DeLorean replacing door roof seals

 I've owned my DeLorean since 2011. Since I've owned my car, the door always made a kind of squeaking rubber sound when opening the doors all the way up. I posted a video about this back in 2013:

Since this wasn't a big problem, I moved onto other things and just lived with the noise the doors made when opening the last little bit. I recently decided to replace the door roof seals while I had the t-panel off while I bolted down the roof box.

It's a pretty straightforward job, but it does take some time and can be a bit frustrating. I chose to get my door roof seals from DMCH and chose to use rivets again instead of screws, like I've seen others do. Here's what it looked like before I dove in:

 

 

I first drilled the top of the rivets off using an 8mm drill bit. With the rivet heads off, I could then remove the seal. You do have to reuse the metal plate as only the rubber seals are replaced. You have to close the door and pull out the seals from the top of the car. My original seals were adhered to the metal plate using some kind of adhesive. The seals pulled off easily, but left behind a bunch of adhesive material. Here's the original seals after being removed from the car:

 This is the adhesive material left behind after pulling off the seal from the bracket:

I then set about to cleaning up the brackets and found that a sandblaster did an okay job, but left the plates with a dull finish. I was able to bring the bright finish back to them with a wire wheel though. 

After drilling off the rivet heads, I was left with the rest of the rivet still poking out. I made several attempts to remove them, but in the end, just pushed them into the metal so they're now hanging out inside the door, and called it good. I did not want to make the mistake of drilling too far and hitting the outside stainless skin of the door and having dents or pinholes. 

I then lined up the new door roof seal on top of the original to drill holes in the rubber in the right places. With the bracket cleaned up as best I could, I opted not to apply any sealant between the bracket and the seal. I then closed the DeLorean's door and lined up the holes for both the rubber and the bracket as best I could. After a few tries, I got them close enough to where I could get one rivet into all the right holes. Here is the door seal in the process of being riveted back in place:

Here's the driver's side door roof seal all done:

One thing I also did was try to protect the torsion bar during all of this. I had an old door seal lying around that I cut so that it would wrap around the torsion bar and protect it from any scratches or damage while I was in there with a drill and rivet tool. Others have used a garden hose cut length wise to do the same thing. Here's a new rivet getting read to go in on the passenger side, showing the black door seal protecting the torsion bar:

It's a bit of a tight fit to get the rivet tool in there, but I am pleased to report that I was successful in putting in all 16 rivets (8 for each door) and that the squeaking sound appears to be gone when I open the doors. The original seals were 40+ years old and were very stiff. The new ones are much more flexible and it may be the only time I will need to do this repair. I also did not damage any part of the door or torsion bar, so I'll call this job a success. Here is the passenger side all done too:

DeLorean roof box bolt down repair

 I have heard and seen some horror stories as it's related to some owners' experiences with a rusted and rotted roof box, as well as many that are experiencing separation between some of the pieces. 

Luckily, my roof box is still in decent shape, but I wanted to take some preventative action to keep it that way for as long as possible. A sign that there may be an issue developing is by looking at where the torsion bars are secured in place just above the rear window. As you can see from my car, the brackets and all of the metal are perfectly in line with no twisting from the torsion bars.

I bought a roof box repair kit from DeLoreanGo that included bolts to secure the roof box, washers, and replacement bolts for the torsion bar retaining plates, which I didn't use because I didn't remove the torsion bars for this fix. It also included a tube or sealant to ensure a water tight seal around the new bolts. This is the part of the roof box where you will drill through. The kit comes with detailed instructions and pictures that are easy to follow.

Since my roof box was still in excellent shape, I didn't need to go down the route of removing the torsion bars, which significantly simplified this job for me. I just removed the T-panel and opened the doors, and got to this point to expose the rear portion of the roof box:

After I wiped off the dirt of 40+ years, I laid down a strip of duct tape and marked four holes where I wanted to drill. They were off-center and more towards the rear of the roof box. I then followed the instructions by drilling progressively larger holes until I got to the desired diameter.

The instructions end up with the largest hole being 10mm, but since I only had drill bits that are imperial sizes, the last holes I drilled were 3/8", which was the closest size I had to 10mm. It was a tight fit and required that I thread in the bolts instead of just dropping or tapping them in, as shown below:

Drilling through the roof box will cause a bunch of debris inside the car, so I laid a blanket down on the rear parcel shelf to catch as much of it as possible before drilling the holes. After I put in all of the bolts, I tightened down the nuts on the inside.

There's a lot of extra threads showing after everything is tightened down. I then put a cutoff wheel on my grinder and cut the bolt so it's flush with the bottom of the nut, all while trying to contain the sparks as best as possible with cardboard and the blanket.

