Showing posts with label Door. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Door. Show all posts

Friday, September 26, 2014

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.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

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


Monday, November 11, 2013

Doors

While I was waiting for my "SAAB Electrics for Everyone" book from Mark Ashcraft to arrive I set to work on disassembling the door and prepping it for resto work too.

I don't know if dingus before had gotten into one of the doors and decided it was over his head (Unlikely, I imagine he thought very highly of himself) but one of the doors was barely held together at all. I think I drilled a total of 4 rivets out of it, that was all that was holding the fiberglass to the frame. For comparison the other door had 6 rivets and hidden screws through a mounting bracket holding it on. The more I dig into this car the more amazed I am it stayed entirely together while trailoring it home.



Fiberglass and door are cuddling no more. This is the same door -the poorly assembled one- as I'm opting to leave one together while I work on the other, that way when it's time to put it together I can get an idea of what it's vaguely supposed to look like.

Eagled eye viewers will see my book arrived... Sunday night is not the time to start wiring.

Bullet mirrors, I have another loose one (complete) in my bag of parts, I think it's the partner of the non painted one. Also notice one is a parabolic lens and the other is flat in the pic above. Again we see some questionable decisions. Why would you paint a chrome mirror, and why would you put said painted mirror on when you have a pair of chrome ones? Because you're a dingus, that's why.

Documenting where stuff goes when it needs to go back.


So dirty. Don't worry, I'll fix that.

more screws, and again lots of places where screws should be, but aren't

Hello silicone, my old nemesis.

Have I mentioned how much dingus likes silicone? I think he used a whole can/bottle/jar/bucket on this one window seal. I probably cut off a pound of seal off before I could jimmy the window loose.

After everything was out of the door (window regulator, lock, latch, handle etc) I noticed that the bottom portion of this door frame was warped out and bent. This of course will not stand, enter my newly created bending chock. I measure the dimensions of a section that wasn't warped and sawed a 2x4 to the proper dimensions. Popped in into place under a warped section and beat the hell out of it with the flat side of a 2 pound hammer.

looking warped AF

Implement of constructive destruction

Chock in place


it's not perfect, but it's level and a lot better than it was.