When I bought my 380SEC, it came without the model designation badge on the boot of the car. It looks as though the original pins on the badge may have snapped off when the car was resprayed and they tried to glue it on. I say this because I can see the super glue marks on the car where the badge should be.
3 years ago when I bought the car, I got a hold of the most expensive grommets in the world from Mercedes-Benz. How expensive? $5 each from my local dealer. They could not cost more than a couple of cents to manufacture, but I had little choice. I also bought a replacement used badge. It seems the price has gone up even more over the last few years. A quick search for part number 0009880727 found an online retailer selling them for US$12.93. I hope it’s for a set of 4, but the listing does look like it’s per piece. Ouch!
How hard could it be?
It should have been a simple job, but nothing is ever easy. The grommets only just fit over the pins of the badge and only go about 1/4 of the way down. No problem, I figured it I just place them badge with the grommets over the holes on the boot lid, I should be able to just press it down and into place with a little pressure – or maybe a lot of pressure by tapping it in with hammer. Unfortunately, this didn’t work too well. Hitting it too hard would bend the badge and risk damaging the boot lid. It also didn’t feel quite right.
I decided I would leave it there and try again at another time. 3 years later and here we are. Part of the reason I left it for 3 years is because somewhere in the middle I lost the grommets and when I re-ordered them 12 months ago, I got the wrong part, so when they turned up recently while i was looking for a different part, I decided this was going to be an upcoming project.
Add heat
Today was the day I would give it another try. Seeing it’s been 3 years, I tried exactly what I described above. What’s that saying about stupidity and trying the same thing expecting a different result?
It was at that point that I decided that I would get my heat gun out and heat up the grommets. Seeing as though they are made of some kind of dense rubber or plastic I figured adding a bit of heat would soften them up enough to allow me to push the badge on.
It worked. A few seconds of heat is all it took and the badge just slipped on with little pressure.
