Hey everyone, just thought I'd finally share the full build of my project car. It's been on the road for two years, and roughly 20k miles since the swap. The W108 chassis started out as a parts car to a parts car, which I pulled out of a barn in 2018. Apparently a tree had fallen across the nose, and the headlight buckets were smashed MUCH further down than they are now. I stole everything that was remotely decent out of it to put into another car I was working on, and then I had a "free" shell to play with. It sat outside for two years before I really got going on it. Rotten floors, rockers, rear quarters, etc. At the same time I found a totalled W210 2000 E55 on FB marketplace for $1500, with no gauge cluster, and no wheels.
The front and rear track width is within an inch or two between a W210 and a W108, so I knew the wheels would fit inside the wheel wells. I found a decent low mileage W210 to measure off of, and build a little car that (in theory) would support the rear suspension at it's static ride height. The W108 uses a single pivot swing axle with trailing arms, while the W210 uses a multilink setup. This meant that in the W108 the pathways from the differential through the frame, out to the wheels was relatively narrow, so I started cutting out frame and lowering the car onto the rear axle until there was enough clearance, and that gave me a ballpark of where to start putting mounts. I was cutting away large sections of unibody, so that meant reinforcing elsewhere. Luckily there was enough room through the rear bulkhead to add my own frame sections that could fit behind the rear seats.
After the rear was roughed out, I did essentiall the same with the front. The difficult part there was on the W210 the upper control arms are built into the body, and the lower control arms bolt to a subframe. So I built another jig that would located the upper control arm mounts in 3D space, and built my own frame sections. Lowered the chassis onto that, and welded it in place. After that, it was a lot of reinforcements similar to the rear suspension.
I wanted to keep all of the chassis electronics from the W210 to retain ABS, which meant keeping a TON of stuff. Essentially all of the chassis electronics. This meant W210 steering column, brake booster, ECUs, gauge cluster, headlight switch, SAM, wheels speed sensors, yaw sensors, and probably a lot more I'm missing. This also meant making room for the wiring harnesses so it would physically fit inside the interior...so while I was reinforcing the outer frame rails, I made channels for the harnesses, cut out the rotten rockers, and welded everything in place.
After all that mapping out was done, I pulled the entire car apart, cut out the floors, and had the engine bay and underside of the car sand blasted. Welded in new floor sections, finished welding all around the body where I couldn't before, then I epoxied it, seam sealed it, and epoxied it again. Reassembled it all, and finally fired it up. After that it were a lot of tweaks (big and small), which I can talk about more if people are actually interested in hearing more about it.
In my profile I have over 700 photos, all grouped together by category, not necessarily the order in which I worked on it. There are only a few things which I couldn't do myself, but aside from them I had this car down to the bare frame, and then built entirely back up to a running and driving car. In May of 2026 I drove 700+ miles round trip to PA to have Brian and Nick from Regular Car Reviews do a video on the car, and most recently I got a Judges Choice award at Mercedes Day, put on by the Minuteman Chapter of the MBCA. If anyone out there has any questions, feel free to ask away, I'll answer everything the best I can. Thanks for looking!
