It is pretty handy to be able to do that, though they shut down their Saturday service during the winter so you have to do it during the week, though as I was there I saw the notice that April 1 they're back to weekends.

The heater is nice. Not as powerful as the old one but it'll be better for more continuous use. Velly velly quiet too.

Man Duck, u got more guts than I have. Sure glad 544 wasn't that bad, I would have given up. Keep goin, I love 123s

Thanks, Pops. It's going, but very slowly.

It's strange that the first unsolicited post in this thread for a long time happens the night that I actually accomplish a little something, though. Last night I pulled off the bumper, nose cone, and front fenders, and yanked out some of the stuff I was storing inside the car. I may have jumped the gun on that a little bit, as I have to find a home for a B18, a B20, some tires, a half dozen green seat cusions, and about 32 hubcaps before I can proceed with cutting the GT apart. Not to mention all the stuff that still needs to come out of the car before I can start cutting & welding... And before any of that happens, I've got to repair the few rusty spots in the replacement frame. It felt good to get somewhere, though!

Amazingly, the fender mounting rails on the GT were without rust holes. Paper thin in a couple spots, but appearance-wise way better than they deserved to be. I have replacements so it barely matters, but I expected half the rest of the car to come off with the fenders.

Holy dingleberries, will this project ever make progress?

Well, I guess so. Slooooooooowwwwwwwwwllllllllyyyyyyy.

Over the summer I did practically nothing to the car. Craig came by to work on a transmission adapter plate, and I cut off the old nose. Bang. I've repaired some of the rust in the new nose, and have tacked it on. I've measured it out and have determined it's squareness. I'm welding it onto the car permanently this weekend.

Pix to come.

Since May a lot has happened on this, but not so much considering it’s now December. Oh well, I needed some time away from cars for a while, and the summer was kinda crappy but I still needed the break. If I can build some momentum I’ll keep my mojo up, and that would be nice…

So, let’s review: Last May I cut apart the 122 frame horns and got all the body panels and most of the mechanicals off the 123, and there it sat for a while. I reviewed the damage:













As I said, the fender supports didn’t look TOO bad up top, surprisingly:





And there it sat for a while:



When I got inspired during a visit from Craig, I got out the sawzall:



And after trimming some fat, it sat like THIS for a while:



I did some rust repair on the old horns, I seem to be missing those photos but the work wasn’t pretty enough to show anyway. Then I set the new nose in place, by squaring up the rear of the horns first and then using the tops of the fenders’ relative position to the firewall as reference, and took some measurements. After a tug here and a shove there, I dropped a plumb to the floor in 6 places using jigs I made on my lathe and marked their position. (In that one picture, the plumb was swinging slightly and the camera captured it off the mark.) I used the front crossmember lower control arm pickups and the rear lower trailing arm pickups, plus a point along the pinch welds midway along the car:









I measured out a point exactly midway between the two related points and got a centerline of the car. I ran a string from front center to rear center and the middle center was less than half a string width off. I ran a level across the LCA pickups and rear trailing arm pickups and they were both dead level. I measured between front/rear right, front/rear left, front right/rear left, front left/rear right, and then double checked all my center point & triangulation measurements. All related measurements were within 1/16” of each other. I was pretty satisfied with that, after a little tug with a ratchet strap, I tacked it down:



Then I trimmed off the remains of the old fender supports, and mocked up the nose cone, hood, and fenders. The hood doesn’t fit quite right but that may be a hinge issue – for now I shimmed it up and lined it up with the nose, and confirmed the fit of the fenders which aren’t great but aren’t bad. The fenders themselves aren’t great, and apparently neither was the original fit of the fenders on a brand new 122, so I’m not too worried there.



After much cutting and fitting, during which I stopped and took NO pictures, the fender supports were on:





Having never done this before, I made the mistake of not stripping the dashboard, trim panels, and removing all the seam sealer from behind the panels. Not only does it make a horrible stink, smoke, and mess when you burn seam sealer with weld, but it also makes welding very difficult! The seam sealer insulates the metal from the backside, and the panel gets extra hot in that area and you’re likely to burn through. WHEN you burn through, you pull out all the seam sealer and contaminate the hell out of the area. It took me some grinding and cleanup to stick these pieces of metal together, and then I set to cleaning the firewall before I go any further:







While I was at it, I removed all the sound deadening panels and inspected the floors. I was replacing the front floors anyway due to the damage I’d done ripping the welds plus all the rust & cracks that were present from earlier abuse, but wasn’t sure if I needed to replace the rears or not. So far it’s looking like I can get away with hammering them back into place and patching them up.









And that’s about where I’m at right now. I have some decisions to make pretty soon that will forever affect the direction this car takes, so I may refocus on disassembly for the time being before welding anything else up. I also have some cleanup to do in my garage, metal recycling and such, and some space to arrange for interior parts & things. The whole car will EVENTUALLY need to come apart so that I can haul it to the blast pit and scour away all the evil before priming, so I guess there’s no time like the present!

You're making excellent progress. Sometimes you just have to pause and re-set where you're going, then pick up where you left off and power through. At least that's how it works for me.

