Door Latches, Stoppers, and Locks

Now that the doors are on the car, it seemed pertinent to make it so they wouldn't open too far and mess up the freshly repaired door-skins, and not fly open when I'm going down the road. So I dug all the hardware for the latches and door stoppers out of my various bags of parts.

*NOTE* The following should all be done BEFORE the door skins go back on the doors. You'll want the doors to be able to open beyond where they will when you're done (like 150 degrees) and getting to the internals of the door from the outside makes things 100 times easier!

Pro-tip, anything that comes off the car for any period of time longer than 1 hour, bag it and tag it. You will regret not doing it later when there are thousands of tiny bits of metal with no easily discernible meaning or function.

I found that one of my door stoppers was missing. It didn't come with the car, as I get into these smaller system this is becoming something of a trend.

So above is the stock stopping bushing. Not pictured is the shim that fits in the slot you can see in the backing plate. Well the good news was I had one stock one to base my new stopper on, all it is: a rubber grommet with a metal backing plate (to protect the rubber from the pin that hold the whole assembly in). So I cut out a new shim, drilled holes in it for new pins (a bolt/nut) and instead of a square chunk of rubber I just used a thick grommet from the hardware store.

That was the easy part. This assembly slides into a small slot in the bottom hinge from the door sills. In the top of the door hinges is a small slot with a hole to put the pin through and mate the shim to the door hinge, you then push the shim through that slot in the door sill and close the door. Then with your patented SAAB mechanic's left/right arm with 2 to 3 more universal joints than the normal human you reach in the speaker hole to the recess where the shim has come through and slide the stopper on with the backing plate facing the front of the car, slot in the pin (bolt) and test it. 

The stopper should do just that, your door should no longer be able to open more than 70-80 degrees. Any more and when you open the door you'll gash two huge holes in the front of the door skin.

Next up was door latches, good news was the latches on the doors were already installed, if you don't do this when the doors are off the car so long as you don't have the windows in yet you should still be OK. The only other component is a striker plate for that latch to grab onto, it just is held to the frame by 4 crown bolts threaded through a backing plate with threaded holes to match, Think a big block 4 way nut. This process is tricky by yourself trying to get the bolt through the right hole and into the right spot on the backing plate, and then thread it without anything falling.

The strikers mount with the rubber bushing up facing down (see diagram at the beginning of this post). Once the strikers are on as tight as you can get them with a screwdriver (they're holding the door shut, there is no "too tight" long as you don't destroy the fiberglass) you'll want to check the fitment of your door. Gently try to close the door and pay special attention to where the latch meets the striker.  Adjust the door in the gap with the two large nuts (24 mm?) that hold the door frame to the hinges, there is a large thinner nut on the hinges on the outside of the door frame on the hinges that you'll really be playing with for these adjustments.

This is a process that is one part insight, then a bunch of parts guess and check. You can know which nut is gonna change what, tightening the top nut will pull the bottom right corner of the door up and right, tightening the bottom one pulls the same corner down and to the left. Obviously adjusting them the same amount moves the frame side to side in the frame. You'll know when they're aligned right when you can get the door to latch smoothly with a light swing of the frame, you may have to make slight adjustments to get the door-skins to line up with the body later, same process.