I then used the sealant and spread it generously on the top side of the bolts and washers. The kit comes with a full size tube of this stuff, but I only used a small percentage of it for this job. Overall, it wasn't at all difficult, but I took my time and tried to contain the mess as best I could, which slowed me down.

If I would have had to remove the torsion bars to relieve the tension on the roof box, it would have been a job that would have taken several more hours. All of those steps are included in the instructions, should you need to go down that route.

Restored DeLorean door card foam

 After seeing the great results others had shown after replacing the door card foam in their DeLoreans, I decided to give it a shot. I used this walk through to help me in the process, so I won't bother repeating all of the steps as it's documented in great detail in that post. 

I bought the door card foam repair kit from DeLorean Go as it was super convenient and I wasn't having any luck finding the scrim foam I needed locally in the thickness I wanted. After over 40 years, the foam in my door cards was extremely flat, as shown in the before photo below:

I took lots of pictures of the backside so that I would be sure to put it back together as closely to original as I could.

The covering peeled off with not much effort. Here's what it looked like during that process:

For the rest of the driver side restoration, I was in such a hurry with the glue and getting it back together that I didn't document the rest of the process. Next came the passenger side several months later. Here's the flat door card look before I removed it from the car:

I used paper cut to the right size to create patterns in the new foam in order to cut them to the right size and shape:

Here are the new pieces before I cut the length down to size:

All trimmed down and ready to glue everything back together:

I used even more glue on the passenger door card than I did on the driver and it turned out great. On the back side of the door card, I did use several clothes pins overnight to hold everything in place as it dried. I am extremely happy with how it turned out:

Here it is installed back in the car:

More DeLorean cosmetic fixes

My car is not cosmetically perfect, but I'll be darned if it isn't getting closer with ever small fix I make. I make lists of things that I find that could/should be replaced at some point in the future, then work on them as time allows after the parts are delivered by my vendor of choice that week.

While working on the car recently, I found a few more places that had quite a bit of corrosion on nuts and bolts and other things and decided to replace them. First, the nut cap on the windshield wiper was faded to a gray color, which you only see when the front trunk is open.

The new cap is a small detail, but it looks much, much better. The old one pulled right out when I gripped it with some pliers, and the new one popped right back in its place.

Next, for an even smaller detail, I noticed the screws holding the cowl screen on beneath the windshield had some corrosion as well, which made them also appear gray instead of black.

After taking them out, I found that they were even more corroded in the threads. The new one is shown on the left in the pic below. The new ones threaded right in without any problems.

When I put my car back together recently after pulling the motor, I discovered a lot of corrosion on all of the screws holding the rear fascia along the top side. I replaced all of those with new screws and they look much better now:

Fixed DeLorean engine compartment light

There are a few things that have never worked on my DeLorean since I bought it in 2011. One was the interior dome lights that wouldn't come on when the doors opened, which I recently fixed, and another was no functioning engine compartment light. My car hasn't even had a bulb in the light housing since I bought the car. 

I bought a correct light, installed it in the housing, but it wouldn't turn on. I then noticed that the switch had separated, so I took it all the way apart, cleaned the contacts on the inside, then glued it back together to keep it from separating again. I was then pleasantly surprised that the light came on for the first time ever, but it only works if the switch is wiggled just right, indicating that the switch will need to be replaced. It was a pretty easy diagnosis and repair, but never one that was high on my priority list.

Restored DeLorean rear quarter louvre

While I was in the process of painting the rear louvre that goes over the engine, I decided to also try and restore the look of the louvres located in the rear quarter panel on each side of the DeLorean. Mine were faded from black to gray and I felt this small improvement would help the look of the car.

Before doing anything, I taped off the louvre so as to protect the stainless rear quarter. This job can easily be done with the rear quarter panels still on the car. If you are going to be taking off the rear quarters for another reason, you could remove the rear quarter louvres then, but I wouldn't recommend removing the rear quarter panel just for this job. Here is the start of my tape job before I did anything to restore the louvre. Notice how gray it looks:

 After taping everything off, I took the same approach as the rear sunshade/louvre, which was to sand them down with 400 grit to get exfoliate the top layer of faded plastic. I then wiped them down with acetone to get them nice and clean.

I then applied several coats of SEM 39143 Trim Black over the next couple of days. I took my time and applied fairly thin coats, even though this pain is extremely forgiving:

Here is the final look. I am very happy with how much better it looks. I used this same paint in the rear pontoon several years ago and have been very pleased with how well it has held up all these years. I suspect that this will look nice for many years to come.