Built in a garage. Written for the platform.

I'm a part-time attorney and entrepreneur who has loved old cars for as long as I can remember. The 1987 560 SL pulled me in because it reminded me of the convertibles my grandparents kept at their place in Palm Springs growing up — sun-warmed leather, clean exhaust, top down on a quiet morning. I'm not a professional mechanic. I'm an owner who picked up a wrench and figured the car out the same way most R107 owners do: a forum thread at a time, a part at a time, a wrong turn at a time.

I bought the car about four years ago. It came with a few of the usual late-R107 quirks and a folder of receipts that didn't quite explain any of them. From day one I was on the forums, on tonk.ca, on mercedessource, on Peach Parts — reading the right thread, then the wrong thread, ordering parts, learning what I'd actually needed instead. Some weekends I fixed the car. Some weekends I just learned which thread was wrong.

Plenty of people had answered my exact questions years before me. The answers just lived in twelve different places, written by twelve different people, none of whom knew I was looking. The diagnostic trees on this site started as the notes I wished I'd had on my first weekend instead of my fortieth.

R107 knowledge isn't missing — it's scattered. Factory service manual PDFs hosted by a generous Canadian. Three decades of Kent Bergsma's articles and videos. Forum threads on Peach Parts where someone diagnosed your exact problem in 2009 and the answer is buried on page 14. The Star magazine archive behind a club membership. Parts catalogs where the right number depends on a build date most owners can't read off the data card.

Any one of those is useful. All of them at once, on a Saturday, with a hot engine and a phone flashlight, is not. The cost shows up in the wrong direction: it's easy to talk yourself into a $400 part because the $40 part needs three more threads to confirm.

That's the whole product philosophy. Every symptom on this site opens a decision tree, not a parts list. The tree walks you down to a likely cause with the cheapest, most informative checks first — a multimeter reading, a vacuum pull, a smell test, a code pull — before it ever points you at a supplier. When it does point you at a supplier, it tells you why that part, in that grade, for your year and engine.

The goal is fewer wrong parts in the parts bin and fewer second guesses in the driveway. A site that helps you order confidently is more valuable than a site that helps you order quickly.

The 1987 560 SL was the seed, but the R107 ran for nearly two decades and the platform has more in common across years than not — fuel system architecture, suspension geometry, body structure, electrical backbone, climate control logic. A diagnostic tree written for one car is, with the right fitment notes, useful to a thousand others.

So the site is built outward from that one car, not around it. Where a procedure or part is genuinely year- or variant-specific (early D-Jet vs late KE-Jet, US sealed-beam vs ROW H4, R-12 vs R134a, early vs late ACC pushbutton), the leaf or collection says so plainly. Coverage is strongest on the late US 560 SL today and grows toward earlier 280 / 350 / 380 / 420 / 500 SL coverage as the catalog is seeded.

The intent is a workshop companion for the platform, open to every R107 owner — whether you've been turning wrenches for thirty years or you just got the keys handed to you and you're staring at the engine bay wondering where to start. The point of these old cars is keeping them on the road. That goes better when the references are easier to use.

Some supplier links on this site are affiliate links. When one is, the supplier pill is marked plainly so you can see it before you click. R107 Workshop may earn a small commission on qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you. The full program list is in the affiliate disclosure below.

The principle is simple and worth stating directly: recommendations are based on what's actually the right part for the job, not on which supplier pays a commission. Affiliate status does not influence which parts a decision tree recommends, in what order suppliers appear, or whether a non-affiliate supplier (RockAuto, AutohausAZ) gets a pill. If the right answer is the cheapest aftermarket bushing on a non-affiliate site, that's the link.

The app indexes the structure of four community sources into its own database: the URLs, page titles, group/section codes, and a short snippet of body text — nothing more. When a leaf cites tonk.ca, mercedessource.com, peachparts.com, or the MBCA Star archive, the link opens that source directly in a new tab. We do not mirror, rehost, or proxy any article content. Search runs against those titles and snippets, not against full-text scrapes. If the source goes offline, the link goes with it.

Decision trees are hand-authored from platform knowledge of the R107 chassis, the M110 / M116 / M117 engine families, KE-Jetronic (CIS-E) and earlier D-Jetronic fuel injection, the 722.3 four-speed automatic, the Bosch 2U ABS unit, and the pushbutton ACC climate control. Where a step has a published reference — torque value, voltage spec, vacuum reading — the leaf cites it. Year/model fitment is noted on each leaf.

These trees are a diagnostic aid. They are not a manual replacement, and they do not cover every failure mode of a 35–55-year-old car. When in doubt, defer to the factory service manual for your specific year and market.

Supplier pills (ECS Tuning, Amazon, eBay, VEVOR) point at direct product pages when we have one curated and pre-filled search URLs otherwise. Clicks route through an internal /api/go redirect so the site can log which references actually get used and prune dead links over time.

This site is a diagnostic aid only. Always verify torque values and procedures against the factory service manual before turning a wrench. Use jack stands, eye protection, fire-rated gloves around fuel lines, and a fire extinguisher within reach when working on KE-Jetronic. The author and contributors accept no liability for damage to vehicles, property, or persons resulting from use of this tool.

Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Mercedes-Benz AG, Mercedes-Benz USA, or any of the linked source sites or suppliers.

• tonk.ca — factory service manual scans, organized by group and section.
• Kent Bergsma / mercedessource.com — three decades of DIY articles, repair videos, and platform-specific kits.
• peachparts.com — community forum threads with diagnostic histories that don't exist in any manual.
• Mercedes-Benz Club of America — The Star magazine technical archive.
• Suppliers: ECS Tuning, Amazon, eBay, VEVOR — for keeping R107 parts, tools, and shop equipment findable.