Re: [DML] Door/Roof seals - pop rivets or screws?

["Walter Coe" <Whalt@xxxx>]

I'm planning on drilling out the rivets on mine while I have the door off
the car. And like you, I don't want to replace the seal using rivets
either, so I have thought about this a lot. (maybe too much).

My favorite idea so far is elongating the rivet holes making the new side of
the holes big enough to take the head of a screw (just like the back of a
picture frame meant to slide over a nail head). Then for screws use small
stainless steel carriage bolts. These have square shafts at the base of the
head that would hold into what is left of the original rivet hole without
spinning. Then you align the holes in the gasket over the carriage bolts
and fasten with nuts from the bottom. The advantage to this is that it
would be very simple & easy to change the gasket afterwards. If a thread
strips, you could always drop a new carriage bolt in there.

Another maybe not so crazy idea is to use 3M emblem tape. I used a 1" wide
strip of this (trimmed down a little) to put my door molding back on. I
test fitted the molding that goes rearward of the door handle using just a
small piece of this tape. I tried to pull it off the next day and found
that it was on there better than the factory original tape. I had to use
solvents to get it all off. (Both the door and the molding.) Perhaps a
strip of this would hold the door gasket on? I wouldn't try this using the
OEM configuration gasket since the stainless bracket would be useless.
Perhaps this would work making a gasket from a thick/stiff strip of rubber.
Maybe a wide piece of aftermarket door molding would work well here (and
look stylish too :-)

Walt