Greetings all. I've come to seek the collective input of the community in helping me with the ease of settling my mind on various issues of purchasing a OCT 81 DMC-12. First my background: I am a former owner of 04463 which was a painted white DMC-12 when I bought it at age 19. I was a young kid that put all his money into buying a painted car and the first thing I did was paint strip it. Various other improvements were made over my 5 years of ownership but being a young kid I eventually ran out of money and life called for other things such as a house insurance and so on... you know adult stuff. Anyways I sold 04463 and over a series of transactions it wound up in London. Anyways ill cut to the chase. Here I am 10 years later and I have a house, a garage and money to start over again. Not too far away from me I found another DMC-12 for sale...a painted DMC-12. Its a Ferrari red dealership painted car with having been with the same owner since the late 80s. He treated it gently and drove it just to work and back mostly. Over the years it only got up to 37K on mileage. I've looked it over and drove it and she gets up and goes but this is where you all can come in and help me out. Over my years of absence from the DeLorean ownership scene I've not really kept up on the community knowledge and so on, so here are my questions and concerns....
1. Binnacles? its been 10 years... where are they? Whats the best cover options for cracked binnacles? are there fiberglass options out there?
2. On the drivers side trim panel the armrest has fallen off. How repairable are these to reattach (under normal circumstances)
3. The original catalytic converter was taken off and some common garage replaced it with another. is it possible to remove this and replace it with a DMC specific catalytic converter? (DMC website doesnt seem to have it for sale) does this hurt the originality of the car much?
4. I plan to remove the red paint. Ive removed the paint form a DeLorean before and in the end it looked great. But what are the odds with cars out there that had the dealership use something like an orbital sander and ruin the stainless for the painting process? I'm worried Ill chemically remove the paint and find severely scratched up panel that not even a regraining will fix. This is really a no go for me on the purchase and I wont truly know until I spend big money to find out whats under the paint. But what stories are out there about this?
The car is a project but by no means a bad DeLorean, it drives, cools, brakes and work just fine. I can get it for a high 20K price range which makes it such a tempting offer. especially since the cost of DeLoreans seems to have gone up on average over 10 years. Thanks all.