Mercedes Wood Trim: Why It Fails And How To Fix It | RS Auto

Ask someone what they think of a car's interior and they will not say "the lacquer on the console has crazed". They will say it feels tired, or it feels loved, and they will have decided within about two seconds of sitting down.

On an older Mercedes, a surprising amount of that judgement rests on the wood. It runs across the console and along the doors, it sits at exactly eye level from the driver's seat, and it is glossy, so it catches light in a way that plastic does not. When it is right, the whole cabin looks deliberate. When it has gone cloudy and cracked, everything else looks worse than it is.

The wood is fine. The lacquer has failed.

This is the single most useful thing to understand, because it changes what you do about it.

Mercedes trim is a thin veneer of real wood on a substrate, sealed under a thick layer of clear lacquer. The veneer is what you see; the lacquer is what makes it glossy and protects it. Almost every "ruined" piece of trim has perfectly good veneer underneath a finish that has died.

It dies in a predictable sequence:

1. It goes slightly milky. Ultraviolet light through the side glass breaks down the clear coat. The gloss dulls and the grain loses depth.
2. It crazes. A web of very fine cracks appears, usually visible only at an angle in bright light. At this point it still polishes up reasonably.
3. It lifts. The lacquer separates from the veneer, most often at an edge or around a screw hole, and turns white where air gets under it.
4. It flakes. Pieces come away and the bare veneer is exposed, which then absorbs moisture and stains.

Stages one and two are cosmetic. Stage three is the point of no return for polishing, because there is nothing left to polish. The fix from there is to strip the old finish and re-lacquer, or to replace the piece.

Why polish does not work past a point

Plenty of guides suggest cutting compound and a lot of patience. That genuinely helps at stage one or two, because you are levelling a thin damaged layer of an otherwise sound finish.

Once the lacquer has delaminated, polishing removes what little is holding on and takes you closer to bare veneer. And if you cut through to the veneer on a piece this thin, it is done. There is no second attempt. If you can see white lifted edges, do not attack it with a machine polisher.

The other thing to avoid is any interior dressing containing silicone on trim you might one day want refinished. It soaks into the crazing and makes it very difficult for new lacquer to key properly.

Get the right wood for the year

This matters more than people expect, and it is one of those details that looks wrong without anyone being able to say why.

Zebrano is the pale wood with strong, straight, dark stripes. It was used on earlier cars, and on a W124 that means roughly up to the end of the 1980s. It suits the early cars' plainer interiors.

Burl walnut, Wurzelholz, is the swirled figured wood most people picture when they think of a Mercedes interior. It came in later and continued for years across the range.

Later cars added other options again, including paler maple finishes on the W210 and W202 era. Mixing them within one car is the mistake to avoid: a burl console with zebrano door cappings reads as parts-bin, because it is.

Our wood trim stock covers both eras. For a W124 the pieces people need most are the burl shifter surround, the zebrano surround for pre-facelift cars and the climate control panel. Later chassis are covered too, including W202 and W210 console trim.

Start with the shifter surround

If you are only replacing one piece, replace that one. It gets the most direct sunlight of any trim in the car, so it is almost always the worst. It sits in the middle of the console where both front occupants look. And it is the piece your hand passes over every time you move the selector, so a lifting edge is something you feel as well as see.

Door cappings are usually last on the list. They sit at a shallower angle to the sun and tend to outlive everything else.

Keeping the new one alive

The finish failed because of sunlight, so the answer is sunlight.

• A windscreen shade when the car is parked in the sun does more than any product you can buy. It is unglamorous and it works.
• Clean with a damp cloth and nothing else. Modern lacquer needs no feeding, and wood trim is not leather.
• No silicone dressings. They add a temporary shine and cause problems later.
• Garage it nose in if you can, so the sun is not on the console all afternoon.

The rest of the console will need attention too

Almost nobody replaces wood in isolation. The trim comes out to be changed, and while the console is apart the other thirty year old items are right there: the instrument cluster with its fading display, and the radio that is probably asking for a code nobody has. Doing them together saves stripping the console twice.

We hold more W124 and W201 interior trim in Europe than is listed online at any given moment, in both woods and in various conditions. If you need a specific piece, tell us the chassis, the year and which panel and we will look.