What have you done to your DeLorean today?

[Michael]

Yup 90% of the labor in a paint job is under the paint!

[Lwanmtr]

Got my hood and front spoiler back on today...

FrontDone.jpg

[iflights]

Replaced my inertia switch & installed it at the '82 relocated position next to the hood pull. According to the service bulletin, this should have only taken 30 minutes. It took more. No surprise there.

[Michael]

Replaced my inertia switch & installed it at the '82 relocated position next to the hood pull. According to the service bulletin, this should have only taken 30 minutes. It took more. No surprise there.

Doc. Are you tellin' me the DeLorean Fanatics....are full of shit?

[CFI]

Replaced my inertia switch & installed it at the '82 relocated position next to the hood pull. According to the service bulletin, this should have only taken 30 minutes. It took more. No surprise there.

Recall labor times are based on average mechanical skills. More importantly, they define what the company will pay for the repair to be accomplished, regardless of how long it actually takes. This is why most auto techs do not like warranty repairs.

[RIUM+]

It's taken me a lot of work of measuring with a lux meter & modifying lenses, but I've finally replaced my headlights with LEDs that I'm fully satisfied with. These have daytime running lights built-in that consume only 0.9W each (only the two outer DRL strips illuminated), the low-beams consume 15.0W each (only the two outer illuminated on low plus DRL strips), and the high-beams 30.7W each (all 4 illuminated on high plus DRL strips). This is around a quarter of the power on low-beams and 60% of the power on high-beams but they're MUCH brighter - not in a single blinding spot, but over a wide spread. The light output is tightly controlled to be ~10% below the legal maximum allowed in Australia by the ADR, and aimed within a couple degrees of perfectly optimal for its falloff pattern. You don't want to know how many pages of spreadsheets worth of measurements I took while trying to optimise everything and modifying the existing units, heh. There's still more fine-tuning I could do but I'm happy with it for now. I also re-grounded my headlights too while I was at it, to give the old Halogens as much of a chance as I could with my comparisons. Re-grounding gave me another 0.8V or so to the headlights, which really isn't much but hey now you can't blame that for the Halogens seeming dim by comparison.

Apologies in advance for my cheap $140USD phone over-exposing lights during night-time photos.

The bulbs themselves:
IMG_20200810_153741c2.jpg

Low-beams comparison, Halogens on the left, LEDs on the right (not properly aimed, they were just in while I was testing):
IMG_20200604_145451c2.jpg

High-beams comparison, Halogens on the left, LEDs on the right (not properly aimed, they were just in while I was testing):
IMG_20200604_145501c2.jpg

Real-life use case (practice run during a hired filming event) in a nearby well-lit shopping centre car park: engine off, low-beams on. The most important thing to look at here is the woman lining up the shot on the left - her knees are brightly illuminated but the rest of her is mostly lit from reflections off the concrete, not the lights themselves. These lights won't be blinding anyone!
IMG_20200814_200817c2.jpg

Finally, I took apart, cleaned, and painted white the insides of the indicator lights. Painting a reflector white usually means less light directly ahead but more light to the sides - something I thought would be good given how recessed they are, at least until I can get around to doing the front side marker flashing mod. But more specifically, the reflective chrome coating had completely disintegrated off one of my indicators and you could see that it looked darker than the other one, so if I wanted them to match my choices were paint both or buy a new one. I haven't found a good chrome paint locally so white it was.

The cleaned-up good-condition "chromed" one on the top with the painted white one on the bottom for comparison:
IMG_20200604_212100c2.jpg

[Col Bennett]

Better than when it left the factory in 1981. Two months of meticulous refinishing work on my DeLorean door hinge/torsion bar area.

The last photo shows how it looked when it left the factory, just as I started chipping the messy silicone off. Needless to say that if someone spent as much time as me at the factory, they would have been building one car a month.

[jawn101]

Better than when it left the factory in 1981. Two months of meticulous refinishing work on my DeLorean door hinge/torsion bar area.

The last photo shows how it looked when it left the factory, just as I started chipping the messy silicone off. Needless to say that if someone spent as much time as me at the factory, they would have been building one car a month.

Wowowowowowow. That looks amazing. Mine looks...very much like that before pic, but with new seals and Heninger’s brackets. Nice, very nice work.

[Col Bennett]

Wowowowowowow. That looks amazing. Mine looks...very much like that before pic, but with new seals and Heninger’s brackets. Nice, very nice work.

Cheers Jon. Really appreciate that mate. Yeah, it's been bugging me for a while and it was finally time to take it on. Definitely one of the most laborious and mind-numbing jobs yet, but it's always a nice moment when you get to this stage. Phew!

[Lwanmtr]

Wow..very nice...if your bored you could visit..ad bring your brushes...lol