As a 10 year old boy back in the early 70's, I sometimes had the opportunity to sit in the backseat of my uncle's 1968 300SEL 6.3. This car had a shining dark blue paint and a black leather interior. Under the hood was this muscular engine compatible with the engines of the cars racing at the 1/4 mile track. It was truly every boy's dream. Although I was very young at the time I decided that this car would some day be mine.
Many years passed and I forgot all about it. I got busy being married, having children, buying a home, well, more or less the usual stuff. Some years ago, before the turning of the century, I visited this uncle of mine and asked him what had become of the car. Don't know why, but I did. He told me he had sold it some 15 years earlier and hadn't heard of it or seen it since. The car was obviously lost. This was on a Friday.
The next Monday I found myself, for a mere coincidence, standing in front of the same car I hadn't seen in 30 years. I was searching for a spare part for a VW Golf, and I had made some phone calls to the local junk yards. I had some trouble finding the part I needed and one of these junk yard guys gave me a phone number of some remote workshop in a neighborhood town. I made the call and the guy who answered said he had the part I needed. When I came there, he was standing in the doorway with the part ready in his hand. I paid him for it and started walking away when I though "hmmm, the bolts are missing". I turned around and asked him if he had the bolts and he told me to wait and went into the workshop. For some strange reason I followed him inside. This was a small and dirty workshop and what caught my eye was a car that had a plastic cover over it. I didn't see anything of the car, but the cover had the right bungle at the front of the hood for me to realize that was a tree pointed star. So, in a trance and without thinking, I walked over there while the guy was searching for the bolts. I lifted one corner of the cover for some mystical reason and was amazed to find my uncle car under there. A car I hadn't given a thought for more than 30 years until 3 days earlier.
As it turned out, the car was an abandoned restoration project and had been moved from one workshop/garage to the other for all these years and never been finished. The car had been in this particular workshop for years. My uncle had been the last person to actually drive the car and his cigarette stubs where still in the ashtray.
The engine had been completely overhauled and the body had been stripped down and painted in the original color. It hand new front fenders, new doors and a new and complete set of rubber seals for the doors, doorsteps, trunk, sunroof, etc. The only problem was that the car needed to be put together. The car was in the corner of the workshop and was completely stuffed, both the passenger compartment and the trunk with all sorts of junk like old tires, bumpers, extra doors and everything gray from dust. I feared the once shining leather seats where seriously damaged because of this abuse. Everything was very loosely put together; the fenders where hold in place by a single bolt, the windscreen was taped in place and the completely empty doors where tied with a plastic ribbon to the post.
To make a long story short I bought the car, although that didn't happen until a year later. The best part was that I only had to pay 4.000 EUR for it. I value this car for more than 25.000 EUR as it is today. Then again, I would never sell it. Never!
It took me a week just to empty the car and organize everything that came out of there. It was more and less another parts car stuffed inside of there. When I tried starting the engine, it vomited a very bad smelling yellow stuff outside the intake manifold. That stuff looked like oil and I was very confused as to what that foul smelling stuff was. But the engine turned over and almost started, and I was pleased that it wasn't stuck. I new it had been overhauled, but it had not been started for years so I was a bit skeptic. The yellow stuff turned out to be a 17 years old gasoline that had been chemically transformed into that very thick oily stuff. The tank was half full of it and the upper part badly rusted as well. I'm not going to go into more details here, but I spent the next months enthusiastically finishing the restoration.
Today, the car is back on the streets and it's almost perfect. Well, I'm a perfectionist so it probably never will be complete, but that's ok because I like being down there in the garage fixing things that don't really matter. Then I have the perfect excuse of being there, you see. The other day I was fixing the Becker radio witch had been dead, and what do you know; the first station I found on the AM band was a German broadcast. I left in on for a while as to enjoy the moment, although I didn't understand a word. That didn't matter, because my 6.3 was speaking again. And of course it was speaking in the native Benz language. How very appropriate. What a perfect car.
Sveinn
Thorstensson.
A 300SEL 6.3 chronic in Reykjavik, Iceland.