TVR Vixen Series 1: Complete door rebuild: Part one

Tired of not making any progress on the car for the last couple of years, towards the end of last year I decided to pull down the crappy old shed that I did most of the work in, moved loads of stuff out of the garage into a new shed and re arranged one end of the garage into a workshop. Then I built myself a new work bench and got on with the car.

I clearly have some sort of mental block with the engine as I STILL haven't sorted it out, but I have made progress on the doors and so I thought I would write that up.

Here, for effect, is what the worst one looked like when I got the car.

The inner section had been cut off in order to expose the mechanism. Still, its a good illustration of how the mechanism goes together! The hinges were shot, pins seized in the casting and now wearing into the outer steel brackets.

Note also the blue paint over luminous pink! Blue seems to have been the final colour of the car before it was taken off the road, but at some point someone decided it was a good idea to paint the door jams luminous pink, I imagine to try and stop people driving into the open door. Probably seemed like a good idea at the time!

The winder mounting nuts were rusted solid and all of them broke off in the threads. The door opening mechanism was rusted but otherwise OK. The door handles were both badly pitted and pretty much U/S. The locking handle - drivers side - had a seized lock (series ones only have one door lock!).

Oh, and see that rusty remnant on the second picture? that's the remains of a pair of brackets for holding and positioning the door-glass frame. Its more or less dissolved.

Both the frames and the glass were there, but one frame needed a bracket soldering back on.

The bits of fibreglass cleaned up OK! The mess at bottom left appears to be where someone has tried to laminate the door glass support to the front panel, possibly in an attempt to provide a bit of stiffness. This might have ben why the door was cut up; in order to get the frame out of this lump of glass fibre. The foam in the middle is where the bottom of the second leg of the glass frame touches the front panel. This is to stop the glass channel banging on the back of the panel and causing crazing on the front. It will have to be replaced with something little more robust.

Re-assembling the two halves wasn't technically difficult; its just a question of tacking the halves together with ali strip and self tappers and then applying fibreglass mat behind to hold them. Access is poor and now my arms are covered in lacerations from the edges of the fibreglass. It was very difficult to get at the back all-round, and the repair took ages.

The whole front panel had been smeared in filler for reasons unknown. There was no sign of damage to the panel from the inside, so I am guessing the filler was an attempt to repair some crazing. This all needs to be rubbed off and then the door will be re tissued before painting. But that will be dome later. Right now I'm just concentrating on fixing the mechanicals and getting it back together, to check if anything is missing.

Onward and upward.......

The frames were rather distorted, maybe due to someone pulling on them to open the door, and took an age to straighten out. I found some bits that seemed to be part of the frame in the boxes of bits.

This is the frame to go with the door I repaired. Its a bit distorted and it has a bracket missing

The bracket was present on the other frame and helped me identify one or two of the odd bits that were in the box of nuts and bolts. Just goes to show, never throw anything away!

I was able to solder this back on quite easily. I was a bit daunted by the prospect of soldering aluminium, but I found an excellent on-line video and with a little practice it worked out OK. I used "Alu-flo 440", which has built in flux and flows beautifully once you get a bit of practice in.

The drivers side frame was in better shape, but was missing the bottom part of the quarter light frame, luckily also in the box, along with a further useful bracket. The drilled and radiused cross-piece is an alloy trim that holds the frame to the door top, via 3 x 3/16" machine screws, and adds a lot of stiffness to the frame.

So, to repair of the mechanisms. First off, I remade the brackets that hold the bottom end of the frame legs to the door. Its just two pieces of 1 1/2 inch angle, made up out of steel sheet with captive nuts brazed on; two to hold one angle to the door and two more to allow the second angle to slide over the first and be locked in place by short bolts. These bolts are accessed from below the door through two holes in the door bottom for adjustment of the frame.

This bolts in to the door like this

It attaches to the ends of the runners with two small nuts and bolts that fix the distance between the two runners. As one angle slides over the other the runners are pushed outward and adjust the window frame in or out at the top.

In fact, having got this far, I realised that the bolts that hold the ends of the window frames would be much better as captives, so I brazed in a couple of stainless 3/16" machine screws. This saves much swearing when re assembling the window frames.

The photo above shows the rough assembly in place.

So to re assembling the window frames.

The frames where a little distorted and required a fair bit of adjustment to get them back straight, but having done this, I turned my attention to re glazing the quarter light.

The quarter light frame comes apart at the bottom, to reveal a pair of mild steel brackets (rusty one on the left, new one on the right). The bottom piece is attached to these using very small countersunk screws. These appeared to have been brass on my car, but were of course rusted in and just stripped out when I tried to remove them. So I made new brackets drilled and tapped to M4 and replaced the screws with stainless machine screws.

The single hole in the cross piece seems to be for a screw that holds the frame to the aluminium cross piece, for rigidity. Oddly, its in different places on each side and I haven't seen these on other series ones. Probably a later fix.

I sealed the quarter light glass into the frame with 3mm closed cell neoprene (thanks Adrian!), which slides easily into place with bit of silicone grease.

The odd square shaped bracket attaches the framework to the drilled aluminium cross piece. Must remember to tidy up the weld!

The window glass runs in the framework, supported by a woven canvas strip, 22mm wide that folds into the runners. I got mine from Woolies Trim as 22mm bonnet tape. Although its close, its not the correct stuff, which actually has three ridges, which support the glass. Despite looking everywhere I have been unable to find this tape. The bonnet tape seems to work.