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.