Doors On

One of my fathers coworkers recreated my rotted door-gutters in 1/8" stainless steel from scrap they had laying around, so when I got them they just needed to have holes drilled to fit in the doors. Well if you didn't know stainless steel isn't easy to drill through. After burning through 5-6 bits I got all the holes drilled, painted them with the same enamel/ceramic mix I used on the trunk pan.

for those of you who don't know: all metal work should be done barefoot/flip-flops. It's the only way to do it. Don't believe me? Check out the editor of Hot-Rod magazine...

Once the paint had dried it was simply screwing them into their spots on the door sills.

With the headliner done, the door sills painted, and the new rain gutters bent, cut and drilled, there was nothing stopping the doors from going on. So that seemed like the thing to do. First I taped all the edges up with painters tape so any unintentional metal on metal contact wouldn't remove paint. I used some spare headliner as padding during the fitting process as well.

Lined the hinges up in their slots and hammered the pins through. Then it was just a matter of adjusting the door's position by tightening or loosening the 24mm nuts on each hinge. Once they were moving in and out freely without hitting anything I removed the padding  (left the tape for now).

The next step is putting the stopping hardware back together so that the doors only open as much as they're supposed to. If you don't install this stuff right the doors will open too far and go straight through the fiberglass skins, not good. I didn't have any of this hardware except a single shim to use as a guide for the other one. So I created a new shim for the passenger door and made a pair of tiny pins by shortening a bolt and grinding the top of it down. Now I've just gotta figure out how to imitate the rubber stoppers on the other side...

That little bugger