Pianos, pulls and bezels.......

8:29 am - Saturday - October 10th - Seal Rock, OR - 54° F, 100% humidity, wind 7 mph out of the west.....heavy cloud cover, and raining.....forecast high for today is 59° F.  Rain all night long, and continues raining as I write.  On this date in 2010 we were in Santa Fe, NM at Santa Fe Skies RV Resort with our good friends Cindy and Forest.......↴

It has been a while since I worked on multiple home projects in one day, but Friday was one of those days.  Things break, and you've got to fix them.  For instance, on Thursday when I got home from my supermarket run I went to close the door of the VW and the door pull broke off in my hand.....doh!  This is a common problem with the 1998-2001 Beetle.  The door pulls on these model years was just a bad design, and made of plastic, naturally.  Additionally, TLE had mentioned on more than one occasion recently that the piano hinges on the stove cover had become almost frozen over time making it difficult to open.  Then Friday a few of the dozens of screws came loose....okay, time to address that problem.  Finally, I have noticed that the chrome bezels which surround our headlights were beginning to pit somewhat from the dense salt air here at SRRVC, so I needed to deal with that.

First up was the stove cover piano hinges (there are two of them).  I retrieved my Porter Cable impact drive to remove 22 stainless steel screws, so I could take the piece with the two piano hinges out to the 'garage' to work my magic.  I used some Marvel Oil penetrating oil to lubricate both hinges, and over the next 45 minutes managed to get them both working smoothly again.  Next up I needed to find 22 new stainless steel screws which were slightly larger in diameter, and slightly longer to replace some of the screws which had pulled out of the wood.  I keep a large supply of all types of screws, and was able to find in that supply just what I needed.  Once everything was properly lubed, and cleaned I took the pieces back into the Newell and reinstalled them.......

......word to the wise....if you want to have a happy life take care of what your wife wants done first!  Am I right, or am I right?

Next up was the task of a temporary fix to the broken drivers side door pull.  I've ordered an aftermarket fix, which is widely used.  The aftermarket solution to this bad design is to install an anodized aluminum door pull in place of the plastic one.  I've ordered a pair of these door pulls from an eBay seller, and should have them in a few days.  I had to remove the remaining plastic anchors which had broken off rom the actual handle.  This involved a little cutting with my Dremel tool, but I got them out and then using super glue reattached them to the handle.  After letting the repair cure for a few hours I reattached the handle.  I just hope it lasts until I get the new ones.....lol....

Door pull temporarily fixed....we'll how long 'temporary' is....

.....while the door handle repair was 'curing' TLE and I took a walk down to Seal Rock Beach which was shrouded in foggy mist.  In spite of that it was not really cold, so I just wore a short sleeve t-shirt.  We were back within an hour, and I returned to my project list.  The next thing up was to figure out how to cover those chromed bezels around the headlights, and also the taillights.  My first solution was to use a roll of 2.5" wide blue masking tape to completely cover them.  This 3M product is water proof, so I spent about 40 minutes covering the chrome bezels with the tape.  It this doesn't work I'll move onto another solution......

Front

Rear

.....we'll see if this first solution does the trick.  We're going to get a lot of rain over the next week, so how waterproof this tape is will become self evident pretty quickly.

Once that was done I reattached the repaired door pull handle, and it seems, at first blush, that it will hold as long as I am gentle with it.  That was the extent of my project day....at least that was as far as I wished to go on Friday.  There are always more things which need attention, and I will get to them eventually.

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