W124 300CE Coupe

I bought my first W124 Coupe in 2015, I had started looking on Ebay and I could see the price of a coupe was in my range. Now I will be clear here that I don't buy cars at the higher end of things, it is not that I have anything against doing that, if you have the money then get the best car you can.  I however like a bargain, I am a fan of doing my own work, I like to roll the dice in life and I have a limited budget most of the time.

So I figured I can spend up to £1500 on a car.  As you do with Ebay I got carried away and paid £1800 for it.  It was down in Essex so I arranged the collection with some work the business had down there, got a colleague to drop me off while he went to the site and I joined him later.

The seller in this case was about as private as the front page of the Daily Mail, he was a dealer operating from his home.  The car was straight to be fair to him, it had broken air vents inside across all vents but it was pretty much as described and it started from cold.  I paid him his money and took it away.

Here is the car outside my house.

I was able to drive the car home that day, around 180 miles and it was  fine.  Always nice when you pick up a car and it does not start to fall to bits 10 minutes after you get in it.  Problems found were

• 2-3 starts required to start engine from cold.
• Broken vents on dash.
• Scruffy alloys.
• NS Indicator cracked with ingress of water.
• Climate Control not cold.
• Paint work dull.
• Seatbelt Butler triangle snapped resulting in flapping belt.
• Original Radio not working.
• Coolant level dropping while driving, around 2cm per 4 hours of driving.
• Passenger seat small split in leather at join.

Not too bad a list I thought really for a car from 1988, my main concern was the cold start issue and the spluttering engine on first pull away, throttle needed to avoid a stall.  That said to me distributor and HT leads for the start so I planned to replace these first.