Been waiting on the driveline to ship for a week now. I figured I could knock some of the small things off my list. One of the small things was a broken bottom hinge on the drivers door. I forgot to take pictures of the problem but basically the metal the hinge was mounted too was rotten, cracking and allowed the hinge to move a lot more than it should. So it was time to cut it out and burn in something new. This turned into a bigger job than expected. This was my first real repair I was kinda making it up as I went. First remove the bad, next make a template followed by blowing a million small holes in the thing metal as you learn to weld sheet metal.
Now the original hinges are riveted into place and not easily remove, probably for good reason but I didn’t have the tools to do it this way. So I decided that I was just going to bolt the hinge back to the new metal that way if I needed to adjust the hinge I could move things around to get everything to line up. I went with button head hex bolts because they have a smaller head on them than the normal hex bolt and I was worried about the door closing.
Now came the moment of truth to test my work and make sure the door still shut.
Had to pickup a few new tools this past week from Amazon. I picked up a DeWalt Die Grinder and some small 2 inch flap discs, also had to pick up a new drill as I let the magic smoke out of my old one.
CRAP! It will not close and here is why. When I channeled the cab I tested with the broken hinge and that little bit of play allowed the door to close even though it probably shouldn’t have, in my rush I probably didn’t notice that part of the door bulging out, with the new solid hinge mount the door will not longer shut. So here is the step back, in order to fix the problem I needed to change my floor. So this meant cutting out the metal along the rockers and stepping it back 3/4 of an inch.
So I cut along the A and B pillars, cut all the floor mounts out and made two 1×3 45 degree 3/4 inch long steps that would push floor back enough to allow my newly fixed door to shut.
So after much cutting and welding, I am back to the where I started remounting my driver door to see if the newly mounted hinge would now work.
Now I had a further problem, the driver side floor was different from the passenger side floor, even though the passenger door closed the fact that the two are not built the same bothered me. So I woke up the next day and repeated the whole process on the other side.
Right at the end I ran outta gas for the welder so I have some clean up on this left to do but I need to make a trip to the welding store first.
Cleveland Power and performance getting my drive Line being mounted to the pallet for shipping.
Sounds like this will be shipping to me in the next week or so, this is when the real fun starts. Anyways that is the progress I have made so far.