Rusty door panel screws are alot of fun but not that hard to fix, lets see how!
I pulled the door panels today because I saw that most of the screws were stripped or rusted out. First thing I did was removed the door handles with my trusty cheap handle clip remover. For those who have never doe this before you will want to go to your local parts store and get a door handle clip remover. You slide it behind the handle and pop out the C clip that holds the handles on.
They if your panels screws look like mine or worse follow along and see what I came up with today. First take a 3/8" drill and drill out the head for the screw untill it falls off. If your panels are covered like mine you will want to start with an 1/8" bit and work your way up untill the head comes off or you will damage your panels like I did. I knew my panels were rusted beyond repair so I just went at it with the 3/8". Once your panels are off you might be able to remove the remaining screw with Vise grips like I did. Even know I still had a 3 out of 8 screw nuts that were usable I decided to replace all of them one I figured out how I wanted to do it. I just took a center pundh and poped out the remaining 3 nuts. Then to replace fix the nuts I used these panel nut made for wood. I ground off the four spikes off the back so they would sit flush on the doors. I also ground a small area around all the areas I wanted to fix including one Door arm rest nut that was sitting in the bottom of the door
I then used my large center punch to hold the nuts in place and also to protect the threads from weld splater. I just tacked the nuts in two to three places then ground them smooth and painted them so they would not rust. I had a set of plain black door panels in my attic so I put those on for now untill I can find some decent CST panels to put back on. From start to finish it only took about 30 minutes per door from start to finish and broke the bank with a whopping $4.00
Kevin
LFD Inc.
Build total $882.69
and 35hrs