The sills of the 450SLC have been looking pretty pathetic sinc I bought this car. The previous owner repaired the rust in the front/rear corners by welding in some new pieces. They then went and covered the entire sill in body filler from front to rear in order to level everything out. To make things worse they made no attempt at all of prepping the surface. The body filler went straight over the top of the original paint and Mercedes-Benz under shield.
The result of this was crusty body filler that was peeling off in large chunks. This was especially bad when I went to get the car registered as they noticed the flaking body filler and failed it due to rust.
The only thing to do was to remove the body filler and repair the sills. I started off with 40grit sandpaper on the orbital sander but found I was getting no where with it and then pulled out the angle grinder with a 40grit flap pad. After about an hour or so of grinding I managed to get the entire sill down to bare metal.
When I finally managed to get to bare metal on the passenger side, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the sills were quite solid. I could clearly see where the previous repairs were done and will revisit them some time in the future. My goal was to clean the sills up for registration and not do a full restoration.
The drivers side was in a similar state, but there were a few spots that needed to be filled. I chose metal reinforced body filler as it’s suitable for filling holes.
I then gave both sides a coating of high fill primer. I chose this as the 40 grit flap wheel I used was quite aggressive and I didn’t want the sanding marks to be visible.
The photos don’t lie, there is definitely more finishing work that needs to be done, but this wasn’t the time for it.
Following this I gave both sides a coat of White Knight Satin Black epoxy paint. The finished result turned out quite well.
Construction is due to start on my new garage after lockdown hopefully ends in a few weeks. This will give me a proper space to work in and I intend to install a 4 post hoist. This should make it easier to tackle jobs like this and I will revisit the sills and carry out a lot of other restoration work on this car. I suspect that the previous owner has welded the patch panels right over the top of the old rusty pieces which is why the needed to fill the sills to level it out. Fortunately I have a donor car with what looks like solid sills so I should be able to get it looking much better than it currently does.
