ocpanther

I thought I would start a thread from scratch of my 300E restoration that I rescued from the slow dry death of rotting in an indy shop's parking lot in the high desert of california.

I will start out with the first pictures I took in the lot and try to document everything that I have done to keep it running and each bit of TLC that I have tried to add along the way.

bigdogbitu

Looking forward to it.................

jwframe

you could start with some before pictures

ocpanther

I finally found the pictures of my car the day I bought it. It had been sitting for about 5 years in a euro indy shop parking lot.







The interior had sheep skin covers ... the only reason there are any seats left at all.

ps2cho

Is that a ding on the front right fender?

I got a straight fender I'll let go real cheap if interested..need to get rid of it. You'd have to paint it though...it's navy color. Just throwing it out there

ocpanther

There was a ding in the right front and left rear. I pounded out both for the most part but the rear needs to be feathered a bit more. I figure I will hold off on changing any sheet metal until I am ready to paint. I need to find my carpet first ... get the seats in and then on to paint.

It's funny looking back at these pictures. The car had more paint on it than I remember. I guess I shouldn't have had it buffed buy those people that come wash cars at your work.

ocpanther

So ... this was 2005. I bought the car for cheap and it spent the next nine months in that parking lot getting a tuneup and fluids changed trying to get it to pass smog.

We finally ot it through (just barely) and I got to come take it home.

It made it the 80 miles or so ok .. I think it only died on me once.

ocpanther

When I got the car home I got abath first thing. Then I cut off those terrible seat covers and vacuumed up the mess that created.

I started driving the car to work most days when it would start ok. It only took a little while before I run into my first issue.

The fuel pump relay was chattering. When you turned the key but didn't crank the starter I could hear a clicking sound coming form behind the battery. So I had a brother inlaw who worked on these cars at an indy shop (he had one too) and so he told me about resoldering the relay. No big deal, right? No prolem, I soldered mine and another one as a spare (just in case). Good thing I had the spare as they kept going out. I had a piece of 10 gauge wire in my trunk as a jumper thatif it went completely I pulled the relay and just hot jumped it to run all the time.

You can imaging this is not how you want your new car to run. So I ordered a new one and that cleared it up for a few weeks.

The down side was when the pumps were running all the time and chattering from the bad relays it burnt at least one of them out. So call the bro inlaw ... have him come down with a new pumps and get that swapped.

.....