Ed Kowalczyk bought the 300D off a lot in Toledo in 1985 with ninety-six thousand miles on it. He has since replaced everything but the shell, twice. This is not a restoration story. It is a story about a man who made a decision once and never went back to look at it again.
Read the featureEverything already written about these cars covers the metal. Chassis numbers, option codes, auction results, what a good one costs this year. All of it useful, none of it the reason anyone keeps a thirty-year-old Mercedes running.
The Haunch covers the other half. The shop owner who trained three of his competitors. The daughter who inherited a car and learned to weld rather than sell it. The trimmer in a county of forty thousand people who is the last person alive doing that work by hand.
Quarterly in print. Continuously online. Photographed on assignment — no stock, no press images, no renders.
Forty miles outside Lancaster, a two-man shop takes on four restorations a year and turns down eleven. We spent three days finding out how that decision gets made.
Hand-stitched MB-Tex, patterns cut from templates his father drew in 1971.
Every recorded sale, sorted by condition and mileage, with the outliers explained.
The Market runs on mb-chassis.com, the network's marketplace, and every listing carries the chassis, the history, and the shop that maintained it. Listing is free. Editorial listings — photographed and written by us — are the paid tier.
Printed matter and a small run of goods made properly — issue back-stock, the annual, and one garment per issue. Nothing made in volume, nothing made to a price.
One gathering per issue, hosted at a shop rather than a lawn. Small, invited, and built around the people we published that quarter.
Every feature in The Haunch starts as an application. We read all of them. Most cars we pass on are excellent; what we are looking for is a person and a decision worth four thousand words.
Ten minutes. No cost, ever — features are not for sale.
We reply to every application, including the ones we pass on.
The Haunch sits on top of a network of chassis sites read by owners searching for exactly one thing: someone who knows their car. A shop can reach them three ways, and none of them are a banner.
Print subscribers get the digital edition, early notice of every Assembly, and the archive as it fills. Leave an address and we'll write once when Issue No. 01 goes to press.
One email when the issue ships. Nothing else, and no list sharing.