Shed doesn’t like the hot weather much. That’s because one of his regular customers from the village, a scatty old dear called Gladys, has a quite a crush on him and uses any trick she can to lure him into her vestibule. Once he’s in there she picks up a violin and screeches out her own unique versions of Gilbert & Sullivan tunes. When it’s hot, like it is now, she will pass the back of her hand across her brow between each tune, shout ‘oh it’s so damn hot isn’t it!’ and seductively undo another button on her viscose top. By the time she’s got to Tit Willow and a few snatches of When The Foeman Bares His Steel from The Pirates of Penzance Shed is pulling nervously at his collar and wishing he was back in the eyeball-poppingly firm but strangely comforting embrace of Mrs Shed.

You can therefore see why he doesn’t like the hot weather much and why, by extension, he doesn’t like convertible cars very much. Still, he accepts that he might be in the minority on this one so today he is setting his prejudices aside to bring you this Mercedes CLK320. It’s got a few miles on it, 150k in fact, but Shed believes that a car with miles and a good service history is often superior to a low-miler that’s been sat gathering cobwebs in a leaky old garage.

The C209’s six cylinders were in a vee configuration and produced a peak output of around 220hp. The V6 was described as ‘silky’ with ‘an excellent automatic gearbox’ by one leading UK car mag, and maybe also by some lagging-behind car mags. Its 229lb ft of torque came in at 3,000rpm and in terms of hard performance it would do the 0-62 in 8.2sec and top out at 150mph.

That was back in period of course, and there’s many a slip twixt coupe and quivering bottom lip. Something untoward seems to be tainting this one’s nearside wheelarch but Shed thinks it’s a scrape rather than the expected (for Mercs of a certain age) corrosion. Your main concerns will probably hinge, or not, on the electronic roof. Early C209 convertibles like this one were built by Karmann before production shifted in 2004 to Bremen. The three-layer soft-top could be operated by the key fob at the kerbside or on the move, kind of, at speeds of up to 5mph. It seems to be working here, but Shed can’t be sure because you could operate it manually if you had to, which you did when the electronics gave up trying to align the latches or the tank holding the hydraulic fluid for the system turned out to be as dry as a camel’s bum. Sometimes it was just a fuse or a microswitch that had gone AWOL. Either way it wasn’t terminal.

Our shed is in the sporty Avantgarde spec which included tinted glass, aluminium cabin trim, stiffer springs, thicker anti-roll bars, 15mm lower ride height and 18-inch 5-spoke wheels like the ones you see here, or maybe not. They don’t look Merc-y somehow but someone on the forum will no doubt put us straight on that. Non-excessive wear to one of the rear ARB bushes was mentioned at the MOT test in February along with the accursed ‘product’ which blights the headlamp lenses of so many Benzes from this era. The ad tells us that the car has a ‘steel collapsible’ but Shed can’t throw any light on that.

Otherwise there’s nothing bad to talk about. When okaying the car in 2022 the tester thought that the noise from the back end might be caused by dust buildup in the brake drums. Yes, that’s right, the 2003 Mercedes CLK320 had brake drums on the back wheels. Shed pretended to be an MOT tester for a while as it seemed like easy money but eventually remorse set in and he took down his home-made MOT’s Done Here sign, complete with correctly redundant apostrophe. He’s still got it stored safely round the back though just in case he ever needs a quick fifty off Gladys.