1988 80: replacing outside plastic door trim

[tnas@dtpdirect.nl (Tom Nas, DTP Direct bv)]

Hi fellow Audians,

Last weekend I did a small (...) job on my I'd postponed for the last
couple of months for lack of time/motivation.

Six months ago I'd foolishly tried to squeeze my pride and joy through a
gap too small for that purpose, just because I was in a hurry and couldn't
wait for the guy who had parked his car in the wrong place to return.
Instead of hitting this a**h*le's car with my bumper I touched a concrete
post causing some deep scratching to the plastic trim on my rear door, as
well as slightly denting the door under the trim. @#$%^&!!!
Knowing car manufacturers, I feared I'd have to buy a complete set of trim
strips ($$$) to replace just the one piece I needed. Imagine my surprise
when I heard I could buy just the piece I needed, for a quite reasonable
price! (about $10 I think)  The strip was in stock and arrived a day later.

Outside temperature finally reached reasonable levels a couple of weeks ago
(bad summer!) so I decided to take the dent out and replace the trim. I'd
read some postings on the list about these strips coming off by themselves,
so I figured it would be an easy job. WRONG!!
At first I tried to get the strip off with my bare fingers. No way. Then I
tried a screwdriver with a taped off end. It didn't budge. Hooked up the
electric paint stripper thingy, figuring that would do the job easily.
Aaaaaargh! Three and a half hours later I had the thing off in *very* small
pieces, using the paint stripper gun on high setting with some care to
prevent paint damage. It had been stuck on with double-sided tape of
aviation grade, combined with some black putty that had set very hard
indeed.

The dent came out easily by just pushing in the right places with my bare
hands. I put the new trim strip on and it looks great. Taking the inside
door panel off (and putting it back on) was really easy, and I was very
much impressed by the way this thing was made. It looked like new inside
the door, even after eight years in our climate. There is no noticable
difference in colour between the original trim and the new piece- this is
VERY high quality plastic. For those of you interested in the procedure of
removing the inner trim on the rear door of the 1987-1991 Audi 80/90, I've
got the -very simple- procedure written down. Just drop me a line and I'll
e-mail it over.

Next job: installing keyless entry/central locking. This probably will not
be as easy to do...

Bye,
Tom
1988 80 1.8S FWD

 _______________________________________________________________________
   Tom W. Nas, graphic design                        tnas@dtpdirect.nl
   DTP Direct bv                              Voice +31 (55) 5 790 799
   Apeldoorn, the Netherlands                   Fax +31 (55) 5 790 125

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