Man, I’ll be honest- this week flew by and I didn’t really have time to do any physical work on the cars out in my garage at all! But in the spirit of keeping the streak of Friday posts in 2021 alive, I thought I would make a quick post about some parts I recently picked up for the coupe.

If you remember my post a couple years back about replacement moldings and weather stripping for the S13, I’ve been trying to collect as many of these items new from Nissan as possible to have on hand for the eventual day that I am able to get my hatch painted. Naturally, after deciding to embark on the journey of building a second S13, I needed to source all of those items again for that car’s eventually paint job.

I’ve had most of the items that are still available brand new stored away for the coupe for a bit now, but the ones I have are essentially all the same as the hatch. The final area that I had been dragging my feet on picking up the parts for was the windshield. Fearing it would soon be discontinued, I finally managed to bring myself to order those items a couple weeks back.

While the windshield molding on my hatch could be worse off, the one on the coupe is pretty trashed. Most glass companies these days install a generic rubber seal in place of the factory unit as many are discontinued, expensive, and from what I am told a hassle to install properly. While this looks just fine and is absolutely the more cost-effective option, I was reminded once again by that strange tick I have developed over the years that I needed to have the factory molding.

I can’t speak from experience when it comes to what the installation process is like or if this includes every item that’s needed, but from studying schematics these are the items I have deemed necessary: 72750-52F10 – Reveal Molding, 72725-35F10 – Reveal Molding Retainer, and G2G16-89901 – Windshield Dam. I do know that the molding can be removed without pulling the glass based on my experience pulling one from a parts car a while back.

These items are fortunately all still available stateside which makes life easier. My go-to for parts like this is typically the fine folks at NissanParts.cc, but occasionally their shipping costs are just too high to make it all the way to me from Washington. I sometimes go with Courtesy Nissan Parts for that reason and they have been amazing to work with over the years as well. You really can’t go wrong with either option in my experience!

I’m planning to revisit my Molding Madness post soon to take another look at the restoration items I have collected for both cars, provide some part numbers, and update the information a bit with a couple items that have since been discontinued. It’s still one of the posts I get the most questions and messages about so I thought it might be worth revisiting sometime- so look for that in a future post soon!

While I didn’t end up in the garage this week, I did make some solid progress on my plans for both cars prior to the weather improving this spring. I am trying to find a good balance of ambitious improvements while still ensuring the cars are ready to be enjoyed as soon as possible. We’ll see how it all comes together.

Thanks as always for reading and have an excellent weekend!

Damon