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Grill Gap

3K views 15 replies 11 participants last post by  Dr.Phil 
#1 ·
I love my 1978 450SL.
It is the most pleasurable car that I have ever driven.
It is the best looking car I have ever owned.
German engineering is obviously stellar.
Having said all that, does anyone know why there is an unsightly gap at the bottom grill corners and the front cross member panels.




Does this look better?
Wouldn't take much sheet metal to do it.




Just Thinkin'

DR. Phil
 
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#2 ·
I think there might be rubber bumper adjustments that can be made that might help a little with this, but I'm not sure.

Can you tell if the grill has ever been off the car?

Those sheets of metal are often hardly even visible with the smaller tighter bumpers.


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#4 ·
The car pictured was taken from here:
Mercedes Motoring - 1978 450SL Roadster/Coupe
It just happened to be the same color as mine , English Red.
I just used it because it was positioned just right to show the gap.
From what I see everywhere, all the 107's are like this.
USA, Euro doesn't seem to matter.
It's like the engineers forgot to make the grill longer on the sides or never got around to fixing the sheet metal under the grill to make a decent fit.
I have seen early drawings of the 107 front and the gap is not there.
It doesn't seem right when every other aspect of the body fit is so nice.

Dr. Phil
 
#8 ·
The car pictured was taken from here:

Mercedes Motoring - 1978 450SL Roadster/Coupe

It just happened to be the same color as mine , English Red.

I just used it because it was positioned just right to show the gap.

From what I see everywhere, all the 107's are like this.

USA, Euro doesn't seem to matter.

It's like the engineers forgot to make the grill longer on the sides or never got around to fixing the sheet metal under the grill to make a decent fit.

I have seen early drawings of the 107 front and the gap is not there.

It doesn't seem right when every other aspect of the body fit is so nice.



Dr. Phil



I'm not going to argue that the gap isn't there when you have small bumpers, but it surely isn't as noticeable or problematic in my opinion. This is about the same angle, right? You can't even really see that piece of metal under the grill with the tighter bumpers. So I can see how the design was considered acceptable when designing the car. Big bumpers were not part of the original design, so...



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#16 ·
I have a can of satin flat black ready to go on the grill slats if it ever warms up here.
I just can't believe it was "normal" on purpose.

When I showed off my car to friends, one of them put their hand in the gap and said "looks like it has been wrecked".

I had not noticed it much until that happened.
I find it puzzling that a credit card barely fits between most of the car's seams and you can put your hand through this one.

Perhaps a wind tunnel model showed some kind of air vortex around the gap that made the car faster!


Dr.Phil
 
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