My First Car
1980 Mercedes-Benz 300D
It was one of those cars you buy from your parents because you don’t have any money. Since it was such an old car, it was a collector’s item. If only it had been in mint condition, I could have sold or traded it for half the price of a new car. Aside from that, I was fixing this car every week for the first two months I owned it. I really didn’t know much about auto repair other than what I learned in my small-engines class in high school. But to me, mechanical systems have a sense of order, and I can generally figure things out. It just takes me longer than someone who has the know-how. Most of the repairs were relatively small, such as leaking vacuum lines and starter problems, among other things. Eventually, it was able to go for a month or two before problems would come up again. The biggest job was when the starter chewed up enough of the flywheel that it wouldn’t turn over the engine. As a quick fix, I would take a screwdriver, crawl under the car, and move the flywheel a few inches to get past the chewed-up part.
But I wasn’t about to do that for very long. To properly fix the car, I was either going to have to drop the transmission or raise the engine to replace the flywheel. Luckily for me, my dad had a 300TD Mercedes with a good engine, but a shot transmission, sitting around for parts. Since I was going through all the trouble to raise the engine, and the other car was a turbo model with an almost identical engine, I might as well swap engines. I was excited to have a turbo diesel because that really makes a difference in acceleration. It took me about two weeks to complete the job, with some help from my dad hoisting the old engine out and dropping the new engine in. It was almost a perfect fit, except one of the engine mounts was in a different location than the original engine. I was able to move it pretty easily by cutting it off and welding it to the correct location. Once the swap was completed, everything seemed to work fine for the most part, but it was having some trouble shifting. Since I knew nothing about transmissions and wasn’t about to try rebuilding one on my own, I decided to spend a bit of money and have a professional take a look at it. Gunbarrel Import Motors in Niwot, CO, has excellent mechanics. They were a bit expensive, but you get what you pay for. I finally had a car that was running well. While it still had a few things that needed fixing, it served me well as my first car.
