My DeLorean Journal

Today I’m excited about having the whole day to work on the DMC. Woke up early. First thing I did was swap the gas struts on the doors. The driver side was weak and had a hard time holding the door open but the passenger door strut still had some strength to it. I was not expecting the doors to be so heavy. I mean, I knew they were heavy but I was surprised when I took the strut off and had the weight of the door on my back. I was worried that maybe the torsion bars were bad, but they held the door open the 4-5 inches that I read about on the forum. 

Next, I pulled off the headliner piece from the driver door. The fabric was ripped off and the plastic trim clips were broke. I'll head to the fabric store later today.

Most of the trim snaps on the upper trim on the driver side door were broke so I made a trip to the auto parts store to pick up some new ones. FYI- the ones for the door trim are the "Ford" ones. I took the upper trim off and replaced all the retainer pegs. While I had the upper trim off, I noticed the window was off the track. I tried to get it back on track but was unable to. I thought I would have to remove one side of the track and that it would have to be done from the bottom of the door - nope. Do yourself a favor and don't remove the lower trim if you don't need to. I could not for the life of me figure out how to get it off. I had all the snaps out but something was holding it in. I found out it was the handle. You have to use a long Philips screw driver and remove one screw from each side of the handle. So I got the lower trim off and found out that there is no way to get to the window. So I start putting it back together and find out those handle screws come out a LOT easier then they go in! I tried for more than a half hour to get the screw started in the handle but I couldn't do it trying to hold the handle up and pull down on the edge of the trim and keep the screw in the hole and the screwdriver in the screw. Ugggh! Talk about frustration! So I finally put the handle on first and bent and flexed the trim around it, which isn't easy because there are two metal tabs on the handle that are supposed to hold the trim in

So I finally got the door back together then looked at the power window and decided I would tackle that later. The window goes up and down okay, not straight - but okay.

So the next thing I looked at was the tail lights. I noticed the night before that the driver side brake lights were not working. I bought some new bulbs while I was at the auto store. I was surprised to see that the tail lights are just held in with 6 screws - mine had 2 on one side and 4 one the other. I wonder how many people have had taillights go missing. I’m going to try to find some security screws, (hopefully stainless steel), to replace the mixed-matched set I have.

When I disassembled the tail lights I found that there weren't any burnt out bulbs. I did a continuity test between the light socket and the connector on the board - it was good. I plugged it into the connector and tested it from the socket to the connector - that was good. Then I thought, 'Oh man, there's a wire broken somewhere between the brake switch and the connector.'  I thought of one more test to do. I took the other tail light off and did a continuity test between the brake light wire on both the driver and passenger side connectors - and that was good. So I knew that a dirty/faulty connection was to be blamed for the outage.

I took my scratch awl and *slightly* bent the connectors in the plug down, verifying what side actually touches the copper on the board - this should help put more pressure on the copper strip on the circuit board and make a better connection. I also took the awl and *lightly* scratched the surface of the copper on the circuit board to remove the oxidation. I re-installed the tail lights - something is still wrong with the passenger side reverse light. I'll look at that later too.

I washed the car and the wife and I took it out for a ride.