Caradise Project Car Part Deux: Doorcards & Headlights
Our fix marathon continues on our ‘Project Gwen’ our 3000GT VR4 Spyder project car. The theme has been that each fix is way harder than predicted. What YouTube says takes 10 minutes is taking hours, or days sometimes.
The last three fixes should have been ‘in theory’ simple and taken perhaps 4 hours in total or less: The doorcards and weather strips had to be replaced for better ones without gashes and cracks and one of the headlights, on the passenger side, was letting condensation in, so I found a used one from Ebay to replace it. The weather strips are no longer available from Mitsubishi, some guy in China sells them for the OMG price of $280 for a pair. This is basically for two strips of plastic and metal y’all. This car is gonna bankrupt me.
I got the doorcards used for also $250 for the pair, and one was not quite as pristine as I expected, because some of the vinyl was separating from the middle portion near the door handle. Still, they were way better than the ones the car came with, with cracks at the top, gashes and very brittle.
So, I had to disassemble the doorcards, that use 9 screws of 6 different types(!). I made a paper drawing to make sure I could get the screws back in their proper places. I re-sealed the plastic, Then after much struggling, I got the old weather strips off the doors. And proceeded to install the new ones. Easy right?
Nope! Once I installed the weather strips on top of the door, I could not put them flush into place. To make matters worse, the windows wouldn’t roll back properly and stopped midway. What the hell? I tried reposition them again, same result. Totally frustrated, I took the new strips off again and compared them to the old ones… for some reason, the new strips had 3 plastic pieces to guide the window glass, but the originals only had two guiding pieces on the sides. The middle guiding piece wasn’t needed. I later found out this is a Spyder-only quirk, all regular fixed coupes have 3 pieces in the weather strip.
However, these plastic guiding pieces were riveted! I removed the plastic middle piece easily by prying them off, but the tiny fragile rivets refused to leave. I had to cut them with cutting pliers and then sand the leftovers down so they wouldn’t get on the way. Finally, after doing all of that, 3 hours later, the strips fit flush into place and the windows went up and down without issue. I had the door cards and window strips in place.
The headlights were also an entire day project. The one I bought needed some polishing, despite looking OK-ish in the Ebay pictures, it was very cloudy and the Lexan plastic definitely needed a polish.So I took off both the headlights to polish them.
I bought two different 3M polishing kits, so that I could use 500, 800, 1,000 and 3,000 grit water sanding paper, then cover them with the protective varnish that 3M expects you to do via a tiny little wipe. Took an entire 6 hours to polish both headlights, thank God for my power drill, but working indoors in my living room made a mess all over the place. Don’t be like me! But I was happy with the results.
After all that circus, and waiting overnight for the lights to dry off. Removing the headlights was easy and putting them back was mercifully easy as well. Thankfully this was not a battle.
Anyway, I still came victorious, the weather strips finally fit, the replacement doorcards were installed (took me 30 minutes to put the screws on their proper place, since some shifted around my screw ‘map’) and the headlights look clear, cool and the passenger side headlight no longer lets water in! Making progress is painful but satisfying.
Next is the audio system, hoping to get the CD changer running again, and then will have to wait a while, we need to find a shop to do the timing belt. Miles-wise is not ‘due’ yet, it was changed at 60K miles an car only has 89K miles, but it is a 13 year old belt (actually two belts) so its gonna be EXPENSIVE. Then it will need paint for sure or a respray at least. Anyone want to sponsor us, please?
