Had a bit of a family emergency, so I’ve been lax for a week or so. Back at it.

From a paint perspective, all that’s left is the doors. As predicted: a joy to disassemble. Spent most of Saturday afternoon on them, and after about 2 1/2 hours on the drivers side door, the passenger side only took about a half hour. The big puzzle was how to remove the fixed triangle window and attached window guidetrack. I finally figured out that the easiest way was to remove the back guidetrack first so that the window pane wasn’t so tight against the front one. The rivets that hold the bottom of the triangular frame to the rest of the assembly seem to have given up the ghost on the drivers side (nothing really holding them in place) so I’ll have to address that before the reassembly. Worst case scenario is that I use the one from my doors from my parts car, but I’m trying really hard to keep those intact for future use by either myself or someone else.

Question: did Jensen have elves on the payroll to mount the door handles? Getting them removed wasn’t easy to say the least, and I am not looking forward to trying to reassemble them after the paint is done. Is there a special tool or something to loosen/tighten the bolts? Accessing everything through the opening on the interior of the door is painful to say the least.

Anyway, hit the doors good with the Zinsser paint stripper on Sunday and scraped off about 2/3 of the existing paint layers. At this point I think I’ll move on to the stripping wheel on the grinder to finish them up tonight or tomorrow (waiting for it to stop raining so I can do it outside and not add any more pink dust to the garage).

Also, now that I have officially disassembled everything there is to disassemble during this project, I called Delta with my laundry list of “stuff” that is either missing, broken, or basically useless. Mostly rubber pieces to replace the rock hard ones I removed (or broke in the process) such as the interior and exterior window wipes, the door seals, door handle gaskets, etc. and lots of push fixes for badges and trim.

My body shop friend took the front bumper stainless panel and is going to sub it out to his English wheel/metalworking expert to work out the dents. He seemed pretty confident that he could get it really close to original, and for the $150 he’s going to charge it seems well worth it as I don’t think I could replace it for that, even if I could find one in the first place.

Oh, and my gas tank should be done in the next couple of days.

I *think* I’m still on target.