DHC report nr. 31; Door handles & heater

At the moment I am spending a fair bit of my spare time on preparing parts and get them ready for when I can start with the reassembly of the car. Like the door-handles, after they were coated (black of course) first thing to get sorted were the small bump-stop rubbers for the handles. As new ones seem to be unavailable I rummaged through a friends “rubber-thingies-magazine” and came up with two rubbers like the one on the extreme right;

Compared to the original ones on the left, they are way too high. But that was easily rectified with a pen knife and some sanding paper. The exact thickness was a bit of a guess but in the end the handles sit pretty nicely aligned with the surround.

With the rubber stops sorted it was time to clean the various parts;

And assemble them;

For good measure I swapped the lock barrels left to right (assuming that the driver’s side was used much more then the right hand side).

With the door handles sorted I started on probably the biggest challenge of the restoration, rebuilding the heater unit. Main reason I pulled it apart was the fact that I wanted to get rid of the A/C bits, and the foam covering on the different flaps was in a rather bad shape. So I got myself an assortment of EPDM (closed-cell-foam) rubber from a local rubber company. And after all the bits were coated I started with refurbishing the flaps;

Cleaned the ventilator assembly;

And started with riveting the ventilator housing back together before I ran out of pop rivets;