The most common repair to these trucks is replacing a broken-off towing hook. This is a peg pointing downwards at the end of the chassis, around which the drawbar of a trailer fits.
To make a new hook for this all-red truck, an edge is sawn off a broken red brick with a metal saw. Mercedes trucks are all made from ABS plastic, so that's what the brick is made of too.
This piece is sanded to a rounded shape with a rounded end, and polished smooth with automotive compound wax.
Next, a small hole is drilled where the original hook used to be, with a 1-mm drill bit in a Dremel. And while I was at it, I also drilled holes in all the other Mercedes trucks with broken towing hooks. (Tip: using a base plate in a tray keeps the cars from easily rolling away while taking them from display shelf to work table.)
The hole is too small for the replacement hook, so it's bored out with a Dremel bit I use for this purpose (this is not a drill bit but a side-grinding bit, which works well). Next the replacement part is cut to the right length, and stuck in the hole with superglue. A flat screwdriver can push it back up a bit from underneath if it went in too far.
The reason the new hook is fitted inside a hole is because this is much stronger. Simply gluing a peg onto the broken end where the hook used to be will have it break off again the moment it has some force applied to it.
An unbroken hook (at top) has been used as an example for the length of the replacement hook. The replacement is a bit thinner due to the thickness of the brick it was cut from, but completely functional. I still need to stick a little notice underneath to point out the replacement in case this truck should ever get sold.
This broken truck was sent along with another little Lego car I bought somewhere. Nothing I can do to repair that kind of damage, except replace the entire cab. Sometime later a loose Shell tanker cab turned up in an auction lot, and luckily the seller was found willing to take out the cab and sell it separately.
To remove the cab, the cargo bed needs to come off first. This is glued to the chassis, and also to the rear of the cab, usually with a large dollop of glue. Twisting a flat screwdriver will separate the cargo bed from the chassis, because there's not that much glue holding it there. A thin cutter will help separate the cargo bed from the cab, though the very lowest point is usually the exception.
The cargo bed remained stuck so the original cab lost a part of its rear before it came loose. This was cut off the cargo bed front. As this picture shows, the Mercedes cab is held to the chassis by the star emblem in the front grille and two lugs at the rear without glue. Gently pressing in the rear lugs should allow the cab to be removed.
The yellow cab came from an articulated Shell tank truck so could be removed without damage; anything sitting on the chassis behind the cab is likely to be glued to the cab as was the case here. The window insert sits on four slender round legs and fits inside the cab also without glue.
Reassembling the truck was a simple matter. I did take care to only superglue the cargo bed to the chassis and not the rear of the cab, using a clamp to hold it in place for a couple of hours while the superglue hardened completely. The end result is a nice bright colour variation in the line-up of trucks. All that was left to do was replace the towing hook, after finding a Lego piece in the right colour for the chassis.
As far as I know Lego don't make parts in that mustard shade of yellow, so I whittled and sanded down a tan-coloured rod (of the type used for light sabre beams) to about half its width. Another broken brick yielded a strip of blue ABS to make towing hooks for the blue trucks. Quite a bit later the olive green trucks were done as well. The old green colour for these isn't used anymore either so I cut a bit from this olive green sloped brick.
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