2nd Car Show

Each year in my home town, on the first Friday of June, a historic street in my city is closed off for three city blocks for the annual car show. This was the first time that I had the DeLorean in road worthy condition when it came time for the show, and I was very excited to be able to go. This car show attracts thousands of local citizens and over 300 cars.

Overall, it was a very nice experience. Despite the four "look, but don't touch" signs on all four sides of the car, the DeLorean came away with way too many fingerprints during the show. When the show started, it was really hot outside, and with the sun shining hard on the passenger side, I decided to start the show with that door closed to block the sun from the interior. 

 I was sitting a good 30 feet away in the shade. I didn't see this incident happen, but my wife said some guy was looking at the car, then proceeded to open the passenger door, and then close it with the greasiest hand I have ever seen. You could have cooked fries with the grease that he left on the door. It was disgusting.

First, "look, but don't touch" includes not opening and closing my car's door.
Second, wash your dang hands once in a while, Mr. Pepperoni Pizza Hands.

I decided to simply open the door to hide the massive grease mark on the door. It looked a lot better open anyway, but I would have preferred to have done it on my own time. I need to wash it again anyways as I parked under a shade tree the next day and got 15 bird poo splatters on my car in a 3.5 hour period. I still didn't appreciate Mr. Greasy Hands.

Here are a few pictures that I snapped of the DeLorean as the show was winding down:
 

   

   

There was a steady stream of people the entire show and I really enjoyed the reactions of the people that we excited to be able to see a DeLorean in person. There were quite a few Back to the Future references, but luckily not enough to make me hate the show.

I was even interviewed by a no-name car show that is trying to get on the air. That was the first time that I had ever been in front of a television camera, and it was pretty fun. I got to talk about the car's history and tell about some of the things that make it unique and fun to own. They gave me their business card with their web site, so we'll see if I ever show up on there. The web site was www.exoticcarmagazine.com. As of today, it doesn't appear to have been updated in a long time.

Other unique cars at the show included a 1975 Bricklin and a 2005 Ford GT.

The next day was another car show, but we were in the process of house hunting and decided that we would just stop by and look and not stay with our DeLorean. We saw a lot of the same cars there that we had seen the day before, including the Bricklin. I am also a Jeep fan, and there were two awesome Willy's Jeeps from the 1940s at the show. I snapped a couple of pictures:
 
 

We noticed that when we were walking back to the DeLorean, it was attracting quite the crowd just parked there. It was kind of fun to drive away with a bunch of people staring at us. I am looking forward to some other shows coming up later this year. I just need to get the A/C working first.

DeLorean's Automatic Antenna Replacement

Using a DeLorean parts crossover list that I ran across on the DeLorean forum, I decided to purchase a replacement automatic radio antenna for my DeLorean since it has never worked since I have owned the car. The parts crossover list recommended the Legacy LN46 antenna, and I was able to find an purchase a new one on ebay for a little over $30. Here are the parts that it came with:
 

I felt very confident in my abilities to tackle this replacement, especially after readying some how-to threads online. For those that don't know, the automatic antenna is located in the rear driver's side pontoon and is supposed to go up when the radio is turned on and go down when the radio or car is turned off.

Replacement of the antenna first requires gaining access to the antenna, which is done by removing the bolts holding the charcoal canister cover inside the engine compartment. I took it out and set it on top of the engine:
 

This is what the old antenna looked like inside the pontoon:
 

 It was secured to a metal bracket that was secured to the inside of the pontoon. After undoing a couple of nuts, it came out attached to the bracket. This is what it looked like when it was removed:
 

The not-so-fun part came next. I wasn't sure how the new antenna was supposed to be wired into the car because a) there were more wires on the old antenna than the new antenna and b) the wires were different colors. Here are the wires on the old antenna:
 

Here are the wires that came on the new antenna:
 

On the new antenna, I assumed that the black wire was the ground, the red wire the power, and the green wire the one that need to get hooked up to the radio deck. I tested this theory by using a car battery to activate the antenna and confirmed my suspicion. The problem is, on the original antenna, it had a relay in a small compartment on the shelf behind in the driver's side seat. The new antenna has a relay built into it, so you need to bypass the old relay completely.

