After completing the underbody and rear axle, there’s one step left before installing the rear axle: putting all the lines back together. These lines are almost always located above the rear axle.
Let’s clear our minds about what needs to be done. Since many tasks are beyond the scope of WIS guidance, we must decide for ourselves which tasks to do first and which to do later. Before the body was restored, I had removed all the lines, this included: brake lines, hydraulic lines, fuel lines, AC lines. These lines are nearly parallel at the rear axle, but they overlap each other in the cabin, so care must be taken with a specific installation sequence.
42 Brakes
The depth of this huge project is till to the brake booster, which located driver’s side, behind the firewall. From here I can through clean the dead end under the fuse box, that is the last dirty place in this entire car. Therefore the first part put back is the ASR unit. Along with the ASR unit are the lines, 6 in total, 2 to booster, 4 to wheels. Removing them is not an easy task, and putting them back is even harder. Especially putting the repaired pipes back intact. Luckily the ASR unit itself is hidden under the plastic trim for 30 years, no appearance restoration needed, and its functions should work forever.
The repairs to the pipeline were completed several months ago and it was not easy. First a basic strategy is required, you need to twist and scratch them when removing them, so it is impossible to reset them without contact, so the possibility of repairing them again after installation must be considered. This means that the coating may be damaged if it is scratched during installation or if the pipe is adjusted to be straighter after installation. In order to make the repair easier, I chose paint to reproduce the original color and used a relatively common color, which can avoid the error of different batches of custom colors. After comparison, I chose RAL 6006 Olive Green. Matt finish, which will better reflect the texture and be easy to repair, and partial re-spraying will not leave overlap.
The construction of the pipeline is very simple, just bent iron pipes and retaining screws. The problem is how to separate them. There are two possibilities:
- Remove the retaining screw. This can only be achieved by destroying the flare. If the flare is destroyed, then the flare needs to be remade after installing the repaired retaining screw. This would have to cut off the original flare, so the pipeline would be shortened, and I was worried there wouldn’t be enough length to make new flares on both sides. And here is a double flare. I have the right tools to make 4.75 mm, but I can’t find any other diameter on the market to make similar hydraulic and fuel lines.
- Keep the retaining screw. This requires galvanizing and painting two completely different repairs to be applied together. Specifically, the retaining screw is placed on the pipeline exceeding 3 meters for galvanizing, and then the entire pipeline is sprayed without contaminating the retaining screw. The advantage of this is that you can keep everything original, but the disadvantage is that it takes a long time and space.
The first is impossible, the second is possible, the choice is obvious.
We are not eager to install the springs or shock absorbers but it’s also the time to mount the lines of rear Self Leveling System. These lines are so long that I had to borrow a V-klasse to transport them to my plating studio. I set up a very shallow pool, which is just big enough to submerge the screw, and then used the lever principle to put one side of the pipeline on the shelf and extend one side into the plating solution. Oh no, stick them in acid first, then wash, galvanize, wash, passivate, wash. Each pipeline over 3 meters has to be carefully arranged 12 times using levers. Sometimes I have to keep holding the pipeline with my hands. Imagine we have more than 16 pipelines, it is so painful.
After a few days the passivation layer was completely dry, I wrapped them with tapes, sand the lines, slide them to sand the surface hidden by the screws. Then I brush PPG marine primer to the surface for rustproof, beacuse the new olive green paint is only visional recover, it’s not rust proof at all. I could just paint them with spray gun but these are too long to roll over without help, I did this during a long break. Then paint the RAL 6006 Olive Green. Even flipping the lines during painting can injure the paint, and these extra-long lines can easily get bent, making further repairs to them after installation almost a doomed prospect. These lines are really fine in general, all the extra works just to ensure I don’t make a confession of “I saw, ignored and now regret”.
