SL For Sale Sold!

'82 380SL

380 SL, 1982. $3200
e-mail: jimc@windwireless.net, or telephone: (509) 926-7801

Why Did I Buy This?

For the price, I couldn't pass up this sadly neglected (at the time) example. Though it needed a lot of work and had to be dragged home on the end of a rope it was actually not too far from running condition. I thought I could get it working and then drive it for fun while I worked on all of its non-critical needs. (Which were legion.) I also thought it would be fun to have a 380 SL for awhile, to complement our (now-sold) 450 SL and the his and hers 560 SL's. (A 107 SL hat trick?)

Why Selling?

There's just no way to justify keeping three SL's long-term, it's hard enough to justify having two. Once the car was fixed up to a driveable condition that's just what I started to do, and the fixing somehow largely stopped. After more than enough time with the unfinished bits hanging over my head it was time to send it on its way. This car turned out to be more of a project than I'd anticipated (there's a shock!), but more significantly, other, more important projects prevented me from giving it the attention it deserved. While I'd hoped to have fun fixing it up to a needs-nothing condition, quickly, then selling it and hopefully not losing any money in the process, that was not to be. (That was the deal I'd made with my wife when I got it!) This was fun to drive while I was repairing it, I'd already determined that it was pointless to do this on a purely for-profit basis with a 240D I'd repaired and sold in the past, it just takes too much time invested for the return you can get. No, it was mostly for fun. And when the fun stopped...

The good part is that you get a car that I treated as my own personal ride, as there was no way to know exactly how long we were going to keep it, after all. (The laundry list of what it needed to be driveable was quite long.) In fact I drove it for just about five years (but not in the winters), about four and a half years longer than intended!

The Good

The Bad

The Ugly

The extras, that is! Some extra parts/items can go with the car, if the new owner wants them. (I would always want such items, but as my wife so cruelly points out, not everybody is like me!)

Pictures:

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