Below is a picture of the old relay that needs to be removed completely:
 

I hooked the red power wire from the new antenna to the red power wire that used to go to the old relay. The confusion on my particular setup was where to hook up the green wire coming from the new antenna. I first tried hooking it up to the white wire that used to go to the relay, as see in the picture below:
 

The antenna did not work when it was hooked up like this. I then went to the internet forums to get help in figuring out what I was doing wrong. My particular setup is unique because instead of having a blue signal wire coming from the back of the radio deck, I have one group of cables that go to a receiver unit that the previous owner put in the cubby behind the driver's seat.

I dug up the installation manual for the radio and found that one of the wires coming off of the receiver unit was labeled as ANT CONT, which I figured might be the antenna signal wire that tells the antenna when to go up or down.
 

I hooked up the green wire from the antenna to that, hooked up the radio antenna reception cable, and made sure the ground wire was in a good known ground at the back of the car and I was ready to test. The antenna worked, but I think that the antenna that I ordered is faulty because it doesn't go up or down very well at all. It's like the motor isn't working like it should. It won't come up all the way on its own, and it won't go down unless I help push it down when the motor is trying to pull it down. I am not going to worry about it for now because I mostly always listen to MP3 CDs when driving it anyway.

The antenna was really hard to get to line up correctly so it came out where it was supposed to. The charcoal canister doesn't leave much room for the antenna inside the pontoon. It was a much more frustrating and time consuming install than I originally anticipated, so hopefully this post will help you avoid the same pitfalls that I encountered.

First Car Show

Car show season has arrived. The local car show was just down the street from my house and was organized to bring awareness about autism. I didn't preregister, but registered once we arrived.

We were the only DeLorean at this show. We met another owner from a city about 25 miles from me a few weeks ago at a local cruise-in at this same place, but we didn't bring our DeLorean to that event. They were unable to come to this show, but it was nice being the only DeLorean there.

I was given a spot next to all of the motorcycles at the show:
 

 

 

The reactions that the car got were very positive. I didn't hear anyone say anything negative about the car. One guy commented that he was surprised that they didn't come with a V8 in them. We had about 10 people ask us about the flux capacitor or where it was. Even though we had a "do not touch" sign on the car, we discovered a few fingerprints after the show was over.

We even won an award for our first show. We got the "Sponsor Choice" award, shown here in the car:
 

It really was a great time associating with so many people that have such a passion for their cars. I am also a fan of Corvettes, and there were two red ones there that I thought looked just fantastic. One was a 1979 and the other was a Z06 from an unknown year:
   

 

 

There were also quite a few cars that I didn't like, as well as a few that made me scratch my head, like this 60s Mustang that had been supercharged. There were three gauges that they mounted outside of the car, which I am not a fan of:
 

I'm looking forward to participating in more shows this year. I definitely need to get the air conditioning working for the summer heat first.

30 year old DeLorean spare tire

While working on repairing the clutch hydraulics, I tested my spare tire and discovered that it would not hold air for more than a few hours, even though the tire looked like it was in perfect shape. It felt hard as a rock to the touch, which gave the impression that it had a lot of air pressure, but when tested, it would register zero.

Thanks to the vast info available online, I discovered that you can't buy a spare tire from a regular tire shop, and that the best option is to go to a junkyard and find a newer car that has the same spare tire size and to swap the newer rubber onto the DeLorean spare rim.

I also discovered that the spare tire size of T125/70 D15 is a very common spare tire size today. I went to the pick-a-part junkyard and had a bit of trouble initially finding one, but eventually found a few. I picked one that had the most recent date stamp on the tire. I paid $10 for it and headed over to Discount Tire to have them swap rims.

