Door removal and glue
At some time the doors have been left swinging in the wind or carelessly opened, and I noticed some cracking of the doors skin at the front, where it has hit the hinge. I thought I'd do something to stop the cracks spreading. Note, only time will tell if my method is a good cure, but I thought I'd post this anyway as you can see how the door comes off.
Allow a couple of hours to remove repair and refit a door, including cleaning up the hinges, finding dropped screws and missing tools etc.
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The door electrics need to be unplugged. This model has electric windows and a small light in the switch. The connector was under the dashboard end:
It looks something like this (the grey stuff is bits of sound insulation stuck to it):
The cable pulls round the door pillar through a channel near the bottom hinge:
The door hinges are held together by a small hex set screw. 4mm hex key needed:
There isn't much room, I used a balldriver because it can be angled:
The doorstop can be sprung out of its holes with some large pliers if you don't mind scratching the paint off it a bit. I put some wax rustproofer on it afterwards:
Wondering why the door opened so wide, I took off the door restrainer, the M6 nuts fell off inside and were recovered through the door bottom, plenty of holes there. The white lines below show the areas which had been strained and pulled out. A little treament with a big hammer flattened them back again.
The nuts are not captive, and there is no access since the door panel is glued, so to put the restrainer back I glued the nuts behind, took me a couple of attempts with a hot glue gun. You can see the right hand nut is in place:
This is the door restrainer, seems in good order:
The hinge pins were dry and rusted a bit, some scraping and a little grease required.
Getting the top screw back in was fiddly, I couldn't get enough fingers in place, so I used a magnetic pickup tool to get it started :o)
I've got another page of pictures to post if you're interested in the glue job on the back of the panel, click below to see them.
I did the driver's side door a little later, the fittings and procedure were exactly the same, though the hinge was stiff and I used a trolley jack under the door bottom to persuade it off, rocking the door slightly open and closed to move it. The door hinge doesn't squeak any more which is a bonus! One of the M6 screws in the door stop wasn't original, being a plain hex set screw and nut instead of the shouldered & serrated items. I shortened the screw a bit, it was a bit long, and re-used them. I failed to notice one of the cracks had sprung sideways slightly and now is glued in this position, leaving a slight ridge.
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