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Automotive
This section attempts to chronicle the repairs and upgrades to my 1981 DeLorean DMC-12, informally known as Ein.
Now that the exhaust noise is fixed, I have to hunt down all the other noises I can hear now. One of them was the T-panel, which was resovled with a little bit of 3D printing.
Patrick and Bill Shea are the owners of the only privately-owned gold-plated DeLorean from DeLorean Motor Company itself. I went with North East Region DeLoreans to look at this car up close.
My steering wheel started rattling and sitting low. I went through all the usual suspects before trying to twist the cage, at which point it snapped in half in my hands. A quick bit of welding and it was all set.
I already had a halogen conversion, so doing an H4 LED conversion was as easy as replacing the bulbs. It’s still pretty easy if you have the stock sealed-beam setup, too.
A weird squeaking sound from my rear suspension led me to a failure on the right shock tower that needed to be fixed. The solution was my impact gun, some steel plate, a drill, and a 3D-printed die.
I need to be able to charge my phone in the DeLorean. I’m too lazy to plug in a cable and there’s no good place to rest it anyway, so I 3D printed a holder for the Apple MagSafe charging puck that replaces the ashtray.
I took my new suspension and exhaust for a test drive, but cut it short when a burning smell and a soft brake pedal told me that something was very wrong. A brake caliper had seized, but it wasn’t entirely clear just what had gone wrong.
My muffler had gotten rather loud, and then it started rattling. The former was a huge gash in the side of my muffler that I didn’t notice until I fixed the latter — the catalytic converter had broken apart. I wound up rebuilding most of the exhaust, and making it much quieter in the process.
I went into this with the goal of replacing the rear shocks with the KW coil-overs, but soon discovered that one of my trailing arms was basically made of rust. This led to a stainless steel trailing arm upgrade.
I had already refurbished the front suspension a couple years back, but I wanted to completely eliminate the vibrations I was seeing, so I went even further and replaced the entire thing with brand new, modern performance parts — billet alluminum LCAs, adjustable UCAs, KW shocks and resurfaced rotors.
My windshield washers stopped working, which wound up being a bad pump, bad harness, leaking bottle, and plugged washer nozzle. I fixed all of that and upgraded to dual nozzles mounted in front of the windshield, replacing the one on the wiper arm.
The DeLorean got louder than normal recently. This turned out to be a series of exhaust leaks involving broken welds, loose bolts, and worn flanges that all needed to be repaired or replaced.
The throttle position sensor on my 3.0L engine never worked properly, so I decided to address it with a custom 3D-printed mount for the valve cover. I tried PLA, PETG, and ASA filaments to see which would work best.
A new video, and a quick summary of the failures of the transmission linkage in my DeLorean.
I started noticing a coolant leak under the driver’s side of my car, to the left of the engine bay. It turns out that I had let a pipe rest on the frame and worn a hole in it, which had to be replaced. Bad routing from a former project also compromised the water pump hose, so that had to go to.
The paint on my windshield trim had chipped away over time, and it was finally time to take it off and repaint it.
A quick swap of a bad O2 sensor wound up becoming a days-long process of waiting for tools, heating parts and finally removing the header and drilling out the bad unit. But it worked, and the new sensor is in reading good.
A squeaking alternator on the drive home led me to a broken bolt on the alternator mount. Not sure how that happened, but I replaced it with a new bolt and installed a spacer I’d mistakenly removed from the Camero alternator, and now it’s good as new.
There was a still a little vibration in my front suspension, so I decided to give one of the front lower arm support kits a try. I went with DeLorean Europe’s setup, which (possibly combined with some minor sway bar maintenance) seems to have almost completely eliminated my remaining vibration issues.
My driver’s side window regulator died. Replacing it requires taking apart a good chunk of the door, and replacing the regulator itself is a pain as well. But after some tinkering and dealing with a short, I have a working window motor again.
DeLoreans don’t have the best sealing between the radiator and the fans, and some common home window and for weather seal can significantly improve cooling by filling those gaps and making sure that the fans suck air through the radiator, not from around it.
Modern cars have an IR barrier in their windows to help keep the heat out, but the DeLorean predates that. Tinting the windows can help keep your car cooler, so that’s what I did.
After almost getting stranded because my starter wouldn’t spin, I replaced it with a new Eagle Premier one. This was pretty straight forward, although I did have to remove my aftermarket header to get it out.
I had a best case scenario for a suspension failure: I got safely off the road and just needed a new ball joint. No major damage, no injuries. Just an inconvenience, and a lot of help from John Dowd.
In a (fairly successful) attempt to fix some vibration coming from the front of my car, I decided to replace the front suspension bushings, ball joints and shocks. This involves a couple of presses, a bunch of replacement hardware, a spring compressor, and a fair bit of time, but I got it done.
After replacing a grinding alternator, I went for a drive and broke my throttle cable highway. Luckily, I was able to use a tuning trick to get my EFI’ed car safely to a parking lot without being able to directly control the throttle. A quick trip to Home Depot got me a new cable and some clamps that I used to fix it in the parking lot.
On a trip to a Back to the Future collection, my cooling fans failed. When I got home I found a melted and burned out fused, and replaced it with two separate inline fuses to reduce the chances of this happening again.
In order to get the rear of the DeLorean aligned, I had to swap out the perfectly good upper link arms with new adjustable ones. It was not as easy as it should have been, but became much easier after I got a new, more powerful impact gun.