Nice work Matt!

Hey Matt looking good, nice to see you back at it again.

It's cool to see your plans come to be with pictures and descriptions of the process...

I've tried doing the pic intensive blog posts, and while I enjoy doing it - it's a big time commitment to do it well, and when your strapped for garage time it's often easier to just keep the head down and make progress rather than stopping to document. So thanks for taking the time to take us with you on the process.

Very cool to see if coming back together!

Rabin

Thanks guys.

So my feeling was to start ripping the car apart because it would all need to come apart eventually. I’m still working out the timeline of how and when things are going to get done, but things are starting to form their own rough picture in my head. My plans all revolve around a few things, mostly family expectations, so the timeframe may be wildly off.

Anyway, to the ripping. I gutted the car. I started in the trunk, pulling all the trim and lights and stuff, and then the trunklid. I got under some dodgy looking sound deadener, something I’ve never been able to look at before now, and there are some goodly bits of sin in there. Some of it’s kind of deep and some of it is clean through, so I’ll be spending some time back here.








It’s not too bad though, and I was sort of counting on some of that being bad based on what I saw from below. Anyway, the body is pretty straight and solid, and the only new rust I found is hidden by the rear reflector:


Once the trunk was somewhat cleaned out, I moved to the doors. On the driver side I found this interesting piece of work:




This door also had its beltline trim mounted by bolted clips, as opposed to the other side with its spring clips. Neither door is in great shape but I have another pair that don’t appear to be as bad, and I’m not opposed to using them.

Next I moved into the interior, and in pulling out the seatbelts I got this garbled mess:


But otherwise all seems well. Headliner removed and bows labeled:


And after removing a few more bits and bobs, here’s where she sits right now:






Now, where am I going to put all of this stuff?


You find the darndest things in cars that haven’t been driven in 40 years.




The first one I’m sure some of you recognize, the second one appeared to be a coin of some sort. Being that the bag look compromised, that it was issued by Shell, and was obviously Canadian, I knew it wouldn’t be worth much so I let curiosity get the better of me:




It appears to be a centennial coil for 1967, the year of the car. Pretty cool. I’ll mount that in my trunk somewhere.

The next step involves lots of heat and smoke (getting rid of all the dodgy sound deadening and dampening material) and cutting out the rusty bits. I’m creating a pile of drawings to be sent to a metal shop we use at work to get them to cut & break some parts for me – firewall braces, reinforcements, etc – but they might not be done until near xmas and I won’t get to that part until January or so.

I think Craig's got room in his garage!

Loving seeing the bare shell there Matt. Is the metal shop going to create some new panels of the rusty bits for you too, or are you going to fab those yourself?

That coin is pretty cool. Amazing what you find when you're digging through old things. When we reno-ed our house, we found some old magazines and a coin from 1892 in the wall.

A coin from 1892!!! That beats the wood screws we found in our house when we did our kitchen - they were flathead #10 wood screws, in a box.

This bare shell... yes, it conjures up images of evil and inspires defilement with roll cages and such. I'm going to settle for hidden strengthenings, I guess. Oh hell, that reminds me of something!

That door repair (with washer) is craptacular. Nothing in what I've seen looks like it would take more than a week or so of repair to do properly with the right parts. Really - no big deal.

Oh and my garage has become so full that it's getting hard for me to move around in it...period. Hmm, I've got to get engines done so I can quit procrastinating and start moving on the 122 before you pass me in the progress department.

I've been uncovering more and more rust. The trunk floor has a ton of it, the rockers are showing a lot of rust inside, big nasty flakes have come out, and where the outrigger supports were are now large holes. There's a plan hatching, but this will all be unfolded later. There is a bunch of work ahead of me but I HOPE that it will all end up alright. The work won't be particularly pretty or photogenic, but I will do my best to swallow my pride and share pictures.

I had some parts built for me to stiffen up the front end of the car a little. It's all 18 gauge cold rolled, and I have a big pile of sheet left over for other patches.



The crossmember between the inner fenders was originally a relatively thin piece of metal, basically just a box to stiffen the firewall up a little bit. I've taken it a step further, by triangulating the box section by using two pieces.




Then I am extending the box out to the edges of the crossmember, and then stretching the box back and up to the corner of the fender support.




And just because they were bending up a bunch of junk for me, I had them do up a little panel for repairing the rusty bits near where the inner fender meets the firewall.


While they had the laser hot... some unholes for the firewall!


And I have a bit left over.


I need to get this front end work done and then I can stuff an engine & transmission into it & fix up the transmission tunnel. Then the floors go in, and I start working on the trunk floor. When all that crap is finished, I have work to do on my rear axle and then build up something a little more sophisticated for the rear sway bar than what IPD had in mind, and it's on to the bodywork before the whole thing gets sandblasted & primed. I'll be booking off a week of vacation time shortly and will make a little progress, but I'm not planning on getting to the visible work until the spring.

Photos will follow, I'm not organized enough for that now.

Jesus you are doing a lot of work. good on ya!

I changed the air filters on the amg. cabin AND engine! I even took pics. so pretty much as complex as your project lol