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Saturday, August 19, 2017

Triumph Spitfire Body Repair #13 - Door and Sill (Still!)

I've been seriously remiss in updating the blog. I apologize for that. I've also not been over to the garage for about a week, but I should remedy that tomorrow.

For this post, the following video explains what I did at least as good as this post does, so watch it! Oh, and sorry about the stuffy nose.




I continued to struggle with door fitment and essentially gave up without committing to any particular course of action. Instead, I moved on to fabricating the bottom front of the rear wing.

The donor piece I used to fabricate the new bottom front of the rear wing.

What I was looking at for repair to the lower B post.


Front bottom of rear wing squared off.

Final fabrication of donor piece.


Repair to inside portion complete. Still need to take care of the notch at the bottom.

It wasn't really more exciting than that. Frustration with the door dominated. A few days later I came back to the garage and was able to meet with the guy I mention in the video to get his take. Before that, though, I did the re-work on my failed attempt at repairing the inside bottom of the driver's side rear wing, which went much better this time.

Some of the paper templates and one cut peice of the old boot lid.

Just barely tacked together. The strips of metal are there for leveling purposes.

His first recommendation was to drill out the holes in the hinges to provide, literally, a bit more wiggle room. This was easily accomplished with the drill press and a large bit. Didn't quite give me enough, though.

Drilled out. Cheap-o Wally World bit did okay, actually.

Still not good enough. This was the extent of my adjustment with the holes drilled out.

With that failing, his next recommendation was to tack the door to the car using metal strips and place the door as perfect as possible. This was still a bit tricky to do, but after tacking the door up I could get the hinges bolted in, but it was very close.

The front tack strip.

Rear top and bottom tack strips.

Unfortunately, the outer sill still didn't fit good enough for me. More adjustment would be required by either adding metal to the door or the sill to close the gap. Similar adjustments would be required at the B post as well. Of course, with the A post, there are three items coming together; the door, the outer sill AND the bonnet, which I cannot fit up. The more I thought about it the more I came to the conclusion that modifying any one of these three pieces would impact the other two, also requiring their modification. Not a path I was willing to take.

Best I could do on the outer sill.

With that, I stopped for the day to contemplate my next move.

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