1981 Mercedes 240D W123

[scotty2hotteee]

I recently acquired a 240D that I mostly just wanted to goof around with. I got the car for $900, drove it home, threw on some porta-wall whitewalls and cut the springs. It looked cool but rode terrible. How do I fix that? Replace springs with new? NO WAY! Airbags it is!

Here it is on day 1.


After whitewalls and cut springs.

[scotty2hotteee]

Here's the setup I got off of Ebay from Airbaggit.com. I realize they're not the highest quality kits but the price was right. $349.00 for everything you see here.


Here's my valve assembly after purchasing some fittings from the local hardware store.


Just everything laid out on the garage floor.

[scotty2hotteee]

Now for my first attempt at fabricating. I removed the lower front spring cup and traced the circle on some 1/8" sheet metal. After cutting it out I drilled the center hole for a stud to mount the bag to. I used my step drill to make holes for the spring cup mounting bolts, then welded everything together. For the upper mount I have some 4 1/2" pipe with a 1/4" wall thickness. I'm going to take a 6" piece, slide it up into the upper spring sleeve and bolt it in place. I'll cut another circle to weld to the pipe to mount the top of the bag to.

After I cut the first circle out I was grinding it round and smooth. My son came out to see what I was doing and said he could cut the circles at school with CAD software and cut my pipe with their chopsaw. He can't do it until Tuesday, (today is Sunday) so I'm on hold for a couple days. Totally worth it though for the precision and continuity. I'm excited to continue the project. The rear mounts will be similar to the fronts except I need to incorporate a shock relocation mount somehow since the rear shocks go through the middle of the spring.
Hope this is interesting to someone, sorry for the substandard cellphone pictures.

Regards,
Scotty

[Laef]

Whitewalls looks sweet, curious to see how it''ll come for the price!

[SD202]

excited to see where this goes.

[scotty2hotteee]

Making sparks!

So my son took my piece of sheet steel to school today and cut 7 of the 8 circles I need to make the mounts. It took me nearly 2 hours to cut, grind and drill the first mount. 7 circles took less than 2 minutes on the Plasma-cam. I apologize for the cell-phone video. It's still very cool though!

[scotty2hotteee]

Brackets and mounts in progress

Spent my morning drilling and grinding. I'm to the point of welding but I want to get all of the noisy stuff done so when I wake up at 4:30 in the morning I can go out and work without waking up my family.

Front mount components.

Front and rear just sitting mocked up.


Front mocked up compressed.


Front extended.


Progress is GOOD!!!

[rattyw123]

How do you plan to do the rear with the strut running threw the spring? I will be heading down this path soon.

[scotty2hotteee]

I'm going to have to fabricate some shock relocation mounts. I'm going to measure the full travel along with compressed and extended lengths and go to the Monroe website. They have all of their shock specs on a chart. I kind of just wing these so I'll just make it work.

[scotty2hotteee]

More progress

So I built a switch panel to go in the stock DIN stereo hole and then put a marine stereo in the glove box. I intend to fill the rest of the glove box with air pressure gauges.


Stereo

[scotty2hotteee]

I also did some work in the interior. The rear parcel shelf was in terrible shape so I removed it and replaced. Not too bad right?
Before


After

[scotty2hotteee]

Hovermercedes!!

[SD202]

making progress! those brackets look great.

[US90]

This thing is awesomeee!

[scotty2hotteee]

Getting the wiring together. I installed all 4 bags, all air hoses from bags to trunk. Switch panel has wiring run, things are progressing well. It's tough to find time but I'm trying to do something on it every day or so to keep the momentum on the project.