"If You Can't Stand the Heat,.." Replace the Hood Insulation Pad on Your Mercedes

One of the things we knew would need doing straight away when buying the car was the hood insulation pad replacement. Why do you need insulation under the hood? It's not just for noise reduction as some may think - the primary reason to have it is to protect the paint on the hood from the engine heat. 

It is important to make sure that the pad is in good condition. Otherwise, it will crumble onto the engine and god knows where it will end up. When we purchased the car, this is what you saw when you opened the bonnet:

It was old, torn, crumbling and bit of it tended to just come off randomly. High time for a change!

The Mercedes dealer quoted us £150 for a new pad and glue, which felt quite steep considering you can get a pad off Ebay for something like £50-60. You will need to purchase the glue separately, but it's definitely not going to drive the total up to £150. So Ebay it was. As for the glue, everyone was raving about 3M, but it's not available here. You can get the proper insulation glue from The SL Shop, which we tried to do, but unfortunately something went wrong in the delivery process and we couldn't get it in time. So a last minute dash to Screwfix resulted in the purchase of Sticks Like Sh*t.

The pad comes rolled up, so before attaching it, it's a good idea to straighten it up on the floor and let it lie around for a while to get flat:

Now when you start to rip the old insulation pad off, make sure you have a big sheet or something similar to cover the engine bay. Plus get some pliers - if you look carefully at the first photo, you will see that apart from being glued on, it is also attached to the top of the hood by a set of round plastic clips, and you will need the pliers to get those off. This is the result of the removal:

And now to attach the new pad. What we thought we'd do is first attach it by the clips, then put the glue onto the hood and then press the hood pad onto that. Getting the plastic clips to go in properly is a pain - some were extremely tight and required lots of strength and hammering as they just absolutely refused to go in. But in the end the pad was attached to the top of the hood:

It makes sense to keep the engine bay covered by the sheet throughout the process, as the glue can drip during the smearing process, which is exactly what happened. Once the hood was covered with glue, we pressed the insulation pad tightly to the hood... and... drumroll... the result was:

No, this is not a mistake and I am not posting the same photo twice by accident. This was the result. The glue had no holding force whatsoever and the whole thing just fell off and continued to hang loosely attached by the plastic clips alone. No matter how hard we pressed, it just didn't work. Even after closing the bonnet and leaving it be overnight, not even the smallest bit was glued on.

So lesson learned? Sticks Like Sh*t does exactly what it says on the label. It doesn't stick. Have you ever tried to glue stuff together with shit? My point exactly - shit may have a lot of other characteristics such as smell and not sinking, but it's just not meant to be used as adhesive material. Otherwise we could have put all the bird poop to good use a long time ago! :)

We would have reordered the proper glue from The SL Shop and continued our attempts, but the car was due to go in for an inspection, service and transmission fluid change the next day, so we just asked the indy to attach our freedom loving insulation pad properly. So this DIY attempt is not as Y as we would have liked it to be, but at least we got this far...

Should you attempt this yourself? Absolutely. Just cover everything nicely with a sheet, purchase the proper adhesive and everything should go smoothly!