Floor Pans, Rail repair Question

[JBoggs]

Eyeing a 71 280 SL for purchase. Weird thing is, paint, trim, and interior are all excellent yet the bumpers show significant rust. Front floor pans have rust wholes, maybe 1" in widest part-seller did not try to hide this. Buds Benz in Atlanta has gone over the car and estimated $15000 to re-do the floors and rails.

Seemed very high to me.

What's reasonable to expect to fix floors and rails for a driven car?

Thanks.

J. Boggs

Was that 15 thousand or 15 hundred?

[skalie]

There's always a hell of a lot more than meets the eye initially when welding up rust holes.......

.......that being said I wouldn't go to a Mercedes garage myself, they are expensive, try and find someone who knows someone who does welding jobs by the job.

I had both floor pans, and one rotten rail welded up in a day by a VERY good friend, paid him about 70$US and a case of beer.

Let me know if it's cheaper to fly him over from the South of France to do the job for you.

[JBoggs]

Yep, that's what he said. In general terms he said that one of the frame rails had a little rust into it.

I spoke with freind of mine that works for a dealer that also does some restoration work and he said that a complete set of floors for that car was around $600. With the best welder in America it couldn't be any more than $12000 could it?

Thanks for confirming my suspicions.

J. Boggs

[Arthur Dalton]

We here in the US are fortunate to have K&K Manufacturing
Co. They make /furnish all the needed chassis body panels and repair sections for the 113 chassis.

A good body shop and new panels are what you want to
look into.

{Not cheap, but affordable]

15K!
Hell I'll do it for 14K!
Just kidding

Step 1

Find a local shop or welder that does restoration work. I have found that on a nice weekend you can usually find lots of older nice cars at a convenience store. Stop the owner and ask him about his car and if he can recommend anybody to do your type of work. Many of the good and reasonable local shops do not advertise. I fabricated my own patches and my buddy welded them in. Took us about 2 hrs.

A) Labor to cut out old material and grind to clean metal (you can't weld to rust), my guess, 4-8 hrs
B) Labor to weld in new material, 4-8 hrs

If you weld to the backside or to close to painted surfaces you will burn the paint.

Good luck

[bstreep]

Just a note to follow up on Arthur's comment. Rumor is, K & K makes the OEM parts for MB... Buy them from K & K and save about 65% (shipping to Germany, black paint, MB emblem, MB markup, packaging, shipping to US, MB dealer markup...).

They're probably estimating that based on a worst-case scenario-needing inner rockers, rear pivot mounts, seat rail mounts, etc...take it from me, its really hard for a shop to estimate jobs without taking a really detailed look at what's to be done.

You've got to figure in the paint work that's necessary, the interior disassembly that will be required, etc.

With that said, it does sound a little high though, and some of the follow ups suggest some good alternatives.

[JBoggs]

I agree if you ask for a phone estimate, you get what you pay for. These guys looked at the car over a few days. The current owner says he has two other estimates-one to buy pans and re-weld- about $1500, other from an experienced Mercedes guy to fabricate new pans for about $700-certainly alot more doable.

This is, this car definitely looks good up close, interior is very good, but I don't want to buy it and have the frame rails give way on me.

Chance you take I guess.

Thanks.

J. Boggs

THat definitely changes things. I might think twice about the car...I cannot imagine that they want that much for some minor floor work...they must've seen some other issues in there.

A good welder/fabricator should be able to splice in some new sheet metal and make the repair invisible...for way less than 15 grand.

There are two ways to go about this, he can either hand-make repair pieces (good way to go if you're not a concours nut and just want a solid repair)...or buy replacement front pans and just section them to use only what you need. This is good if you're a stickler for having the proper embossings on the floorpan. Pans in these cars are not difficult to repair properly.

Make sure on this car to also check out the inner rocker panels as well as the stiffners underneath the front fenders. If the floor has some issues, these spots may be compromised too.

Good luck with your search!

[rmadison]

Repairing floor pans by sectioning, patching rust around both headlights, a few rust blisters on one fender, remove dings, paint chips, re-set and center hood, install passenger mirror, insert new thread for "C" post chrome cap, re-paint where needed including hard top...this in NYC for about $1,500 plus parts...
Richard M