Still alive

I have all of the body panels off of the D and I am currently taking everything off of the engine that I can. The car is much lighter because of this (it is sitting higher). I'll be splitting it in a few weeks so stay tune for that.

RUST!

The driver's side seat (Just driver's seat?) well that seat came out pretty easily. The bottom of the seat is pretty rusted. I am not sure what I am going to do with these little pieces of history. But replacing them with new delorean seats is out of the question because the cost is so high. Just for new leather it is $500 and as we can see, that is just the tip of the iceberg. Aftermarket lightweight seats are in the $400-$600 range. Bottom line is I am not set on the seats for this car, anything that is black will do nicely.

The passenger's seat was not as easy to come out. I am betting that the car was not level and there was more water sitting on the passenger's side. Here is what the rails looked like.

Getting that seat out took some force. The whole thing was rust-cemented to the floor mats. After I was sure that force was both needed and safe I then got a 1x4 to use as a lever. The lever was quickly broken. I upped it to a 2x4 and it came out.

Condition of the flooded seats

I got some new info on this car. I heard this second hand, but the rumor is that this car was stolen then found in a creek. Some of the pictures make the seats look pretty good, but in reality they are destroyed.

Here is what they look like initially.

Yeah, these have got to go...

Door Vent Solutions

This blog software likes to upload the pictures backwards, but as you can see by the finished product, all of the gaps are filled by great stuff and then finally sealed with duct tape. Not just any duct tape, black duct tape. Basically all of the cracks were filled with "great stuff" (whoever named this stuff never got it on their hands). After the foam was trimmed down flat, I put the tape on it. Once everything gets put back together (in a few years) then I hope that it makes the HVAC work more efficiently.

Door Vent problems

The doors on the delorean have an vent that gets air from the dash. This is nothing new, many cars have this setup, but the delorean's setup is so leaky that the air does not make it through. Since this is a complete rebuild we might as well fix this problem before it even starts.

It is laughable at how badly the air duct lines up with the vent.

Door Rebuild 2

The passenger door is rebuilt, but not perfect just yet. Right now it will open but it takes some effort to get it to unlatch. I think once I trim the metal around the door latches it will close and open easier. I don't plan on putting the interior anytime soon so there will be time to adjust the rods. The next post will show the door vent upgrades.

Door rebuild 1

The passenger door was just mangled. This picture does not really show just how bent up some of the parts are, but the main level latch part had a big bend in it and the rods were a bit bent up too. Also the main door handle holder thing was bent down too. I found one of the front latch rods on the floor of the car all rusted. It took a while to sand down all of the oxidation, but it will be worth it in the end.

The latches worked pretty good, they did need to be cleaned up a bit. Some of the plastic is broken off on the top half of where the striker pin connects. On the door it's self the metal is bent up a bit and the plastic around the striker pin has some deep scratches on it. I will have to look into adjusting the door so that it will hit the pins cleaner.

Here is the door stripped down a bit.

Overview pictures

Here are just some additional pictures

Willy Wonka's delorean

I swear parts of this car were made by some one who thinks graham crackers are acceptable building materials. I love the stainless steel panels, I just wish they had the same mentality about their fasteners. Overall Deloreans end up aging relativity gracefully. The body is fiberglass and the panels are 304 stainless steel. It would have been awesome if they went with the stainless steel chassis and an interior like a modern day lotus elise, but at this point I just wish they used screws that didn't turn into dust.

Later on in the project just about everything that can be powder coated, will be powder coated.

The stuck door

After some research and help from the guys over at DMCTalk.com I was able to get into the door.

I found these two sites useful

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92JJQG57t1s

and my post

http://www.dmctalk.com/showthread.php?p=239259#post239259

I took out the interior (here you can see the top half is out), http://www.dmctalk.com/showthread.php?t=17029 , it was hard with the door closed and the window inoperable, but it is possible. I'll just need to get some new little plastic trees. Also taking out the bottom half was difficult. The trick was knowing that the handle that has the pull strap is attached is attached to the door frame. The interior section, that needs to be removed, is overlapped by the edge of this handle. After you get the interior piece over the handle, then it comes out relatively easily.

After the bottom half was removed it was pretty easy to take out the rusted up and frozen solenoid. Once that was out the door lock button worked and I was able to unlock the door and open it. Success!

Pictures

0883 arrives!

After a long wait, 0883 arrives from Bloomington IL. Funny thing is that the car was originally from San Antonio TX, and now it has been shipped back here.

The car has a salvage title and needs extensive work. The car was flooded out and the engine (not that I care) is trashed. I found a mouse nest inside of the throttle body. I don't even know how a mouse would crawl into that. The interior needs major work and a lot of the screws and bolts are rusted out. The passenger door's interior has been mangled and the driver's side door is locked shut.

I keep telling the car that it has a home now so it should stop smelling homeless.

Overview of the project

I have always wanted to rebuild a car, but there is only one old car that I would want to spend time on. The DMC-12. I spent many years looking at these cars online and one day I found Dr. Dave Delman's delorean http://www.electricdelorean.com/. Initially, I didn't like the idea of an electric delorean. Why modify a classic? Then it hit me. The car was suppose to have a V8, then they just chopped two cylinders off and made it a v6 with the 90 degree crank shaft positions making it an odd-firing V6. Stock you get an amazing 130 hp at the flywheel. While I cannot find the exact number right now, but I remember the hp getting to the wheels just being laughable. Road and track rated the car at a 10.5s 0-60. Even with modern upgrades to the engine, a "stage II" gets this 0-60 up to about 9.5 seconds.

Dr. Delman's delorean is faster than stock and it's carrying about 800 lbs of batteries. Also, the big thing with electric vehicles is that the batteries just can't dump all of their energy and when you do you end up with less total energy.

So here is the project. Get a car that really needs some attention, take years to fix up everything knowing that it will never run a gas engine again. By the time the car is all ready to go, then either there is new battery technology or (what is more likely) is that the LiFePO4 batteries are cheaper.