Sunday, December 13, 2020

Crew Cab

 

 Some car guys don't like four-door cars. Generally those are the same guys that use phrases like "IF IT AIN'T BLOWN IT SUCKS", "REAL CARS DON'T SHIFT THEMSELVES", "MOPAR OR NO CAR", and "I'M NOT GAY BUT MY MIATA IS", so you can't really trust their judgement. Four-doors are cool. Deal with it. But these crew cab cars do have a disadvantage. Not only will they bankrupt you if you have to buy new window and door seals, you'll then spend months replacing all the window and door seals. Which is what I did.

I actually did all of this a couple months ago, but doing the job was arduous enough that I struggled to write about it. I'm finally getting around to it, but I might just rush through it because "IF YA AINT FIRST YER LAST".


Behold! Doors.

And then I took the doors off.

Door.exe uninstalled

Removing the nasty old door panel

Scraping off the rubber with all the suppleness of a dried booger

Crusty rusty door trim.

Stripping off the butyl rubber with mineral spirits

Clean and prep for paint


 
Take out the window glass

Clean the nastiness

Steel wool to get the crud off

Cerium Oxide polish

Polishing the glass

Shiny!

Taped off and ready to spray

SEM Satin Trim Black

Vent window seals

Little bitta goopy glue to help hold the vertical vent seal in

Pain in the butt rivets on the vent vertical seal

All done, ready to go back in the door

Vent window installed

Window seal installed

Lower window channel, except that it goes inside the door

Window regulator gets finagled back up in this hole

Ta-daaa!

And then repeat four times, without forgetting any of the many many steps I left out. Seriously, I worked on this (with carpet and headliner concurrently) from April to November. 
 
 
Before

After

The last piece to the puzzle was to get the front and rear glass in. Back in the sixties when they were building these cars, they either had a wizard on each assembly line, or rubber seals that actually fit the bodies. Installing the glass is no small feat that involves a tube of butyl rubber, a piece of rope, and animal sacrifices. I'm not even going to attempt to describe the process here, if you really want to know, go look on youtube.  Long story short, I got the glass in. I'm not sure how good a seal I got, but the glass is in. What more do you want from me!?!?

Rubber

Tape and trim

Rope

black goop that gets everywhere

black goop before it gets everywhere

Back glass ready to go in

Ready for front glass

Front glass in


So finally, after an entire summer of interior work, I was able to put the interior back together and drive the car. We got an awesome weekend of 70 degree weather in November, so I took the car out several times and drove around to let the ECU auto-tune the fuel map. The car is still in need of a great deal of refinement (and an instrument panel) but it did feel really good to drive it. And it felt even better to take my small friend for a ride in "Daddycar".


All done (well, mostly done)

The best shot of the interior

I left a ton out, but you ain't missing much. Just imagine a few months of tedium and you'll get a pretty good idea of what I left out. This isn't where this story ends, but the remainder deserves it's own post. We'll get there eventually, we always do.