One Door Down

It dawned on me that despite still waiting on a few parts I actually had enough of them on hand to put the driver side door back together. This was the door that had suffered water damage previously, so the first step was to recreate the missing vapor barrier. My oldest son helped me out with that by copying the pattern for the existing barrier on the passenger side and cutting it out of a contractor garbage bag. Our bags were in the 5 MIL thickness range which was good enough for our purposes.

The Volvo HT-204 speaker mounts the car had come with were not in great shape. I had to glue a few things together an instead of pop rivets to hold them on I used small nuts and bolts. This would make it easier to take the off again if I ever decided to change them. Unfortunately the configuration of the screw holes that attached the actual speakers to the HT-204’s was very unusual. The original speakers were approximately 5.25″ in size but the holes for the mounting screws were in very different places. This required me to snip and bend a few pieces of the speaker’s metal. That’s always a sort of scary process, but after some fiddling and fussing I got the speaker in securely enough. After that it was just a matter of attaching the barrier, connecting the speaker, mounting the the panel, and then adding the various handles and fixtures.

And there we have it! A complete, if somewhat dirty, driver’s side door. Now to find the guide casings for the other three and I’ll be set.