Jacking Point welding W124 & W201/190E

We carry on curing the typical, classic rust spots at the W124 and W201. This time we focus on the jacking points of our 190E 2.0 . You might have seen that on differtent pages already, but also on our page wagen124.com we can’t neglect them! Well, better to say we shouldn’t neglect them for too long. This time it took me over a year to start with it. Here is my ultimate tip to beginn with: Do it as soon as possible! The jacking point of the left side could have been saved last year, but now we had to fully weld it. Such a shame.

How to get to the jacking points

Well, let’s start. We don’t show photos of the disassembling of the  door sill cover which  can be found on every model going up from the 1989er models. Before that  time only W201 and C124 (Coupe) had it.  All models show the same fixatation: a bunch of screws in SW8 on the bottom side and sometimes plastic nuts at the front wheel house, depending on the car configuration. The 190E we are showing has a automatic slip deferential, in short ASD, thus the control unit is based and the control unit is located in the right front wheel house in a seperate cover.

When the doors are open you can see a long black rubber seal – you need to pull it out and remove the srews underneath (normally cross-head screws). As last step you need to remove the planking from the fender and back wheel arch and release the last screws – that is normally the point where the whole planking is coming your way anyway. The reason behind the massive rust on the sill tops, jacking point etc is now clear, normally you end up with your shoes almost knee-high in compost… okay, not knee-high, but approx 1,5 kg is nothing unusal. I have already seen little trees growing in there – seriously. I am not joking!

Let’s start

Now we are ready to finally start – we have full view of the jacking points and their little brothers, the service lift points. The service lift points have rubber points which should be removed in order to work properly.

As you can the see the rust took all he could get, thus both points are in a very bad shape and need to be fully replaced. You can only get rid of this problem if you weld edgeless, sheet metal on sheet metal without overlapping. If you only put a sheet metal on top of it, you will have the same problem soon enough again. The moisture will crawl under the seet metal and the rest you know…

Preparation of the metal sheets to be a perfect fit

Bear in mind that edgless welding means more work before and after the welding itself. You can see the reason behind in the next picture: after you have fully removed the rust, you need to produce a new sheet metal.

There is a possibility to just order them via Internet in shops like wagenheberaufnahme. de. But if you need to weld all 4 jacking points like me you need to pay approx. 120 Euro. I’d rather built them myself, even though 120 Euro is a fair price.

We took normal 0,8 sheet, cutted the sheet beforehand. Then we adjusted it to fit properly into the jacking points of the car. For the buckle you can just take a 38 socket, put the sheet on top and put another socket in size 24 on top and then stamp it into the sheet with a little help of a heavy hammer. Just smooth any deformations in the bench vise and you are ready to go to the next step.

Next thing to to do is to bore a hole for the jacking points. I prefer to use a drill press, but a step drill will work as well. If you have the whole in the sheet put it back into the bench vise in order to straighten it and to deflash the edges. This way the sheet is much easier to weld later on.

Preparations done

The sheet is now ready and can be adjusted to the car. That is the most time consuming part of the whole process. The sheet is a perfect fit when it is not falling out when you place it in its spot and both sheet are fitting smoothly to 100% together on all sides. If that is not the case it might happen that only one sheet is welded properly as the distance to the next sheet is too big. As a result you have too much heat and the sheet is burned through.  Thus you have a lot of addional work to fix it. Well fited sheets are welded into place within 15 minutes, so the work before is really worth the effort!

Welding the Metal Sheets to the car

This is how it looks when you also have the buckle in the sheet. Now you can start to weld the sheet:

Almost done:

After prime coating twice with Brantho Korrux Nitrofest and wrapped in undercoating it looks like on the pics below. As soon as the undercoating is dry I will repeat it and paint it in car colour.

Before winter this car will also enjoy a cavity preservation. Also planned before winter is the cavity preservation with also painting the side sills. As a result there will never be rust again.

That’s it for the welding of the jacking Points – finally a big check mark on my To Do List!

~Sebastian