One thing about owning a 40 year old car is that if you look hard enough, you'll probably find something that needs to fixed or replaced. Such was my recent experience as I was working on the car. I found a few extremely minor things that I thought I would take care of while I had them on my mind.
First, the rubber seal that goes around the fuel filler was cracked and looked pretty bad. Mind you, this is yet another part of the car that only I will likely see, so I would have been fine to have left it. But I like having things in as good of condition as possible, so I decided to replace it. This seal was around $13 new from DeLoreanGo, plus I got stainless nuts, bolts, and washers to swap it. The job appeared to be a very straightforward repair, so I dove right in.
There are just the 3 visible bolts that you see around the fuel filler. I removed the access panel in the trunk to be able to put a wrench on the nut on the back side so that I could loosen everything. There was a ground wire on one of the bolts on my car, though I don't know if that's standard.
Here's the original gasket and bolts after I took them out of the car:
Here's the seal removed, just before the new one went into place:
The hardest part of the whole job was getting the new rubber in place without it bunching. Here is the new seal in place with the new bolts:
In the engine bay, there is a small panel on the back and my car's panel was missing from the day I bought the car. It either fell off or one of the previous owners took it off for something and never put it back on. I got a stainless steel replacement panel and the screws and washers and put it on. I rarely noticed that it was missing, nor did it affect anything about the engine bay, so I didn't care to replace it until now.
On the interior, one of the switches is the defrost switch. Even though I have never used that switch before, the image on mine was worn away, probably just from the friction of occasionally cleaning the car. I bought a replacement from DMCH and the old one popped right out, was easily unplugged, and then the new one was put into place. Here's a comparison of the new and old:
This next repair is hard to notice. One the passenger side rear quarter panel, at the top of the panel where it meats the louvre, there is a rubber buffer. I had replaced the driver side buffer 10 years ago after an unfortunate incident necessitated the removal of the quarter panel for repairs, but I didn't bother replacing the passenger side. When I recently washed the car, I noticed that the part of the buffer that is exposed when the louvre is shut was rough like sandpaper. The rubber was deteriorating, so I decided to get a replacement. It was around $22 from DMCH. I ripped off the old one (it actually broke in half near the louvre strut during the removal, and I slid on the new one. I don't recall if I used an adhesive on the driver side buffer or not, but I didn't for the passenger. If it doesn't stay sitting flush on its own, I may go back and add some in the future.
The old buffer:
The new buffer:
In the luggage compartment, the latch cover in my car looked like it had had a rough life. It was cracked in several places, had part of it missing at the top, and had scratches all over it. Since a replacement was less than $4, I went ahead and replaced it after all of these years of ignoring it.
The old latch cover:
The new latch cover:
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