Before the pipes were installed, the interior was cleaned of residual plating solution and dirt using AC pipe cleaners and compressed air. I underestimated the difficulty of installing the pipes. It was impossible to keep the paint from being scratched. I was very happy to be able to install them back… Then there was a lot of masking work to repair the RAL 6006 olive green.
32 Springs,Suspension And Hydraulics
Although the article describes the grouping of parts according to EPC, it does not sort them according to the order of group numbers, because the grouping logic of EPC does not work in actual installation, and you must carefully consider which parts to install first. Before we can start the other groups, the pipes near the firewall form complex logic.
- HVAC heating pipes are fixed under the firewall and must be installed in front of the firewall.
- The feed line and return line leading to the injector are below the heating pipes and must be installed before the heating pipes.
- Under the rear axle, the self-leveling lines are located under the fuel lines and must be installed first.
The conclusion is that self-leveling lines must be installed first. This chapter probably won’t appear in other 140 restorations. Unfortunately, self leveling rear suspension is standard on the V12. The self leveling is designed to garantee proper leveling of the rear axle when the vehicle is full lodaded. I personally feel that the investment in this system is not proportional to the return, even when it was new, because I never drive with a full load. But I’m a “fundamentalist” and will only restore it as is here.
The fluid leading to the rear shock absorber relies on the power steering pump to complete the circulation through feed and return. There are “only” two extra-long tubes. However, there are 7 shorter tubes that connect to the accumulators, and 4 lines in the front that connect the power steering pump and fluid reservoir. I researched the prices of these lines and they were extremely expensive, making my precious time look cheap in comparison. Being stingy, I would rather do these annoying and unhealthy tasks with my own hands than spend half a car’s money on some steel pipes that may soon rust. The procedure for restoring these pipes is the same as for brake pipes, they’re just shorter and simpler.
In addition to the lines being fixed, every bracket and clamp is also restored. All the rubber was thoroughly cleaned, we were missing one and one was oil soaked and enlarged, I got spare parts from the parts truck. As for the clamps, many parts are no longer supplied by MB aftersales and must be repaired yourself. There are blue and white zincs, yellow zincs, blue and white zincs covered with black paint, all remanufactured to original specifications, even if the brand new blue and white zincs are covered in black paint. These clamps come in various shapes and it is best to record their location and color when disassembling, lots of photos are helpful. The best help is actually without anyone’s help, you want to have time to slowly document everything rather than suddenly finding all the different parts piled together by your colleagues.
In the picture above you can see the self-leveling lines are below the fuel lines. One of the two current accumulators is completely original, it is 30 years old. There is another one that was replaced about 7 years ago. In order to achieve consistent performance on both sides, it was decided to replace both with new parts. I placed the order in October 2022 and it was a part that was not in stock but ready for production, luckily I received them in December and the label said they were made in November, not bad. Accumulator’s bracket and nut were also restored to original specifications, I’m very satisfied with the result.
In the above picture the wrong M8 nut appears, they attach the accumulator bracket to the body. These nuts have flange, which belongs to the front sway bar. You may even wonder why there are 6 of them, because the sway bar only requires 4. Well that’s exactly how I messed up, I had 2 spare sway bar nuts and when I found out there were 6 of them I had no hesitation thinking they belonged in the accumulator brackets. Fortunately this place is not hard to reach even the rear axle is on, by the time the article was published, all 6 nuts had been corrected.
47 Fuel System
Before the installation of fuel lines, from top to the bottom, I first replaced the fuel gauge sender. Then the filter on the fuel tank, this is a horrible discontinued part. You will be always confused why a big portion of fuel system related parts are discontinued, sometimes they imply risks of deaths. I put on the last one in my inventory and never see a second in the market.
Octavius has two fresh (<15,000 KM) fuel pumps could to be continued, but I gave them to Chimera and ordered two new for this advanced restoration. By the illustration I believe we are short of two insulating sleeves on the rear of the pump, they are no longer available. The part number of two stripped screws on the metal brackets can’t be input to the order system at dealer, fortunately they can be mounted by the nuts on other side. I marked this little flaw and will solve it later. All steel lines and nuts & bolts are re-plated, fuel filter and insulating sleeve are replaced.
