Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Door Alignment

Most of the body panels on my car are pretty darn straight, except for the passenger door. I've been meaning to look into this since day one but never got around to it, mainly because I can't open the passenger door very far when it's in the garage.

As you can see the door stick out at the bottom...


But goes in too far at the top.


As you can see the center part of the door where the striker is sits flush. My thinking was that if I adjusted the lower hinge only, I could push the bottom of the door inward and the door would pivot on the striker causing the top to come out.


The front of the door was already flush with the front fender so I didn't want to have to adjust the top  as it involved 6 bolts holding the top of the fender vs. 1 bolt on the bottom. But when I tried to adjust the bottom hinge I found I could only move the door in about 1/8" before the hinge ran out of adjustment. This meant I had to adjust the top hinge which was going to screw up my fender alignment. Oh well.

When I was done moving the hinges the rear edge of the door looked pretty good.


I couldn't get the entire trailing edge to sit flush since the angle at the top of the door doesn't quite match the rear sheet metal, but it's close enough. However, now the front fender was out of whack.


It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, but I had to remove the kick panel to access a single nut keeping the fender from moving that 1/8" or so that I needed.


I'm pretty happy with final fit.