Kid At A Candy Shop

This week, the Merc is at the rustproofers.

I went in today to see what lurked underneath the dirt, grime, oil, and carpets once they were gone and the guy had cleaned up the surfaces somewhat.

Let's start with the worst rust damage present in the car and go from there.

This is the passenger side interior wall of the luggage compartment. The rust there is already pretty bad. To explain it in a little bit more detail I need to show a couple more pics:

The hose visible on the right is a rainwater drain hose. It runs from somewhere around the rear glass to the spot visible in the pic. The horizontal surface of course is the one also visible in the pic before. The hose hadn't been attached to the exit hole. This resulted in rainwater getting trapped in the trunk, causing the metal to rust.

The rust here is something that needs to be fixed right. It's going to be expensive and time-consuming, so for now it will have to wait. In the mean time, we're going to just clean up the rust a bit and apply rust transformer.
Onwards with the "rust status" story:

This is the opposite side vent area. There's some rust here, too, but not nearly as bad.

Spare wheel well looks pretty neat.

Looking up at the trunk "roof". What you're looking at is the infamous W126 window frame metal sheet. Water gets trapped there and the result is something like this. There is a fix, and the sheetmetal there gets replaced, and it seems obvious that my car has received this threatment at some point in its life.

As for infamous rust spots, here are the jack holes. They appear surprisingly healthy, so not much to say here.

Ditto for wheel wells. There appears to be very little meaningful surface rust. The front wings appear to have been swapped at least once. Well it's obvious, looking at the odo and how rust-free the panels are.

The inside of one of the front wings; the wing is rostfrei, the wheel well is just odd-colored, not rusted.

The rear wings are one of this particular car's two problem areas. There is evidence of fledgling rust, and also, a rust repair that is not of satisfactory quality (read: it's a botch job). This, along with the trunk, will have to get fixed in the years to come.

Now that the grime is gone, I can, for the first time, confirm service history markings noting that some parts of the suspension have been replaced recently:

One noteworthy thing is that it's clear this car has been rustproofed at some point. It's not as good quality as a Finnish pro does it this day and age, but there were some good points. One of them was an occasional visible rustproofing of some body cavities, visible here as the yellow substance:

That's it for details. Overall the car is pretty clean "under the foreskin". As you can see, took me 14 months to confirm it, but it's great to finally know it's not a time bomb, body-wise.

Some miscellaneous pics:

I'm feeling pretty good about what I saw, and also, it was great to see the car without all the dirt and grime. I was like a kid in a candy shop, looking at it from near and far and from different angles for the best part of an hour. :-)

I always say the age of a car is no excuse for rust. Very often, when selling cars, people tend to say things like "this car is X years old... you can buy new ones at the dealership". That's a crock. If a car's been maintained right, it has no rust, period. IMO taking rust for granted is for people who can't afford to stop rust as soon as they spot it.

In any case, mine unfortunately has some, but that is just something that has to be fixed, when I get around to it.