Today, I finally finished one of the doors on my car. It has been sitting for a couple of years now and my goal for this year is to get it running enough so that I can send it home to my brother.
When I originally planned to do this project, I was torn between just cleaning up the interior and keeping it as stock as possible, or to redo everything and make it just look better with paint and stuff. I decided that it would be much cheaper and easier if I just redid everything instead of trying to get the car to "showroom stock" look.
First thing I did was remove all of the accessory parts. If any of you don't know, there are c-clips that hold alot of the parts on doors like the window crank, door handle, etc. You can buy one of those c-clip removal tool or you can use a cloth to "pop" the c-clip out. If you want to try that, just get a fairly thin piece of cloth like a shirt, slide it under the accessory like the window crank and wiggle it around until you feel it get caught on the c-clip. Keep wiggling and pulling on the cloth until the part comes off.
I carefully removed all of the parts. The really hard part was removing the vinyl backing that goes on the door. It is held on by clips that are attached to the backing of the vinyl. It is easy to break those clips as some people with newer cars will attest to. Imagine trying to do that when the car is around 40 years old!! I know there is a tool for that, but I didn't have one handy, so I just had to be really careful.
I bought some vinyl spray paint, white primer, black paint, and white paint. I sprayed all of the accessory parts with black paint, sprayed the doorskin with the vinyl paint, and sprayed the inner door with primer and white paint.
After everything was dried, I replaced all of the parts.
Notice how the redid parts look compared to the old door. I am still kind of torn about the stock vs. modified look but since I am poor, a clean looking interior will have to do over a bone stock restored interior.
