More Door Work
Now that I have the drivers side door fitting good, opening and closing well it was time to move on to some other areas of the door. In the past the door has swung open to far and hit the fender. This caused some damage at the bottom of the door along with a small amount of rust at the front corner. I started by working the door back into shape, or at least close to it. The rusted area was then removed and the inner door structure built back into shape. A pattern was made from the passenger door and transferred to sheet metal. The lower hinge was then removed from the door and the raised rib around the hinge cut off. A filler section was made to fill this void and welded into place. Once the welds were dressed down I rehung the door.
The new filler section for the lower door was then trimmed and fit into place. This section fits over the inner door structure and gets crimped along the edges. Once everything is fitted into place it was welded in. This door still needs alot more work in the future to get all the kinks out of it from hitting the fender. Make sure you have good working latches so this does not happed to you.
At this point I went ahead and welded the door handle opening closed. Sometimes you wonder why they designed some things the way they did. In this case there is no external key door lock on the drivers door but there is one on the passenger door. If you always locked your truck up when you left it you always had to unlock and get in on the passenger side. Now I'll be asked how do you get in or lock it. Well some things we just need to keep to ourselves.
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With that finished I moved on to fill the upper hinge opening. The upper hinge is the most challenging due to the many curves along the beltline. I was lucky enough to have access to some junk doors from a '36 pickup and salvaged the rear part of the doors at the beltline to use as filler pieces. The picture on the left is the trimmed section of the passenger door that will be used to fill in the drivers upper hinge area shown on the far left. I decided to cut out a little above and below the beltline due to the raised rib around the original pocket area. Once it was all trimmed and aligned it is a simple weld it up and grind it down.
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These old trucks seem to be a little rougher on build quality compared to the passenger car line. One of the areas that was cut short was the belt line at the cowl. The '35-'37 Ford pickups are all a little different in this area and I feel the '37 is the worst with the '35 being finished off the best. With the stock hinge it doesn't stand out that bad but with the hinge removed and the new filler section added in place it really stands out. I need to do some work here to continue the line into the cowl. I may take another piece of the junk doors to do this but I'm not positive that is the best way to do it.
Here is the nearly completed door with hidden hinges, new latches and all the holes filled in. I think it looks a whole lot better. My wife still doesn't know how to open them!
