Jamagin

My TA is a 99 and mine also has a crack in it.

Kingp321

I have a crack on both sides of my 30th.. same area but not like yours, the drivers side is starting to get there.

For the person who asked if this happened after replacing the window motors.. I would have to say yes..

JL ws-6

iTrader: (50)

It happened to mine, and the door panels have never been off... so that shoots teh removal as being the cause out the window, literally.

It is a GM **** up, just like the checking primer on the passenger's rear quarter on my car, the fact that the hood doesn't line up right with the front quarters, pretty much everything wrong.

I blame all these problems on that **** St Therese plant in frenchie land canada... those idiots up there made a mess of these cars, 100% of the quality issures aren't with design, it's with the monkey's that were building them.

Sadly, the new camaro is gonna be built that that same rathole. That, insures 100% that the car will have **** for quality, they will fall apart, just a matter of time, and the car wil have a bad quality rap within a month of them being released to the public.

Gm should have took a bulldozer to that place the day it closed, and moved any new camaro assembly to bowling green where the vetts it built, then at least the car could be built right so this kind fo **** wouldn't happen. And if the union is the reason the canada plant ie being reopened...... well there you go.

I love my transam, it is a awesome looking car, and is probably one of the best performance cars for the buck ever made, it's just too bad that they had to leave it to be built by a bunch of hacks in a country with a damn maple leaf on their flag!

JL ws-6

iTrader: (50)

On another note, I will be pulling the panel off the car, and will be attempting to repair the crack by removing the staples, and then using an adhesive, somethign like shoe goo or another adhesive to reattach the weather stripping piece to teh door panel, and will attempt to repair the inner part of teh panel in a similar fashion. When I get around to doing it, I will post up pic's of what it comes out looking like. Providing it works I will do the passenger side on my car before it cracks as well.... unless it decides to crack before I can get to it.

jay_99z

iTrader: (5)

I don't think it means a damn thing where they were built. TA's crack, Camaro's don't. Sounds a lot more like a design flaw. I don't know what Canuck stole your girl but damn.....you seem bitter.



My girl's WS6 is cracked on both doors. Two of my other friends have cracks in theirs too. Gonna pull them off and epoxy or fiberglass the back one of these days.

JL ws-6

iTrader: (50)

I've seen more flaws with these cars that are directly related to the manufacturign processes that are used it's not even funny.... no canadian stole anythign from me, I jkust think they should be left to hockey, not something as important as building an american icon automobile.. it's something that should be done by people that acre, american workers, in an american plant! I would take great [pride personally to be building a car like this, knowing how happy alot of guys would be with such a killer car... those clowns up there in canada can't drive something like this for less then 2 months a year, so it's not a car they care about!

TA guy

iTrader: (1)

Hey, don't knock Canada because GM choose to build a chincy interrior. Heck, the door pannels probibly aren't even manufactured in Canada. And trust me when I say that most American Union automotive factory workers don't care either. You wouldn't either if you saw what they have to do all day, boaring, tedious, repetitive, work. Fortunately, it is also difficult to screw up, and if the car was designed properly it wouldn't matter who put it together. Unfortunately, due to cost considerations, you get cheap parts which will break no matter who put them on. The door pannel issue was also present on the third gen TA/Firebird FYI.

My door pannel just cracked when someone hit my door recently. State Farm wanted to put a used pannel on the car. My bodyshop was unable to find one (had 3 different pannels shipped in) that wasn't cracked in the exact same place so they paid for a new one. So I would say it is pretty common.

JL ws-6

iTrader: (50)

Maybe true, but the method of stapling the rubber to the door panel = hack.

If they had any wuality control at all, someone would have seen that and made a change. A simple adhesive could have ben used to do the same task and it would have been perfect. That is what I personally plan to do, attach the ruber to the door panel with automotive goop, it is easy to work with, dries quickly, and lsts a really long time, and when you have to redo something with it, it is easy to get off of pretty much anything. If they hafd put the rubber on the panel that way from the factory, this problem wouldn't even exist.

Not sure who was doing the design on that or who thought it was a good idea to staple molded plastic, but they need a lesson in structural design, and maybe sould take a class on the tensile setenth of molded plastic, probably save GM alot of headaches in the long run.


Any idea what the new door panel cost when it was replaced with a new one? I was comtemplating just going ot the dealer and buying a new one and right from the get go redo the panel's staple job from the start.

TA guy

iTrader: (1)

The cost of the pannel was over $500 from the dealer.

The problem is that the strip (it's the metal component of the strip that causes the problems) is rigidly attached to the plastic trim pannel and does not allow the plastic to expand and contract uniformly due to the different expansion rates of the metal vs the plastic. This combined with a plastic that gets brittle over time causes the problem. It is a larger issue than using staple vs glue. You need to attach the strip in a way which allows it to float relative to the plastic. Of coures when you look at the way the pannel is molded on the inside, you can see that it is possible that pannel could crack regardless of the weatherstrip attachment because of non uniform expansion and contraction in the plastic combined with brittleness. I'm just saying I can see several potential failure vectors, and in the end your right, it is a bad design. An inexpensive vinal overlay (as is present in almost every other car they produce) would have corrected the issue, but would have made the car $50 more expensive. Attaching the rubber/felt srtip directly to the plastic (no metal backer) may have also corrected the issue (of course it may create other issues) Good luck preventing yours from cracking.

JL ws-6

iTrader: (50)

After doing some research, I think the automotive goop is going to work, it has good elastisity (bad spelling) qualities so it should expand and contract good enough to prevent any further cracking, and hold the existing crack together pretty good too.

I'll post up results when I have it done.

02RedHawk

iTrader: (17)

Is the RH Replacement Door Panel P/N 12458755?

Ebony, Leather, '02, 10-speaker system.

Need some help! Local dealer is about as helpful and accurate as Stevie Wonder judging a beauty contest.

Gun5

iTrader: (37)

got a 94' formy, 98k miles been sitting in garage for 4 years of its life but still no cracks at all on either panel