Last month, Part 1 of this article detailed this project that I undertook to true up the body fit on my Lotus Europa in an attempt to get panel fits close to contemporary specifications. That’s typically a 4 or 5 mm gap and flush within a millimeter. It was a 90 hour project that preceded the car going in for a professional paint job. In retrospect, I am very happy I spent the effort.
Last month I gave details of how I trued up the hood and deck lid. In this installment of the article, I will cover the doors.
Rules of Engagement: (I want to repeat these rules again this month because they are so important). In order to keep this project as simple as possible, I set some engineering based rules of engagement. These set the sequence of activity for each panel, one at a time. Here they are:
- Put the panel in the opening in such a way that it maximizes the quality of the fit. (In the case of the doors, you will lock down the hinge and striker position for the duration of the project.).
- Document where you are starting from with a camera. You will also want to use a marker pen to document gap and flushness measurements right on the panels and openings so you know where you are going to make changes.
- Plan on working only one surface to fix the fit. By this I mean for any given location, plan on doing the fiberglass work on either the panel or the opening but not both if you can avoid it.
- When the fiberglass work begins, work on flushness first. Gap rectification will be second.
- Always use fiberglass cloth – never use Bondo as it may crack later on.
Right or wrong, these were the rules of engagement I used on this project and they worked very well. Now the fun part!
Door hinge and striker location: The first rule above is to get the door to fit as best it can in the opening. It’s worthwhile to look at your initial state before you start disassembling the door. Take some photos and make some measurements of gap and flushness to decide how much effort is likely to be applied.
To remove the doors, you’ll have to jack up the car probably at least 10 inches. The rocker panel trim will have to be removed to gain access to the hole in the body through which the hinge shaft will drop. Follow instructions in the shop manual for removal.
Before I removed the doors, I noted that there was play in the door hinges. They rattled when I moved the aft end of the door up and down. As just about everyone does, I immediately ordered a stainless steel door hinge set expecting this would solve the problem. I later found out this was not a wise investment.
Let’s talk about the striker first. I elected to have my strikers plated so they had to be removed. In order to do this, you have to remove a fiberglass closeout panel in the rear wheel well which is held in place with pop rivets and silicone sealer. This is the same panel you must remove in order to remove the fuel tank attachment bolts. Before I reinstalled the closeout panels, I used a hole-saw to cut access holes to the striker backing plate and then covered these circular holes with the same rubber cover used to cover the fuel sender unit. This saved myself a lot of grief later, especially when I stripped the striker backing plate and had to use regular lock nuts to secure the strikers. Yes, I had a few “Oops” moments.
Now back to the hinges. What’s going on with the loose hinges? I took the doors on and off and tinkered with the hinges at least two dozen times before I understood the real world mechanism by which they work and it’s not what is advertised. Here’s the conclusion I reached (at least for my car).
The myth is that the ½ inch stainless steel shaft rotates in the threaded bearings that attach to the top and bottom of the door inner panel. This only happens if the centerlines of the bearings can be secured in such a way that the centerlines line up perfectly. No matter what tricks I tried to employ, I could never make this happen. The result was that no matter what I did, the misalignment caused the shaft to be gripped so tightly that the shaft rotated with the door. The door and the shaft acted essentially as one piece. Therefore the door hinge shaft was actually rotating within the bushings in the car body.
Oh no! Did I waste my money on a stainless steel door hinge? I knocked myself out to try to true up the parallelism on the door inner surfaces to get the treaded surfaces to have perfect alignment. But no matter how good I thought it would turn out, as soon as I tightened up the nuts to keep the bushings in place, the beautiful alignment was lost. Failure!
So if the hinge shaft is actually rotating in the body holes, why were they rattling? A simple experiment gave me the answer. I loaded the shaft into place without the door to find that the body holes had worn out into an oversized condition. In my particular case, it turned out only the bottom hole in the rocker panel was really loose. The only option for repair I could think of was these lower holes had to be sleeved.
I chose to sleeve these holes with brass. I don’t know how long this is going to last but I had already spent way too much time tinkering with the hinges to worry. For material to do the sleeve, I went to Ace Hardware and purchased telescoping brass tubing in their hobby section. I selected the size that had an inside diameter of ½ inch.
I drilled out the rocker holes with a 17/32 drill. I then potted the tubing in the hole with epoxy. The trick here is to leave the full 12 inch length of the tube in the door opening so you can aim the top of the tube at the hole in the fender for good alignment.
Figure 5 shows how the top end of the tube is temporarily held in place using masking tape until the epoxy cured. After it was cured, the tube was cut off with a hack saw blade and filed flush to the sill.
Now the hinge and striker mechanisms are repaired and the door can be installed to the best of your ability. Make sure you remove the weather stripping before you do your door adjustment. For this project, the priority for fit was to get the window frames to fit as best as possible in the opening. The reason for this priority was that fixing window frame fit was presumed to be more complicated than working the body of the doors and the body of the car.
With your project, have fun getting the door to fit properly, I say with a sly smirk. At least your doors won’t be rattling around when you secure them.
Document your fit along the perimeter of the openings. This is rule number 2.
Figure 6 shows how the documentation was done on this project. Masking tape was placed along the perimeter for a surface upon which to write gap and flushness measurements. In this photo, the driver door window frame had already been trued up for flushness (rule number 4). The numerical markings on the masking tape represented the current gap in hundredths of an inch. During this project, the A pillar on the driver side had a warp in it. To true up the gap, it was decided to build up the in-side of the door opening until the A pillar trailing edge was arrow straight. Boy did that end up requiring a lot of final contouring to get it right. Good call but a lot of work.
Let’s stick with the driver side for a minute. Figure 7 shows the finish fit of the leading edge of the door. Of course, all fiber-glass work was done with the door off. You can see that the priority in this region was to work the fender rather than the door. A substantial amount of fiberglass had to be added to get the body to match up with the door.
Figure 8 shows the trailing edge of the driver door. It turns out both doors had a slight twist with respect to the body. To mitigate this, the sanded area was built up with the most build up happening at the lower rear corner. Because fine fiberglass cloth was used to build up this area, the door was actually marked up like a topographical map to indicate where layers of fiberglass cloth would be added. This worked like a charm. As mentioned last month, all sanding was done with a long sanding block.
Figure 9 shows the passenger side door. On my car, it was necessary in this one area to remediate both the door and the fender. This is because both sides of the gap curled inward and required build up to get them to align.
Figure 10 shows how the fender edge had to be built up substantially. This is the area between the two arrows. The washed out edge was built up with fiberglass cloth so there is no danger of chipping the surface as there might have been if simple Bondo had been used.
Lots of hours were spent doing the final sanding and sculpting before the car was turned over to the body shop for painting. In all I invested 90 hours of work and it was worth it for this project. As mentioned last month, I held my breath when I received the finished painted car because I wasn’t sure if the fit would change. It didn’t, so there was a Lotus god watching over this project.
See you in the field next year and you can see for yourself how the body fits turned out.
