Door skin replacement

The passenger door showed up to be in decent conditions after being media blasted. In spite, the driver door did not. It had some rust damage in the inner door shell and the skin had dents and rust. A friend suggested that I would replace the full door shell with a new one. But as the new door would cost hundreds of euros if ordered from overseas and due to the fact that I had a door skin available for 50 euros from a fellow FMOC member, I decided to take a chance to repair the old one. Should I fail to fix it correctly, I would only loose some time and little money.

First thing to do was to fix the rust in the door shell to add rigidity before removing the skin.

Rust damage in the lower front corner

Patch being test fit

Patches welded

I'll need to put the doors back before I will move further to the quarter panel repairs. Therefore I needed to make sure that the doors will remain in their correct position. The door hinges got blasted and a set of new hinge pins. 

The hinges repaired

Door to quarter gap looks nice

I left the door attached to the car, pulled my angle grinder and little by little ground the door edges so that the skin would separate from the flange.

Rear edge is getting loose

There are only few spot welds along the edge

Instead of drilling I ground the spot welds off

The door is split in halves

There is a bracket for the vent window in the door skin that needs to be collected from the old skin. I recorder its position by measuring the distances from certain points. (The door skin had date code 10 2 2 E , btw) Then the spot welds were drilled out and the bracket cleaned and painted.

Vent window bracket

The bracket being welded to the new skin

I spent a while grinding the major rust off the inner surface of the door shell before it was handled with rust encapsulating acid and painted black. A new insulator was glued on the structural bar that faces the door skin's inner surfaces.

Inner surface painted

Insulator to prevent unwanted rattle and noise

The shell was placed on the table and the door skin was set on top of it. I checked the many times to ensure correct positioning before tightening the skin against the shell with all the pliers I could possibly find. Then, with light hits with a hammer, I started the bend the flange carefully. I kept rotating the door at least three times over until done. The final round was assisted with a dolly to prevent twisting the visible surface of the door skin.

I did not weld the spots to the flange at this point. I wanted to ensure that the door aligns well before welding. The door was hung back on and the gaps to rocker and quarter verified. The skin appeared to be quite good but not perfect.

Fits fine from this angle

It appears that the dent in the old skin had also twisted the lower edge of the shell as well. The skin gaps well with the rocker but the center area of the edge is a couple of millimeters out of the rocker. This needs to be addressed with gentle hammering. I will not add welds until this is done.

Another problem with the new skin is that it seems smaller in height that the original door. That is, the door has to be lifted up a couple of millimeters until the ridge in the belt line matches with the quarter panel. This may effect that the rocker gap will grow too big and needs some filler metal.

These final adjustments are to be done after the quarter panel repairs are finished and the front fender is installed. Then all the three are to be adjusted together to match with each other.