Mercedes 129 titivation
Discussion
r129sl said:
TonyF55 said:
Whilst we have some font specialists on here, can anyone tell me what font this is ? I see this font a lot on 80's VW's and the non straight letters are quite curvy.
I used to be a proper font nerd but it is one of the many obsessions that has been crowded out by adult life.Anyway, pre-2001, I understand there was no prescribed font, in the sense of a font precisely specified by legislation. There were subtle variations between the fonts used by different plate manufacturers. The plate you show on the Sirocco features a font best represented by Lutz Headline, owned and published by Lineto. See here: http://lineto.com/The+Fonts/Font+Categories/Headli... and here: http://www.leewardpro.com/articles/licplatefonts/f... It seems to be relatively readily available. I have noticed it previously and always rather liked it, although I feel it belongs on 1970s and 1980s vehicles. Although the font Lutz Headline was drawn in 1997, it appears to be based on anonymous fonts in use as early as the first half of the twentieth century. A fascinating business.
Pretty much a whole page of this thread is devoted to fonts. Great! Anyway, you can buy numberplates in Lutz Headline here: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Classic-Car-Old-style-Nu...
Guess what I'm doing...
Edit: or not, it's too difficult. It also appears from gentle googling that this subject has been well-traversed by the VW forums.
Guess what I'm doing...
Edit: or not, it's too difficult. It also appears from gentle googling that this subject has been well-traversed by the VW forums.
Edited by r129sl on Wednesday 15th July 22:28
The car looks fantastic - I wish I had known about someone like this when I did mine a year or two back - I have never been fully happy with the paint on my car, but maybe I am too fussy.
Number plate fonts interest me too, though I don't know much about them. My own car's registration has a 'curly' font - it is very similar to the Lutz headline, but the numbers and letters are slightly more rounded. A lot of Jaguars dealers used it in the late 1980s and early 1990s - I have seen it on quite a few Austin-Rovers as well. I wonder what it is.
Number plate fonts interest me too, though I don't know much about them. My own car's registration has a 'curly' font - it is very similar to the Lutz headline, but the numbers and letters are slightly more rounded. A lot of Jaguars dealers used it in the late 1980s and early 1990s - I have seen it on quite a few Austin-Rovers as well. I wonder what it is.
I think it is the product of Unipart. My googling through up a thread on a VW forum in which a saddo like myself purchased on Ebay a load of old Unipart letters and plates. He compared these to the Lutz Headline font and noted how they used to appear on old VWs. It wouldn't surprise me if Unipart supplied Jaguar and AR dealers with their plate-making gear.
dbdb said:
The car looks fantastic - I wish I had known about someone like this when I did mine a year or two back - I have never been fully happy with the paint on my car, but maybe I am too fussy.
Number plate fonts interest me too, though I don't know much about them. My own car's registration has a 'curly' font - it is very similar to the Lutz headline, but the numbers and letters are slightly more rounded. A lot of Jaguars dealers used it in the late 1980s and early 1990s - I have seen it on quite a few Austin-Rovers as well. I wonder what it is.
Would be interested to see what that looks like if you don't mind posting a pic.Number plate fonts interest me too, though I don't know much about them. My own car's registration has a 'curly' font - it is very similar to the Lutz headline, but the numbers and letters are slightly more rounded. A lot of Jaguars dealers used it in the late 1980s and early 1990s - I have seen it on quite a few Austin-Rovers as well. I wonder what it is.
TonyF55 said:
Would be interested to see what that looks like if you don't mind posting a pic.
Hopefully R129 will forgive the thread drift and (Gulp!!) non-Mercedes content!! 
Original dealer 'plate on my 1992 Jaguar Sovereign. The supplying Jaguar dealer was Arthur Royle in Prestbury, Cheshire.
To add some extra letters from the same font, here it is used on a different Jaguar from 1993 (coincidentally the same colour) almost certainly with its original dealer 'plates from the supplying dealer Lancaster Jaguar in Sevenoaks. It is a low mileage car I saw advertised on the Internet a while back.
It seems reasonably common on Rovers too.
Edited to add:
It isn't the easiest thing to google, but I have seen references to it as the "Bestplate" font, used in Jersey in the 1980s. http://autos
te.com/topic/2618-old-charles-wright...Edited by dbdb on Thursday 16th July 12:01
r129sl said:
I think it is the product of Unipart. My googling through up a thread on a VW forum in which a saddo like myself purchased on Ebay a load of old Unipart letters and plates. He compared these to the Lutz Headline font and noted how they used to appear on old VWs. It wouldn't surprise me if Unipart supplied Jaguar and AR dealers with their plate-making gear.
That seems likely. Jaguar used Unipart for a lot of stuff - they supplied most/all of the car parts for older cars until very recently. It hadn't occurred to me - I will have a Google!I finally picked it up last Friday: the delay was my fault as I was selling my Golf and ended up with too many cars in town.
Unfortunately, the weather has been a bit grim and my wife was working all weekend, so I have had neither time nor opportunity to play with it. I am hoping to have some time off tomorrow to do some cleaning and polishing and to take some pictures. I have driven it and, as always, I had forgotten what a great car it is. More to follow.
Unfortunately, the weather has been a bit grim and my wife was working all weekend, so I have had neither time nor opportunity to play with it. I am hoping to have some time off tomorrow to do some cleaning and polishing and to take some pictures. I have driven it and, as always, I had forgotten what a great car it is. More to follow.
