Mercedes W124 Interior Restoration: What To Fix First

A W124 that has covered 300,000 km still has a better built interior than most cars made today. The problem is that it looks its age in a handful of very specific places, and those places are the ones your eye lands on first. Fix them and a tired car reads as cared for. Ignore them and new leather will not save it.

We see a lot of these cars. The wear is remarkably consistent, so here is the order we would do the work in, and why.

1. The steering wheel, because you are touching it

Start here. It is the part you have your hands on for every minute you drive, it is directly in your eyeline, and after three decades the original is almost always shiny, hard and slightly sticky where the palms sit. A cracked rim on an otherwise clean dashboard drags the whole cabin down.

It is also the cheapest way to change how the car feels rather than just how it looks. A thicker rim, a wood and leather combination, or a flat bottom if you want something less formal, all change the driving experience in a way a new gear knob does not.

You have two routes. Buy something already finished, or send us your own wheel and have it rebuilt to your specification. The second is usually the better idea on a W124: your original is the right one for the car, the airbag cover matches your interior colour, and rebuilding it avoids the hunt for a good used core. You can put a wheel together in the builder and see it rendered as you choose, which saves the guesswork about whether burl walnut works against a beige interior.

2. The wood, because it is the first thing a passenger sees

W124 wood is lacquered veneer, and lacquer has a lifespan. Sun through the side glass breaks down the clear coat until it goes milky, then it crazes into a web of fine cracks, then it lifts at the edges. Once it has reached the lifting stage, no polish will help. The finish has failed, not the wood.

The pieces that go first are the ones that get the most light: the shifter surround and the console. The climate control surround follows. The door cappings tend to survive longest because they sit at an angle that catches less sun.

Which wood you want depends on the year. Early cars up to about 1989 used zebrano, with its strong straight grain, and later cars moved to burl walnut. Both are correct, they just belong to different eras of the same car, and a mismatch is one of those details that quietly looks wrong. Our wood trim stock covers both, including the shifter surround and the climate control panel.

3. The instrument cluster, because a dead display nags

Two faults dominate. The odometer and trip display loses segments until it is unreadable, and the backlighting dims unevenly so half the dial glows and half does not. Neither stops the car, which is exactly why people live with them for years, and why they are so satisfying to sort out.

The cluster is a thirty year old circuit board that has been heat cycled every day of its life. Solder joints crack, electrolytic capacitors dry out, and the display's ribbon connection degrades. These are repairable faults, not scrap ones.

Buying a refurbished unit outright is usually faster than sending yours away, and it means no downtime. We keep refurbished clusters for the W124, including diesel units. One thing to know before you order: the mileage shown will be the mileage of the donor cluster, and in most of Europe you are required to declare a cluster swap and record both readings. Keep the paperwork.

We wrote up the specific failure modes in more detail in our cluster guide.

4. The radio, because the original one is probably locked

Leave this to last, because it is the only one of the four that is genuinely optional. But it is worth doing properly, and the usual mistake is to cut the dashboard about for a modern double DIN unit. That is a permanent decision made for a temporary convenience, and it costs real money at resale.

The better answer is a period Becker with the electronics brought up to date, so it looks exactly as it did in 1993 and streams from your phone. We do this to the Becker Classic BE2010 and the Audio 10 BE3100.

If you still have the original and it is asking for a code after a battery change, you do not need to replace it. Look the code up from the serial number, which is free to check.

What we would leave alone

Not everything is worth chasing on a car like this.

• Seats that are worn but intact. MB-Tex is close to indestructible and a worn driver's bolster on original upholstery is honest. Full retrim money is better spent elsewhere unless the leather has split.
• The headliner, unless it is sagging. Discoloured is fine. Drooping is not, and it will only get worse.
• Small plastic scuffs. A W124 with a completely unmarked interior looks like a museum piece. Some evidence of use is not a fault.

The order matters more than the budget

If you only do one thing, do the wheel. If you do two, add the wood. Those two are eighty per cent of the perceived improvement for a fraction of a full interior restoration, because they are what you look at and what you touch.

We hold a lot of W124 interior parts in Europe, and rather more than is listed online at any one time. If you are after something specific, tell us the chassis and the part and we will check the shelves.