SLK Rust Traps

[DickyC]

My wife's SLK has been elevated to "a keeper" and its stone chips, parking dents and emerging rusty bits were scheduled to be done. In preparation for this, I had the wheels off to inspect the wheel arches, where the first rust was appearing. Her car is an early one, a 1998 SLK230, and you do see some with rusty arches. We bought it in late 2002 from a main dealer, presumably right on the limit of what they would have on their books, and it has had a fairly easy life for the nine years she's had it. Apart from the odd Italian tune up by me, it is mostly used locally at 30-40mph, has a full MB service history and is garaged.

Cut to chase:











Yuck. Where I had naively assumed that the drain holes at the rear corners of the bonnet drain into a funnel arrangement to be piped away, in fact empty straight into the plenum between the outer and inner wing. It's poor, to say the least. With the under wing shields removed you can clean it out, hose it through, let it drain, let it dry and squirt some Waxoil or similar in there. As I had left to the last minute to inspect it, I asked the bodyshop to do this and they did with no extra charge. They suggested making it a regular job for the Spring.

Following a reversing ding on the boot lid some years ago, MB quoted £600 to put it straight. To do the rust on the arches, seven parking dings, the bootlid, the bonnet and front bumper, the non-MB bodyshop who did the work for me earlier this month charged me £1303. That's pretty much everything below the windows excluding the rear bumper. Good job; it looks nice.

[SLacKer]

Great find what a ridiculous design. Is that a Linerite Blue car. I have had two SLK's and they have both been Linerite Blue.

[DickyC]

SLacKer said:

Great find what a ridiculous design. Is that a Linerite Blue car. I have had two SLK's and they have both been Linerite Blue.

Indeed, Linerite Blue. It was my wife's choice; I'd have gone for a silver one but it's her car and I'm glad she got her way.

When we wanted to buy it, living in Newbury, we went to MB Newbury. They had four at the time but didn't have the colours she was interested in. The salesman wasn't interested in her choice of colour, wouldn't let us drive one, drove us both round the block separately in one (and drove like a nutter) and insisted on looking at my station car, an elderly 16V Golf, with a view to a trade in. "I want to come out and have look at it, I need a fag," he said. He took one look at the VW and announced, "I'll offer you fifty quid for it, but I must say we'd drive it straight to the breakers." Nice. Both my sons had it after me for a year or so each.

In the evening I looked on the internet and found a garage in Clifton with SLKs in all four colours she wanted to compare. We drove up there and the salesman couldn't have been more different. Friendly for a start, had a proper look round the then car-for-best, an Audi Coupe Quattro, said this wouldn't be the way to move it on as it was a specialist car, rang a mate in the trade and despite getting a reasonable price over the phone advised me to sell it privately. When my wife had decided on the blue one, he gave us the keys and told us to have a drive round for half an hour, to see if we liked it.

He got the business, needless to say.

This was all over one weekend. On the Monday the guy at MB Newbury rang and gave me a bking over the phone. The garage in Clifton was in the same group and he'd just read the sales figures for the weekend and why hadn't we bought the car from him? He could have got the colour we were interested in if only we'd asked. When I took the car in for a service he didn't work there anymore.

By the bye, around the same time my eldest step daughter was looking for a Boxster. She went to Porsche in Reading and explained what she was interested in and they sent a low loader to the showroom the following weekend with one of each colour.

So many different ways of selling cars.