on 1/8/09 21:34, Mountain Man at maontin....@gmail.com wrote: > I think it applies to the dialog. We are a culture that has gotten > waaay beyond the necessity of living and are hurting ourselves for it. > mao
I read these discussions with great interest. One of the main reasons I stuck with the older cars for years was my belief in the fact that there is a certain nobility in keeping something that was built to last and serve a useful purpose, active and useful. Just as, for example, my parents always purchased the high-end furniture and had it refinished/recovered/rebuilt as the decades passed. Unfortunately, you can only be the salmon who decides to swim against the current up to a certain point. In my part of the northeast/rustbelt there is simply no interest in older cars anymore, as far as the auto industry is concerned. There are virtually no wrenches left who have the inclination to work on even the most pristine older Benz for anything resembling sane money. The markups on working on the newer European models are just too alluring. They see a 126 as a bothersome anachronism. A turbodiesel 126 drips oil on their shop floor to boot. The guy who gave me the $440 bill for my tranny cable actually had the brass balls to complain about that. I kid you not. And that car did not leak much. Oh, there were bright spots. My local import parts dealer always helped me out. But they are getting frustrated. Every last significant part I ordered over the last year was either wrong (listing problem) or failed right out of the box and had to be exchanged. Not sustainable for them. The manager of the parts counter of one of our local dealers is a great guy. He always helped me out. But over the last few months I have been hearing something I never before experienced with Mercedes: "Sorry, that's NLA" (or backordered forever, in Mercedes parlance). Kaleb suffers from the conceit common to many people who are knowledgeable about working on older cars. If I understand it, it cannot be hard. Unfortunately I was born with two left thumbs, I am not naturally mechanically inclined and what I have learned came really, really hard over many hours of trial, error and more error. Yeah, in the parlance of my high school years, I'm a five-star dork. And I got into wrenching my own stuff way too late in life. My bad on that. When you take the attitude that you should not be driving an older car if you cannot do this or that job, then this community starts to sound like a religious cult. It makes me very uncomfortable. Most of the people I have corresponded with on these assorted MB lists (and I have been around since Hurst was looking for his first Mercedes on Dave L's original one) relied on some level of shop support to keep their cars on the road. When that is no longer there, you are at the mercy of people's memories as you troll multiple lists for advice, in the hope that someone has had the same situation as you in the past. I can tell you have had numerous instances where I either came up empty-handed, or worse got bad advice from someone whose memory had evidently faded. As usual I have rambled a bit. So yes, I miss my 126 and I miss making a statement against the consumer culture. But the man will get you in the end, as we used to say in the 70s. So will trying to drive 25-yr old cars in a region whose climate ranges from -35 deg C in the worst of the winter, to 35 deg C or more with punishing humidity in the summers. Old equipment creaks, groans and fails when asked to tackle that. And so, finally, did I.... :) Cheers Mac _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com For new and used parts go to www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
