It's been difficult for me the past couple of days to get quality time with Sofia. My daily FC RX-7's auto trans decided to self destruct, so I had to deal with troubleshooting and then sourcing a new-to-me tranny. But I was able to squeeze in an hour or two over the weekend and get some stuff done.
After cleaning up the mounting hardware for the rear moldings, I went to work making a replacement mounting screw. The pics below show how I did it:
Broken screw:
Broken screw chucked up in my vise:
A little cutting fluid helps in drilling out the old screw:
Ideally I'd use a drill press to do this kind of work, but my press is down, so a vise and hand drill had to suffice:
Successful screw extraction!
Using a larger drill bit to make a counter sink for the new screw:
Larger size bolt (that still fits through the holes in the body) is screwed into place:
Finished mounting hardware:
So with that done, I mounted the driver's side and passenger side. I hate that you have to remove the relay panel to get access to the passenger side, but I survived. Once I put them on, I noticed with dismay that the door and rear moldings didn't match up. In fact, they were off by a mile. The reason was that the butyl tape I used for the rear quarter window trim was too thick, so the trim didn't lay close enough to the body. Since the rear moldings go OVER the quarter window trim, this was throwing off fitment. Irritated, I pulled everything off...the rear molding as well as the quarter window trim. I had to be super-careful getting the quarter windows off as to not break anything. I managed. I pulled the butyl tape off the quarter trim and used a tube of 3M urethane to attach the trim. I HATE urethane. It's messy as hell...gets all over everything. I had to change my gloves several times to minimize contaminating my paint job. I still made a mess that had to be cleaned up with brake cleaner and elbow grease. I wore gloves and I still had that crap all over my hands when I was done. BUT, it works. Really well. Here's the evidence:
tJ