Complete door rebuild: Part two

Having repaired the door body and the window frames, I have now started to look at the latches and door handles. After a certain amount of swearing, I have found that the most convenient way to re assemble the doors, is to start with the door handles.

The handles come from a Standard 8/10. My handles were both pretty much shot, so having spent some time looking for replacements, with no luck, I eventually went for new reproductions. They seem to be of quite good quality, and the guy I bought them off was able to fit a new lock for the driver's door too.

The door handle requires a small pusher, to operate the lever that frees the latch mechanism. I had to make up a new one as the old on was too badly damaged.

Next I fitted the latch. The latch mechanism itself is from a Ford Consul/Zodiac or Zephyr. I found some spares from a mark II that look identical to my originals. I think they are from the rear doors.

Theres a lot of damage to the door shells around the fixings for the lock mechanism It looks like it is due to attempts at adjustment of the door fit, or perhaps the fixings pulling through. In any case, I have filled the holes in and re drilled. I plan to make adjustments to the door fit using the striker plates if possible.

Attaching the latch mechanism to the door was a bit of a challenge. The original fixings I got with the car were a selection of odd bolts, which goes some way to explain the state of the glass fibre. What I had hoped to do was to use new low profile screws and washers to spread the load and protect the fibreglass, however, the threads in the latch seem to be 7/32 BSW, a really obscure thread that is not readily available. There isn't room in the metal to drill out and re tap, so, for the time being I have used the machine screws that came with the spare set of latches. I used a set of solid countersunk washers, to spread the load, but I am concerned that these will be too proud of the surface, and interfere with the closure. Well see later on.

The small screw in the picture above holds the rear of the door handle to the door. This looks like it will be a problem later so I will need to find some way of spreading the loading on the door skin at this point, to stop cracking.

The picture below shows the lock mechanism in place

After the handle and latches go in, the window frames and bracketry can be fitted. This is another knuckle scraping process, but I found if you reassemble it in this order, you get least cross!:

Attach the Aluminium Trim cross piece to the frame.
Fit the glass to the frame,
Insert the frame into the door
Attach the glass frame runners to one side of the bracket. You can do this easiest if you raise the frame a little and access the captive bolts through the cut-outs in the door back. You can get at the front one though the cut out for the door-opening catch mechanism.

Slide the winder mechanism into the door and fit the arm into the window glass channel.
Now jiggle the winder mechanism spigot out through the hole and screw it in place.
Attach the second bracket to the first
Bolt the brackets to the door
Now screw down the aluminium trim piece to the top of the door.
Wind up the window fully
Fit door catch mechanism. It needs to be separated from the door skin by a spacer, a bolt does the job

and that's it! Mechanism completely rebuilt! The window winds up and down, the door latch works and everything.

Dead chuffed!

The door body itself still needs a lot of work, but that I will save until I get to the bodywork as I want to be able to match the curves in properly. The shut lines leave a lot to be desired as well. Hopefully I will sort that too.

A couple of final bits to mention: first the striker plates. In the boxes of bits,  I only had one striker plate and it looked like this.

A closer look at the photos I got when I bough the car showed that, at the time it was dismantled, it had two, mismatched striker plates. The one above on the drivers side and different one on the passenger side

The driver's side B post has two sets of holes, one vertical pair that matches the striker plate, and another horizontal pair. The passenger side had only the horizontal pair.

It looked very much like the striker plate I had, must have been a later addition, the two additional holes being for the original striker plate. I think the passenger side striker plate was from an earlier version of the Zodiac/Zephyr/Corsair or Consul. In any case, I sent a photo to John at Goldendays parts and he was able to source a pair for me.

So there we are. One door completely rebuilt and correct striker plates sourced.

Lastly I sent the door hinges away to Adrian Venn at Exactly TVR to have them rebuilt. They came back all sorted out, bead blasted and primed, which save a lot of messing about.

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.

So, there we have it. Door repaired, window frames repaired and reglazed and frame support brackets remade and fitted.

I think that will do for part one. Next step is to repair the locks, winding mechanism and interior opening mechanism.