August 2
Written August 7
Dear Friends and Family,
Story
We had two Mercedes Benz goals, the museum and a pre-arranged factory tour. The seven-floor museum highlights the 120-year history of the German car, from Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz in 1886 up through today. The whole operation was fascinating, with lots of shiny, colorful cars and trucks and busses to photograph. I'm sure we should have spent more time reading the explanation of everything, but that would have taxed even our auto interest too much. Suffice it to say, one could spend several hours seeing and learning about everything. We, however, we were on a tight timeline since we also had the factory tour to make.
The Daimler Unterturkehim Works has been making engines for over 100 years and currently produces about a million and a quarter engines per year. Mercedes Benz cars are made elsewhere in Germany and in several other countries but Unterturkehim is a massive facility all by itself. The tour was scheduled for 105 minutes and followed the assembly of the newest four-cylinder diesel engine that powers a range of MB cars and trucks. We watched the process from receipt of a bare block casting through all the automated steps of adding piece after piece until the finished engine was tested at the other end of the line. For someone who understands a bit of what all the engine pieces are, it is interesting, but for the non-technical, it might not be as understandable.
This brings up comparison with our Audi experience the day before. Maybe it's just us, but the Ingolstadt museum and tour just seemed much more interesting than the visit at Unterturkheim-Stuttgardt. Maybe it is because we drive an Audi or maybe because it is easier to understand a car going together than an engine, but of the two visits, we'd rank Audi ahead.
Of course there was still the Porsche Museum to go. Another story.
John and Marianne
Pictures
 |
||
|
Mercedes Museum Building Most of the rest of the photos are practice using High Dynamic Range (HDR) technique where several identical pictures are combined . My sense is that the best subjects are ones that are stationary and that have a wide range of illumination or color or both. Car museums seem like good material. |
||
 |
 |
 |
| Non HDR of a 1899 Mercedes "Dos a Dos" |
HDR of the Dos a Dos |
On of the first "mass produced' Mercedes. |
 |
 |
 |
|
Lots of color to play with. |
||
 |
 |
 |
|
Here I even played with the output to make it
a bit less real. I like the effect, not always, but sometimes. |
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
This was the only picture allowed of the Daimler Engine Factory at Unterturkehim. The company has been making engines here for over 100 years. |
||
Links