Monday, November 3, 2014

Land Rover windscreen leak, door latch fixed

It finally rained here in California, YAY!  I was able to go out during the start of a shower and find the leak causing the puddle on the drivers(left) floor mat.  I sat there for a few min and then it started, it was coming out under the retainer for the glass in several places. The worst offender was dripping onto the windscreen holddown and then onto the floor. Even when it was happening the clear water was hard to see.


While it was raining I tried pushing down with a putty knife the sealant on the outside of the glass but it helped not.. So I had to wait a couple of days for the rain to stop and things to dry up some.
Today was the day so looking at the outside seal I could see it was cracked and seemed too small a volume.


In my stuff from long ago I have some seal that was called Duct Seal by the guy who gave it to me. I have had it about 40 years in a bag. It is pliable, sticky, and works great. I set up myself with a hair drier and dried out the outside channel and heated up the duct seal then pressed it in with a putty knife.

Once pressed in I cleaned up the look with the putty knife so it would look better.

It took about a half and hour to work my way across the bottom and fill in the gap. Hope it stays!


The other thing getting done today was ever since I put my doors on the drivers door has needed a huge slamming to get the lock set so I could lock it with the key. I set out to figure out what was going on. I tried adjusting the stiker but nothing was working so I took it off and tried it in the latch. That is when I found that it wasn't fitting correctly but I couldn't see where the "jam" was. So I looked for witness marks, The rubber was hitting the side of the latch so I ground that down, no joy....
    Next I started taking measurements to see if the latch and the striker were a good fit. The latch seemed a bit tight so I got out the Dremel tool and smoothed out the lip, that helped a little but enough to let me know that something else was binding.
Something I couldn't see.........Then I found it one of the screws which holds the rubber on the striker was 1/32-1/16" of and inch too long. So I ground it flush with the Dremel and tried the striker in the latch by hand and VIOLA! It worked! Then I reinstalled the striker and it's all good now. Whew!

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