On cars up to Ident No. A 220200, the bracket of fuel pumps made of up and down two parts. The upper one is available but the lower one is not, I zinc plated it and passivated with blue shine. Here we have another quirks from Mercedes aftersales. The plastic brackets of fuel hose on the pump bracket are also upper and lower. They are both available, the upper one with initials 140 is about $4.5 which is totally fine. The lower one with initials 124 worth more than $40, they looks exactly the same except the 124’s is white. Luckily we only have the upper one broken so I ordered the black one and decided to wait until the white one became reasonably priced…
Similar, the steel fuel lines are refinished together with hydraulics’ and brakes’. Next step is the assembly, the rubber mounts are pre-tied to lines with black tapes in factory. However in our condition, it’s impossible to align the rubber mount to screw rod on body without install them. We spent much more time here than the factory just to imitate that black tape. The fuel hose restoration is another story. I replaced all factory-available hoses and restored the rest, visually——there is no way to restore the rubber. The pickling might damage the sealing of connectors, so I extend the plating time and test every pipe with pressure.
The activated charcoal filter near left rear wheel arch is the last part left. I believe the original filter is dead because there are gas escape when filler cap opened, and I can hear the sand-shaking sound from the old filter but the new one doesn’t. Hoses on the filter are refreshed with factory materials, hoses around engines are also ready but has to be installed when engine is back.
83 Heating And Ventilation
Octavius spent 20 years in south, where the culture is to use tap water instead of antifreeze as coolant, so the steel heating pipes are severely corroded. All three sets of pipes have been discontinued. Even if they are still available, I would probably argue for cost-effectiveness. Reasons why these pipes were abandoned are just steel, they don’t last forever. So the pipes and brackets had to be reproduced.
It’s amazing how much they hang on by a thread. At first glance they were just leaks, which corroded the bodywork near the firewall, which had been repaired previously. All it took was a little more force on the nails to cut them open, and the coolant could have sprayed out a long time ago, but these tubes held up!
To prevent corrosion from happening again, I thought of stainless steel. My shop’s bending dies are all larger, so the job was sent to the machine shop. Before handing over I cut the solder joints and saved the brackets to avoid them never coming back. I paid several times the cost of materials because the store said they needed to be tried and tested. After a few weeks we received the new pipes and discovered several issues. Firstly, the bends of the pipes are not quite right, the shop tried hard to replicate the bend of each pipe individually but did not try to put them together and the result was that they didn’t fit together. The second problem is that the pipe wall is too thick! This may be well intentioned and an advantage, but having to have a huge amount of force to adjust them again puts a lot of pressure on my shop.
First we fully replicated the brackets in stainless steel, I was not going to weld these rusty original brackets to the stainless steel. This made it possible to position the pipes in the cabin, and then with further bending adjustments we moved the working branch in front of Octavius. During this time I just sat back and watched, they were too difficult for me and the machine shop was probably only 50% done. Imagine that you need to try to put 5 deformed pipes together, find the one closest to the standard among them, and adjust the other 4. Then try to weld them to each other and then the bracket, making sure there are no mistakes at every step.
This work continued intermittently from summer to winter. The good news is that when stainless steel pipes are spray-painted black, they look very similar to the original parts and are certainly much better at resisting rust! Maybe next time I’ll go with copper or thinner stainless steel tubing, but better not to have a next time, this is a bad situation.
In the last photo, you can see that there are 2 pipes passing through the firewall and leading to the evaporation box in front of the instrument console. If these pipes are not installed before the firewall, no other work will be possible. At the same time, there are 3 fuel lines under the heating pipes. Every step must be thought through, otherwise it could be a disastrous rework.
Let us breathe a sigh of relief, the longest and harders job on Octavius is over. The following is the overall after & before. The rear axle is ready to be installed!
