Car Clock of the Week: 1971 Mercedes-Benz 250 Kienzle analog

We have looked at a few dozen timepieces in this Car Clock of the Week series so far, including many made by the Vereinigte Deuta OTA company and a couple made by Kienzle. Today we’ll see a junkyard-harvested clock made by both VDO and Kienzle, extracted from a used-up W114 Mercedes-Benz.

W114s show up regularly in California wrecking yards, I have learned during my junkyard travels over the years. The W108s from the same era (the W114 was the precursor to the E-Class, while the W108 came before the S-Class) use the same type of Kienzle VDO clocks, located in the same portion of the instrument cluster: right in the middle. I found this car a few weeks ago in a Silicon Valley self-service wrecking yard and promptly extracted the clock.

This clock is a standard 2-1/16″ diameter self-contained gauge, mounted in a sturdy panel that’s very typical of Mercedes-Benz products of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The date code stamped on the back shows that this clock was manufactured during the same month in which Captain Beefheart’s Lick My Decals Off, Baby was released. Most old VDO clocks (even mechanical ones like this one) still work after a half-century, but a quick check with my car-clock tester proved that this chronometer was kaput.

I put the clock back in the car it came from, in case some other junkyard shopper wanted to take a shot at buying and fixing it.

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