Door Repairs

I took a week of vacation the week prior to Memorial Day expecting to get a considerable amount of work completed prior to the heat of the Texas summer. Unfortunately, I didn't get as much accomplished as I expected. Between the early heat and the non-stop customer calls and urgent emails, I spent maybe two full days on the car during the week.

My biggest accomplishment was the repair of the drivers side door. I would image that I spent a total of 24 hours this week on this one door. The first step was installing the door on the hinges and aligning the striker plate. It takes some time to get the right combination of the right number of hinge spaces, hinge alignment, and striker plate alignment. Once the door opened and closed relatively easily and had a relatively good door gap, I started on the lower 4" and bottom. With the door on the car, I aligned and scribed a line on the door where the lower skin would be installed. I flanged the door and spot welded the skin to the door with spot welds every 3/4"-1".

The door bottom was more difficult. I had to remove the door again from the hinges and clean the inside structure of the door. The bottom attaches to the skin with a rolled edge which I spot welded every 4" or so. The door was installed back on the door and I spent several hours trying to the get the right alignment of the bottom of the door edge to the rocker panel. Once I had this alignment, I spot welded the inner door structure to the door bottom. It will still take a little filler to make all of this perfect but will be less than 0.030"



These doors were in terrible shape and I've heard that most people would have started with better doors. The primary reason I reused them was the fact that these are the original doors with the original SN stamped inside. I have even found that the front to rear door gap is pretty good and will take very little filler to finish off.

A couple of things I learned. Never take the doors off by unbolting the hinges. Leave the hinges in place and pull the hinge pins. Proper door gap is 3mm which is about 0.118" This will be consistent for the doors as well as the hood and deck lid.

More photos of the door repairs can be found here. I have found that there are no real publications to tell you how to do this. I posted a couple of messages on the 356 Registry Talk List and found a couple of guys who have done this before and offered plenty of help.