Still no chance to do a full write up with pictures due to work commitments and weather. However, the car is finished now and I am very happy with it. There were a couple of niggles: an old run inside a feature line on a wing mirror that necessitated a repaint, a masking line in the boot shut and a bit of dust in the paint behind the numberplate. This week the Man rectified all these willingly and without complaint, I felt a bit bad for bringing them up because it is not like this is a ten grand concours job. Anyway, it is looking spiffing.
It was the wife's birthday yesterday so we had dinner out and a night away from the rats. Here are our motors parked up by our lodgings this morning. I'll do some detail pictures of the SL today. On Saturday it will be at the Mercedes-Benz Club stand at the Silverstone Classic if you're there.
It was the wife's birthday yesterday so we had dinner out and a night away from the rats. Here are our motors parked up by our lodgings this morning. I'll do some detail pictures of the SL today. On Saturday it will be at the Mercedes-Benz Club stand at the Silverstone Classic if you're there.
I spent some time this evening getting the car ready for its trip to Silverstone. I just managed to get some snaps before the sun went down. In these pictures it has just been washed, dried and waxed but has not been detailed, so there are droplets of water and little smudges all over the joint. I will do it properly tomorrow. But I wanted to get some pictures in what was a stunning sunset up my way.
What is there to see? Well, it could do with being flatted back rather a lot more. You can see the wobble in the paintwork which immediately gives away that it's a repaint. I think it also needs a really, really good polishing with diminishing levels of pad and polish aggressiveness, then sealing with some good quality sealant. At the moment, it just has Autoglym Super Resin Polish on it (which I find quick, easy and reliable). I keep stressing, however, that I was, am and always will be on a budget. But the best thing is there is no rust and it is all the same colour. I have some new mats which I will put in tomorrow.
Some general shots to start off with, including the first, awful composition in which a road sign appears to be growing out of the roof.
Here you see how the rusty tail end has been made good again. Let's see how long it lasts.
Likewise the wheel arches. This is the one which needed the big repair:
And this was the one with the big ugly bleb which was starting to break the paint:
Here you see the bonnet refreshingly free from chips:
I quite like that last shot. Anyway, I also took some pictures in which I sought to demonstrate the delicacy, elegance and beauty of the lines of this car. Dimwits often described it as blocky or slabby when, in fact, if you look at it through open eyes, it is anything but. I think they mistake unadorned, pure and simple for those things, perhaps used to the plastic chrome tat, the swoops and slashes and the fiddly details that modern cars need to disguise their ungainly forms.
The front wheel arches are superbly done:
Grille, lights, wing and bonnet:
The rear wheel arches are more delicate than the fronts, but the body is wider here, before tapering at the tail. Sacco obviously found the trapezoid form satisfying.
All things considered, I am happy with the job and remain in love with this car of mine.
What is there to see? Well, it could do with being flatted back rather a lot more. You can see the wobble in the paintwork which immediately gives away that it's a repaint. I think it also needs a really, really good polishing with diminishing levels of pad and polish aggressiveness, then sealing with some good quality sealant. At the moment, it just has Autoglym Super Resin Polish on it (which I find quick, easy and reliable). I keep stressing, however, that I was, am and always will be on a budget. But the best thing is there is no rust and it is all the same colour. I have some new mats which I will put in tomorrow.
Some general shots to start off with, including the first, awful composition in which a road sign appears to be growing out of the roof.
Here you see how the rusty tail end has been made good again. Let's see how long it lasts.
Likewise the wheel arches. This is the one which needed the big repair:
And this was the one with the big ugly bleb which was starting to break the paint:
Here you see the bonnet refreshingly free from chips:
I quite like that last shot. Anyway, I also took some pictures in which I sought to demonstrate the delicacy, elegance and beauty of the lines of this car. Dimwits often described it as blocky or slabby when, in fact, if you look at it through open eyes, it is anything but. I think they mistake unadorned, pure and simple for those things, perhaps used to the plastic chrome tat, the swoops and slashes and the fiddly details that modern cars need to disguise their ungainly forms.
The front wheel arches are superbly done:
Grille, lights, wing and bonnet:
The rear wheel arches are more delicate than the fronts, but the body is wider here, before tapering at the tail. Sacco obviously found the trapezoid form satisfying.
All things considered, I am happy with the job and remain in love with this car of mine.
Edited by r129sl on Thursday 23 July 22:25
That looks superb.
The wave in the paint isn't visible in the photos - is it visible only when viewed at a steep angle whilst moving, or is it apparent at other times too?
My own car has a slight wave down the sides on the doors which does annoy me, since as you say, it makes it immediately obvious it is a repaint. Mine is much more apparent when viewed at a very oblique angle.
I had the car professionally polished after it was painted. This reduced the wave on the sides quite drastically. It is not particularly apparent now; you'd have to look for it to notice it.
The wave in the paint isn't visible in the photos - is it visible only when viewed at a steep angle whilst moving, or is it apparent at other times too?
My own car has a slight wave down the sides on the doors which does annoy me, since as you say, it makes it immediately obvious it is a repaint. Mine is much more apparent when viewed at a very oblique angle.
I had the car professionally polished after it was painted. This reduced the wave on the sides quite drastically. It is not particularly apparent now; you'd have to look for it to notice it.
Gassing Station | Readers' Cars | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff