ROUNDIE REVIVAL

MURRAY ALLEN'S BEAUTIFUL BENZ COUPE IS ONE OF A TINY NUMBER MADE AND SENT HIM ON A GLOBAL FORAGING EXPEDITION

- GUY ALLEN

This was the first Mercedes-Benz fuel-injected production car and was something special in its day. Just 470 were produced and only around 48 in right-hand drive.

Where did the interest in Mercedes develop? As a schoolboy I was brought up in Preston (Melbourne) and someone in the public library made sure there was a good range of motoring books on the shelves. I found a little trove of Mercedes-Benz stuff going back to the 1930s.

In my travels and during my working life I collected quite a lot of pre-war books and magazines. It gave a depth to the interest that you don't get from a television program.

I never found out who the old librarians were, but they had excellent stuff.

Someone years later queried something and I found much of it still there.

The first Benz I had was a 190B Roundie, about 30 years ago. It belonged to a doctor in Oakleigh and was sitting under a gumtree in the back yard and he must have passed away and the family was tidying up. I think I paid $1500 for it. Towing was another $180! It had a little bit of rust, but I was impressed that it had sat under a tree for four years and it was still solid.

Setting up a business at the time, so there wasn't a lot of spare cash, so we really had to struggle and do a lot of it ourselves. We did favours for people to get chrome done - a bit of bartering.

I'm a fitter and turner toolmaker by trade, which is why I can do a lot of the work myself. We have a little lathe, quite a nice milling machine, which is useful when a lot of the material you needed you couldn't buy.

I was in the Mercedes club and was President at one time.