The Project Pad

Flew from Seattle to Chicago one-way about a week ago to pick this up and drive it home...
This has always been one of my dream cars (despite it being a slow underdog) and this came up for a good price.
2000 miles and 2.5 days/30hrs of driving and I made it home without a hitch!

1987 Mercedes-Benz 190E 2.3-16 'by Cosworth' with a 5spd dogleg Getrag trans
-2nd owner since '91
-was advertised as having 115k miles in the ad and the odometer...but a journey through the service records at a hotel room on the way home showed it had 210k miles in 2001. So yeah, not sure how much it really has on it.
-Spent most of it's life under the hot New Mexico sun, thus the paint is severely faded on top.
-Mostly stock. Has euro headlights (which are amazing) and Bilstein sport shocks in the front (but still has self-leveling suspension, SLS, in the rear). Previous owner's son also had the bright idea to cut off the muffler.
-Interior is in pretty good shape besides some seperation on the rear seats
-Cruise control and AC still work!

Plans:
-Tune-up
-Install CD player
-Motor mounts
-Muffler
-Wheels of some sort
-Plastidip paint job until I get time to paint it properly
-SLS delete with Bilsteins
-Some sort of springs; adjustable perches or cut 400E springs

Who knows what in the future...Turbo + EFI? 07K? It'll most likely stay pretty stock since I have other cars to do crazy things with. Plus you can't really fit a tire on these cars unless I add flares. Even the Evo2 kit doesn't gain you too much width.

The Journey:
1st night heading into Minnesota
ORDtoSEA-1 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

Some portions of the drive I felt like they should've just named the interstate after this exit
ORDtoSEA-2 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

Exhilarating North Dakota
ORDtoSEA-3 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

Start of the 'Enchanted Highway'...didn't go though
ORDtoSEA-4 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

Painted canyon at Theodore Roosevelt National Park
ORDtoSEA-5 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

ORDtoSEA-6 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

View from the flight deck. That's my killer stereo, a $20 portable speaker from Walmart.
ORDtoSEA-7 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

Western ND, Eastern MT
ORDtoSEA-8 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

ORDtoSEA-9 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

Needles to say, I didn't take this route
ORDtoSEA-10 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

ORDtoSEA-11 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

Driving into the night, towards the end of a 13+hr day
ORDtoSEA-12 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

Western MT
ORDtoSEA-13 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

ORDtoSEA-14 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

Back in Washington!
ORDtoSEA-15 by alxdgr8, on Flickr


And onto the car:
Cosworth-1 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

Cosworth-2 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

The tired paint
Cosworth-3 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

Interior pre-cleaning
Cosworth-4 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

The rasp-erific exhaust
Cosworth-5 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

Cosworth-6 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

Cosworth-7 by alxdgr8, on Flickr

Ill say it here too. I love these cars! I hope to see some good things here.

Nice score, Alex. These are one of my favorite classics also. There are a few local ones around here, and a few have come up for sale, but they were asking nearly M3-type money for them. And one was an automatic. The dogleg getrag is a nice tranny in these.

I have imagined a garage with one of these, an urq/RS2/S2, an E30 M3, maybe a 944 S2/951...i guess being in high school and nearing driving age when these came out created the connection. R&T's 'Clash of the Teutons' was read many a time through the 90's. And I certainly would not have imagined owning an eS2 before the Merc or the M3, though.

The nice thing about these cars is they all can be a pretty solid investment if you are smart with the maintenance and modifications. So now, buying old, quirky european cars can be justified as a 'smart' use of money...or so I keep telling myself.

Frick ya dude nice score! Those are awesome cars!

Nice car! My first audi was purchased from an owner of one of these. It was the first one i had seen in the flesh. I was impressed.

Since cosmetics are pretty low on my priority list for this car compared to the Audi/Porsche projects, I'm going to be 'dipping' the entire car with Plasti-Dip. I've got plenty of air to spray it with a HVLP, so I'll be going that route with a 1.8 primer nozzle instead of the airless home paint sprayers. Should provide a bit better finish than most dip jobs.

I've never been a fan of flat black so I won't be doing that. It just always makes the car look like it's just primered. Anyways, I'm thinking of a few different colors. It's hard to find previews of colors on these cars since they only came in two colors in the USA, and even the 190E in general didn't too many offerings in the color pallet worldwide.

