Just after graduating from high school I hitchhiked to southern California from Montana with a buddy and when we stopped to visit with my cousin (a used car salesman) he told us we could pick any car from his lot for a demo ride and go cruising around and see some sights. He only had one MBz on the lot and that's the one we picked since we had never ridden in one, actually had only seen a few of them, and had never...ever...been allowed to drive or even touch one. By the end of our little sightseeing excursion I had set a goal for myself that I would own one of these some day when I was old and could afford it. Well, as the saying goes, you have to grow old, but you don't have to grow up!
I was hunting birds with a friend one day in his brand new F**D four-door diesel 4x4 pickup ($45,000+?) and he was giving me a hard time about being too much of a cheapskate to buy a new car to replace my '75 115. I told him that when the day came that I needed to replace my MBz that I probably would, but that it would likely be with another used MBz. Well, that day still has not come, many years later, and I have owned three MBz's (still have two of them and would have all three except for an ignorant jerk of a so-called German car mechanic who literally destroyed the engine, but that's another story) in the meantime. I don't have the heart to remind him that my total investment for all three has equaled about one-third of what his pickup cost when he bought it, with change left over. The sad part is that his pickup today is a piece of worn-out and virtually worthless (worth much much less at any rate) junk while my MBz's are the same as they were, if not better. Is this worth the effort? I most definitely think it is. I personally think that Mercedes is the standard that 99% of today's automobiles are still trying to reach and probably never will for the most part. I'm sure I don't have to explain to anyone on this list who owns one (or more) about the engineering and quality that is intrinsic to these automobiles. I don't really have the time to work on mine as much as I'd like to, but I find the time somehow because first of all, they're built with a lot of common sense engineering which really simplifies things for a dork like me and secondly, because I basically just don't trust anyone else--around here anyway--to work on them. I haven't made many contributions of note to this forum because I don't have that much of value to contribute, but boy have I learned a lot just by lurking in the shadows and reading what you guys are saying! There are many experts of the self-taught variety who regularly contribute here and in my opinion--that's the best kind!
