gullwing best.

I looked under both 300SL's and the 55 had a rear panel while the 63 had none but had a very interesting rear suspension that is much different than anything I have seen. What did MBZ do on this car? I thought I would see the standard swing axel.
Henry

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63 190d (sold)
69 220D (sold)
69 280SL (sold)
76 BMW 2002 (sold)
86 190E-16v (Demised at Laguna Seca Turn 9)
87 300SDL (sold)
87 300SDL 135k
87 300TD 280k (sold)
95 E320W 211k
95 E320w 111k
05 C320 4matic
06 E320 CDI 90k (Totaled by a texting 19 year old girl in a nissan)
2013 GLK 250 Bluetek 4MATIC

like the M-B sedans of the '60s (or that 280SL)? The '55 would have still had more conventional swing axles, of course.

Back in '65, when I was in graduate school, a visiting professor wanted to sell me his 300SL roadster (I had done some basic maintenance on it for him with considerable enthusiasm) because he didn't want to be bothered with shipping it back to Germany -- his price was only $7000., but that was twice my annual income at that time. Oh well, talk about lost opportunities -- now one seems to be worth 3 1/2 times my annual salary.

The 300SL Coupe had conventional swing axles. The roadster had the low-pivot swing axle developed by M/B to reduce the camber change of conventional swing axles. The 280SL had the same axle as the roadster.