Door gasket

David R. Birch wrote:

Usually there are plastic "rivets" with a thin wide head that goes into a hole in the gasket (which is hollow to allow it to squash) and a compressible stem that goes into a hole in the door. The gasket holes can get torn over time, especially in climates where frost or ice can build up in car door openings and prying open your door can rip the holes in the gasket.

One solution is to find a salvage yard that either parts out their cars or lets you into their yard to take off parts. That's how I found replacement gastkets for all doors that were very cheap but still in good condition. Totalled cars can be relatively new, so the gaskets haven't gotten much wear. The problem in removing the gaskets to prevent damaging their holes is that the studs or rivets that hold them to the door get damaged. I bought a set of retainer studs for each door, and that cost more than all the gaskets. It's possible when working under nice conditions to remove the gasket by flexing sideways to stretch the hole to get off the retainer stud's head and leave the stud in the hole in the door, and then do the same to put the replacement gasket on the stud's head. Even if you choose to try to reuse the torn gasket, you'll still need to get the stud head inside the hole so the gasket is against the door instead of spaced away from the door by the stud. Even a stud in a torn gasket hole is better than removing the stud and not having one in that position at all.

The problem is that the gaskets could stick again due to icing. After putting in the replacement, I would periodically wipe the door frame and door edges to clean them (since car washing doesn't touch that area) and apply wet a rag to wipe silicone lubricant along the doors, frames, and gaskets.

Also to prevent tearing the gasket holes if the gaskets still happen to stick to the door frame, I applied a dab of adhesive between each retainer stud. The used gaskets weren't in perfect condition, and I figured to have something a bit more robust to hold them in place. They have adhesive specifically to hold those gaskets to the door; however, I didn't save any, so I don't know what I happened to have used. I asked at a car parts store and used what they recommended. You don't want some high-temperature adhesive used for engine gaskets. In fact, you want an adhesive that is usable from 120F (for those really hot days your car sits in the sun) down to subzero temps during the winter when it needs to still be pliable to hold onto the gasket which still moves. My only recollection was that it was butyl-based adhesive. Might've been similar to this stuff:

I bought several tubes because I replaced gaskets on several doors. Passengers often just yank on a door to open it when siezed by ice instead of gradually working it open, so even the rear door gaskets got damaged. If you're doing just one gasket and only a portion of it, like along the bottom, a smaller tube should be enough Just make sure to thoroughly clean the door and gasket and then wipe with isopropyl alcohol before applying the adhesive. However, you might consider doing all doors by applying the adhesive between every retainer stud for every gasket on all doors. Sorry, I never had to work on this again, so I don't know if that adhesive can be scraped off to reapply should the gasket get even more abuse. When looking at the door gaskets that haven't been pulled away from the doors, you should be able to tug on them to see if they come away from the door. Don't tug too hard, just enough to see if you're tugging at a retainer stud or between them. Could might also be able to slide a plastic knife between the gasket and door to see where are the studs and see that the gasket is not glued to the door. The manufacturer makes them replaceable, so they need to be removable.

That's a spam signature added by your choice of anti-virus software. You should configure it to not spamify your posts. Fact is, the e-mail and newsgroups scanning is superfluous as it offers no more protection than the on-demand (real-time) scanner, so you might want to uninstall their e-mail/newsgroups module. They deliberately do not use a legitimate signature delimiter (which is dash-dash-space-newline, not dash-dash-dash-newline). They don't want their spam hidden by clients that can hide a legit signature block. Don't volunteer to become their spamming affiliate.