I was hoping that they would just do it for free since I have bought so many tires from them in the past, but they charged me another $10 in labor to switch them out. I didn't bother taking any pictures of the newish tire, but it is holding a steady pressure of 60 psi, in case I ever need it in the future. This was a very easy thing to do, but I just had to take the time to go find a tire and pay to have them switched. More time consuming than difficult.

DeLorean CV Boot replacement

While I was under the car repairing the frame rust last month, I noticed that the CV boot on the driver side was not even attached at the lip. I also discovered that the passenger side CV boot was nearly in two pieces. That's bound to happen after 30+ years.

So I ordered a CV boot kit from John Hervey at Special T Auto. It was back ordered and took a few weeks to get, but it came with everything I needed to rebuild the CV joints. This was a relatively easy job, but just messy. Luckily I have a stash of latex gloves to help keep my hands a bit cleaner, and I used plenty for this job. There is a great write up on www.dmctalk.org on how to rebuild the joint. Since mine has been trouble free and hasn't made any noise, I decided to not completely disassemble the joint itself, but to just wipe out as much of the old grease from the joint before repacking it.

Here is the drive axle with one of the joints removed:


It really was as easy as the write up shows. Once the drive axles were removed from the car, and I did them one at a time so I didn't mix them up, I put them in my vice for ease of working on them and went to town. I simply removed the old boot clamps that were obviously original to the DeLorean. I then disassembled the joint. The hardest part was the old snap rings. The new kit even came with replacement snap rings, which I didn't realize until I had completed the first joint. The old one works just fine, however.

Here is the half-torn CV boot from the passenger side:


I used dozens of paper towels wiping out the old grease before putting on the new boot. I repacked the grease on both sides and worked it in before sealing everything up. The kit came with heavy duty zip ties that allowed me to tighten them really well to ensure no leaking. Here is one of the joints all put back together:


Here is a completed drive axle with two new boots:


The hardest part of the job is taking the drive axles out of the car, and then back in. The actual job of rebuilding the joints is easy if you follow the instructions. After approximately 100 miles of driving, the boots look perfect and show no leaks anywhere.

Back on the Road

After taking a couple of months during the winter to tackle some rust repairs and clutch hydraulic repairs, I was able to button everything back together on President's Day and get the car on the road again. I realized that I have not taken very many pictures of my car since I bought it last year, so I snapped a few pics for the heck of it after the successful road test:




 

I have significantly reduced my mental to-do list. Here are a few items that I will have to tackle soon:

Replace CV axle boots on drive axles (passenger side outer boot is torn)
Replace Thermo Time Switch to fix cold start issue
Replace non-functioning power antenna
Find and replace suitable spare tire (doesn't hold air)

Some possible to-do items:
Replace 30 year old transmission gear oil
Replace cracked dashboard
Replace motor mounts
Get an alignment
Fix interior lights to come on when door is opened

I'm sure there's more, but that's enough for now.

DeLorean Clutch Issues Resolved

As seen in an earlier post, when attempting to remove the clutch pipe from the slave cylinder, the clutch pipe snapped off right by the bolt connection on the end. I pulled the SS clutch line and hooked it directly to the slave cylinder, but the line was too close to the exhaust.

I bought a replacement clutch pipe from DMC Houston and installed it. When I went to bleed the system, the clutch pipe started leaking badly at the connection with the SS clutch line. I must not have tightened it enough. It now works flawlessly. Here is a picture of the new clutch pipe attached to the slave cylinder:

Much more space between the clutch pipe and the exhaust now compared to when the SS clutch line was hooked directly to the slave.


Here is a picture of the old clutch master and slave cylinders once they were removed:
 
The DeLorean clutch master was a Girling and the slave cylinder says Bendix. The slave still worked great, but I decided to replace both since they were originals. I don't want to repeat this job for as long as possible.

Below is a picture of the new clutch master installed. This was taken after it had been there for a few months: