1/19/01 Working on the Doors

The best laid plans…I ordered the window felts along with the window channels last week in hopes that they would arrive in time for me to take them up to the shop and install them today. Well, they didn’t arrive at work before I left on Thursday, so they’ll have to wait until next time. I decided to make myself busy by rounding up some screws and nuts I was missing for both the window felts and the transmission. This required a trip to “The Home Depot.”

For those of you who are not from the U.S., “The Home Depot” is a hardware, home improvement, lumber, plumbing, carpeting, and plant store rolled into one huge warehouse. These inherently American sized “Mega” stores are replacing all the small hardware stores across America, so we must all venture into them from time to time, no matter how small the item. The problem is they have always seem to have so much stuff, but never exactly what I need for the Ferrari! I was looking for 6 mm metric nuts to secure the shift linkage, but in an isle full of every fastener imaginable, the one small drawer of metric nuts had only four sizes without a single 6 mm nut! Luckily I found the flat-head sheet metal screws I needed, but it seemed hardly worth the trip for a $0.79 cent package of screws. I left the store resisting every urge to wander about the rest of the store, knowing that it would be at least an hour before I would be able to escape!

I ended up going to an auto parts store to get the right nuts for the transmission, so much for a “mega” store!

The chrome window pieces need to be screwed into place first before the felts can be attached. That is what the flat-head sheet metal screw were for. The holes in the chrome strip were beveled so the screws would sit flush with the strip so the felt can be laid over it. With the screws in place, and secured, now all we need to do is wait for the felts.

As I was surveying what kind of weather stripping I would need to buy, I looked at the bottom of the left door to find another type. It had been painted over, and would have to be replaced. When I went to the right door to inspect what kind of shape it was in I found there was no trace of a channel. Normally, I would just have assumed that the right door bottom had rusted out, and when it was repaired, the weather-strip channel was not replaced, but when I looked at another GTE, it was missing it’s right door channel as well. Hmmmm. Coincidence? Anybody out there have a GTE want to go and have a look to see if they have this weather-strip channel on their right door?