For anyone who's been watching this blog you'll know it's been a while since the last update. That doesn't mean I haven't been progressing, but I did have a very busy patch (a 4 month patch!) with work and related travel that slowed things down.
I've also just completed a rather tedious stage in the area of fitting new doors. This isn't hard in itself, but to complete it in such a way that all the panel gaps look good is another thing entirely (as at least one other reader of this blog can testify with their own project car)!
While I was cleaning up the old doors and finding more and more problems with them, a wise friend said I should simply purchase new door shells to save myself weeks of work. I could then also flog the old door shells online to recoup some money.
The new doors arrived recently after a two month wait but when I went to do the initial trial-fitting - I found the left door had a (huge) half-inch-plus panel gap from the sill panel to rear lower corner of the door. The gap between the rear door edge and the rear quarter panel was fine, the top edge of the door lined up the the top edge of the rear-quarter fine, just the rear lower door edge seemed to "run out" from the front (which was OK) to this huge gap at the rear. Checkout the following photo to see what I mean. This shows the new left hand door fitted but with the body-shell swung upside-down on the rotisserie....
To cut a long story short........ when you replace a rear-quarter panel - do so with the original doors still in place. I could smack myself for not thinking of this earlier, but this way you will notice if your new rear quarter panel has its lower lip folded over (the fold that meets the sill panel) half an inch longer (thus lower) on one side when compared to the other!!! There is simply no easy way out of this predicament. I even thought about extending the lower edge of the door to match the gap, but in the end sanity prevailed and I tediously unpicked and/or cut-through various welds to remove my new "sill & chassis-rail combo". This then gave me the room required to "re fold" the lower edge of the rear-quarter panel. Once done I then re-fitted the sill-chassis combo in the correct position.
The photo below shows the "sill & chassis-rail combo" removed (after a stack of effort) with the new door still in place.
This shot shows my "cut to size" jig in place that I used as the mould to reform the fold in the lower edge of the rear-quarter. I simply tapped the fold over with a few gentle taps from a hammer.
By the way, when your car is on a rotisserie its not as simple as just removing the old sill (and chassis-rail), I had to re-enforce the whole body structure again while doing this work!
Thankfully now though, the results look pretty good. I have nice clean gaps for both doors and a good foundation from which to complete things. And here is some extra advice for anyone fitting new doors (or sills and/or rear-quarters for that matter), just so you don't have unrealistic expectations....... You will be very lucky if you don't have to do some panel massaging of some kind to get the gaps right. All these panels I've bought new so far have had variances in them in terms of critical dimensions. Luckily for me, my "out of the box" right-hand door needs only minor work to fix a tight panel gap at the top rear door edge (I will adjust the rear quarter - not the new door), but the left-hand door still needs some panel-gap work half-way down the rear edge as the rear-quarter (front edge) is not perfectly straight (has a bulge in it).
One thing is certain even before doing these final cosmetic fixes - the new doors look fantastic so I don't regret using them (as opposed to fixing the old ones).
Here are a couple of shots of the door gaps. Sorry for the crappy photos - I'll upload better ones when I get the time and the lighting is better. But you can get an idea of the results regardless. This is the lower rear corner of the right hand door (I will sqeeze up these gaps later to match the left hand door).....
And now the new "fixed" left hand door.....
My next task will be to locate a late model donor car to find a suitable firewall, wipers, electric switches, etc, etc. This will take a while as I will need to organise a trailer, find a car, make room at home, and so on. So don't be surprised if it's a while before the next post - as I have to do all this and then install the new donor bits before uploading the next post.
As always, and comments or emails are most welcome.