Some generic examples

Aluminum:


White:


White w/pearlizer:


Red:


Light Blue:


Yellow:


Hunter Green:


Navy Blue:


Electric Lime Green:


Koi Orange:


Flex Blue:




I'm probably leaning towards Red the most (possibly with the glossifier to make it less flat). But, the flex blue or white would be close behind. And I've always wanted a Porsche signal green car, so electric lime would be fun.

Red 190E (imagine it flat/matte):


Nogaro-ish 190E




Classic white:

White!

I really think white is the way to go.


Very nice pick up! I enjoyed reading about your journey. Montana looks spectacular this time of year! I look forward to seeing how this progresses. I think this kind of project is really fun to take in a semi-restoration direction. I love seeing cars like this get cleaned up and put back into reliable service (this one is obviously already in decent mechanical shape!).

It is beautiful!

vote for white too.

Been thinking about dipping my 200 but I've read a lot of complaints about the texture. I'll be interested to see what yours looks like.

I vote for blue.

Silver. it is the correct color for a german car.

White! I pondered the other colors until I came across that last one, and I immediately knew which one was my pick!

Red!!

Nice find. Brings back memories of my childhood. My mom upgraded to Merc 190s after a pair of mk2 cars (a rabbit diesel and a jetta gasser. .. a raspberry colored 190e then a gold 190d. They carve the windy backroads at ridiculous speeds with ease.

Nice pickup! There's an A4 that comes to our local meets that is an awesome burnt orange/red colour, dipped. It is such a nice colour. Maybe I'll dip the 4k... hmmmmmmm

A friend of mine had one of these and he put a 1j into it.

Always loved these cars. Goodluck.

Thinking about picking up a set of Type A's...some inspiration.



I don't really like many Merc wheels and Evo2 wheels are hard to find. I'd like a set of these, but they were only offered for a few years as optional wheels on C230/250's so I can't find them either.

This is only related because it is Mercedes, but I drove a C63 today. It was amazing. I *really* wanted to buy it! I don't imagine the 190 cossies are very closely related to the newer cars, but they were sort of the grandfathers of the high performance c-class I guess. Kinda like the E30 M3 compared to a new one

Got a $30 muffler on so it's driveable without the risk of getting pulled over. Still a littler raspy, but it's alright for now. There's also a heat shield rattling I need to find. Definitely was good practice for my TIG, I need a LOT more practice.







I've got motor mounts along with a whole bunch of other tune-up parts coming tomorrow. I definitely need them as you can see. [Click for video]

And I bought some wheels, they should ship next week. Borbet Type A 17x7.5

Nice, better get rid of that wheel gap though when those come... more like that first picture you posted with the Borbets.

ahhh love everything about this

There's a non-running one that looks minty mint nearby for $4000. Wish I had the space to fix it and flip it

Updates? I'm still curious about how your plasti-dip will come out.

No updates, I've been out of town for two weeks and will be gone two more. I did get my set of 5 mint Borbet Type A's in anthracite just before I left though; need to order tires before I can mount them. Did some tuneup stuff and replaced one of the motor mounts (the easy one). I'm thinking it needs a tranny mount too now. Need to troubleshoot the CIS as I think it's not holding pressure after shutdown, it takes a bit of cranking to start. I'll be moving in August so I'm probably going to wait on the plastidip until I move into my new house/shop since I'll have a lot more space.

Wheels:




I'm leaning pretty heavily to the red plastidip, I think these will look really good with that.

Got my new tires mounted this past weekend on the new wheels. 215/40R17 Nitto Neogen on 17x7.5 ET30 Borbet Type A (rare gray metallic; full set of 5).
Accidently destroyed one side of the parking brake setup after rolling the car backwards not knowing that the wheel bolts were too long and caught on one of the shoes (it's on the inside of the hub/rotor). The other side didn't catch somehow. I'll have to replace the one side, but for the meantime I found some shorter bolts and ordered a stud kit so I don't have to worry about it in the future.



Also ordered red plasti-dip with glossifier, it'll be a few weeks before it gets here.
Had a little scare today when I decided to start troubleshooting the cold start problem. Decided I should run down the factory service manual test list. Pulled what I thought was the ECU and found the connector and pins to be severely corroded with several missing and many more ready to fall off. After freaking out for a bit I google'd the part number to find out it's just the ABS computer. ECU connector is perfect! Time to find a new ABS computer though...