Really Glad I Saved This Part – Small Repair Win!

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I have to come clean. Pun Intended. I seem to go through phases every couple of years where I purge stuff. You see where I’m going with this. There’s a fine line between keeping good parts and just keeping junk. My wife thinks that most of what I keep that’s related to my project cars is the latter. HA! And it never fails that when I just let go of something I’ve had for YEARS, I’ll end up needing it within two weeks of it leaving. Par for the course there.

Many times I’ll sell something or if it is something small and seems insignificant, throw it away. Granted there are a lot of times where it was for the better because I got some cash or freed up some room. But there seems to be that two out of 10 moment where I’m like… “Dang.. why did I get rid of that??”

When I bought this car this part was laying in it and that’s because it had a broken tab. It’s the hatchback door cover. Because it is a black interior piece I set it aside. It’s since bounced around inside the car or sitting on another car in the way. I did think about getting rid of it because it was just in the way at times but I thought that I would regret that. So I kept it. the issue was coming up with a simple solution for that broken part.

The specific broken part was one of the two studs that the screw goes through to hold it to the hatch. The part wasn’t damaged at all around that area. It was a clean break. That was a good thing. All I had to do was recreate that stud for the screw to go back through. The stud acts as a spacer to hold the panel the correct distance from the hatch. You can see one of the two studs in the picture below.

90 Foxbody Mustang Hatch Cover Panel Repair 2

Enter in the ahah moment. I was at Ace Hardware and found a couple of plastic spacers that seem to fit the bill. They were the exact diameter of the broken stud but they were not the correct length. So I bought two of them and cut one down and just taped them together to recreate the stud.

90 Foxbody Mustang Hatch Cover Panel Repair 1

There was one thing I had to do to get the screw to seat all the way down. I had to use a recessed angle drill bit to get the screw head to sit flush with the surface of the cover.

90 Foxbody Mustang Hatch Cover Panel Repair 3

Once I was done with all of that and installed the cover with new plastic push pins and hardware from our friends at National Parts Depot <- tap for direct link. I noticed that there were a couple of parts that had some deep gouges with plastic strands hanging off. I pulled out a fresh razor blade and took to it to remove the eye sores staring at me.