My slow going 300SEL 6.3 restoration

[alabbasi]

I've owned a couple of 300SEL 6.3's for about a decade. I bought this one around 2011-2012 time frame. It had been sitting many years and had some horrible gas inside. The PO started parting it out and decided to sell the transmission from it before I saved it.

I found a transmission for it, however the linkage was locked up. In 2014, I found a Euro spec 69 300SEL 6.3 at a salvage auction so I decided to buy it. It had a very major fire at the fuel tank however the engine looked to be in great shape. It was on the m-100 club register and looked to in perfect pre accident damage.

About 6 months ago, we started the project of pulling the engine from underneath, including the transmission and sub frame and installing the replacement motor. It made sense to do it this way because the suspension, engine mounts, air bags are all in great shape.

Work has been slow but today, we finally got it running. Here is a video update. I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did.

To view this content we will need your consent to set third party cookies.
For more detailed information, see our cookies page.

Accept third party cookies

 

[Druk]

The likely reason the key won’t turn the starter is that the trannie inhibitor switch isn’t connected.

 

[alabbasi]

Is that the neutral safety switch under the hood? We reconnected it suspecting the same but as someone had gone in there and hacked it, we may need to reverse engineer everything to get it back to the way it was supposed to be.

 

[Ted]

I thought “air bags”!!????

Then I thought again.
I’ll shut up now.
But they are lovely cars.

 

[Williamwoo]

I thought “air bags”!!????

(So did I!)

 

[Druk]

Is that the neutral safety switch under the hood? We reconnected it suspecting the same but as someone had gone in there and hacked it, we may need to reverse engineer everything to get it back to the way it was supposed to be.

Honestly don’t know where it would be on that car but certainly later trannies have it on the side of the box where the selector lever enters.





.

 

[C43AMG]

That was the first Mercedes i bought 1983. Great Project

 

[alabbasi]

Honestly don’t know where it would be on that car but certainly later trannies have it on the side of the box where the selector lever enters.

Yep, we got that reconnected but it still does not work, somebody had hacked into the wiring so I need to figure out what they did and how to undo it as it may well solve the problem if we put everything back to the way it should be.

 

[grober]

Its possible that a car from that era should have a ballast resistor coil arrangement and people often mess about with the wiring for these with odd results this may be a useful source? M-100 Message Board
and maybe this
Checking and regulating engine

 

[alabbasi]

It does, but the ballast resistors are functioning correctly. As they are mounted on the engine, they were part of the swap. It's worth checking out though as the old engine had some kind of electronic setup. This one still has the points.

I'm a member of the M-100 group (actually past board member and webmaster). It's a great site if you own any W116 or W108/W109 let alone one with the M100 engine.