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1957 Mercedes 300SL front end restoration: Part 3 Fitting New Headlight to Body and Gullwing Templates

This is Part 3 of a series of posts on the automotive restoration of this 1957 Mercedes 300SL.   Part 2 showed all the pieces we made in Part 1 TIG welded together and metal finished to make one headlight housing piece to now offer up to the body as one unit.

This post shows a little more detail on creating and using our templates from our Mercedes Gullwing reference car.  Pictures show one by one each template alphabetically labeled and offered up to the metal work to show the level of accuracy we like to achieve.  We then move on to grafting the housing into the body, metal finishing, and final assembly of the light, trim ring, and bumper to round off the restoration of the front left-hand side.  The pictures show very satisfying results.

Restoration templates from Mercedes Gullwing

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Template ‘A’

 

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Template ‘B’
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Template ‘C’

 

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Template ‘D’

 

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Template ‘E’
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and finally Template ‘F’

Mercedes 300SL Restoration Process

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Now we begin tacking in the housing.
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Tig welded and the surface of the weld ground off.
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Metal finishing begins.
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Metal finishing in progress.
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Ready for assembly.

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Completed Mercedes 300SL front end restoration

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Trim ring fitted. Even radius and nice mating surfaces.
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Smooth.

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Money shot! Good as new.
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One stage down, several more to go!

The completion of this Mercedes 300SL automotive restoration will be continued in Part 4.

For more information check out the automotive restoration services we provide at our workshop in Denver.