The more I thought about it and slept on it, I convinced myself that I was not as careful as I had hoped and allowed the A post to droop when attaching the lower A post. In an attempt to verify this, I used some shims and the rear burst plate and put the door to the body as straight as I could and looked at the hinge holes. Not pretty.
"Inside" the hinge hole...the dark metal is the threaded hole of the hinge plate, the lighter metal is the A post. Needs to come back and up a bit.
With that, I was off to the races. I used a spot weld chisel that I picked up on Amazon and went to town breaking my spot welds. It actually went pretty easily and I didn't do any major damage.
Strengthener separated from lower A post.
Inner sill and most of floor separated.
With the bottom A post detached from the bottom of the car, I had the ability to move it quite a bit. The trick now was getting the door placed and the body arranged to get the best fit that I could. I strap helped achieve this.
Strap pulling the top of the dash back a bit.
The gap at the back. Still a bit off.
Once I got it where I thought I should, I used a few vise-grips to hold it in place and checked the fit. I did this several times.
Temporary attachment...checking fitment.
Once I was happy, I welding it back in.
Welded back together.
And on the inside. A few holes to fix, still.
That was about as good as I could do with what I had to work with. It's still not perfect, though, so we'll see how it goes.
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.
The saga continues...I fight with measurements on the door and trying to do comparisons on the passenger's side. Here's the pertinent video:
As part of the fitment problems, I really concentrate on driver's versus passenger's side arrangement. My logic being that 1) Both were identical coming out of Coventry, 2) They need to be that way again and 3) They aren't...fix it.
I start with the A post and trying to compare the two sides, ignoring any influence that I may have had welding it in in the wrong spot. Immediately, I see the flange where the door rubber would go is different.
Some gap issues there on the seams. Need to close that up.
Nice and clean on this side...
I tried to make the driver's side match the passengers. It worked out pretty well, but, in summary, I don't really solve any problems here as the gaps were still way too big, or small, than I wanted to see.
Gap at the B post top...about 0.4 inches.
Gap at the bottom of the A post. Funny how the top of the B post and bottom of the A post see the same gap. Hmm....
After that, and still contemplating the inevitable solution of undoing the bottom A post installation, I moved on to something that I could actually accomplish without undoing something that I had already done. Or at least I thought (more later). My intention, though, was to start repairing the bottom front of the rear wing.
Lots of missing metal here. Need to fix that, obviously.
My fix. There are actually three separate pieces here, in a U-shape, sorta.
How that U-shape piece will fit up.
How that piece does fit up.
Same piece, but from the side of the car.
I stopped at this point, based on the time. It was a good effort, but in the end, it was futile as I didn't have a contour gauge that would allow me to properly compare the two sides of the car. My "eyeball" wasn't good enough and I had to remove this patch and do another one. That worked, though, but you'll have to wait on that write-up. Cheers!
I wanted to take some more measurements to try to conclusively find where the fitment problem lay. I positioned the door as properly as possible on the B post and looked at the hinges. By putting the door catch assembly on both the door and the B post, I was able to hold the door in pretty good position. It wasn't perfect, but it was better than when I locked down the front of the door in my last post.
Like I said, not perfect.
With the B post set, I moved to the front of the door and set that as good as possible and then snapped some pictures of the hinges to see how close the holes were. They were not pretty pictures.
How far the top hinge is off, give or take.
And the bottom hinge. Not good.
I also grabbed a picture of the top of the door to the top of the dash fitment.
The vertical gap between the top of the dash and the top of the door is the concern here.
At this point, I was essentially convinced that I had reattached the bottom A post in the wrong spot and that it was, indeed, causing the dash to "droop", which translated across the two-and-a-half feet of the door to unacceptable gaps at the back.
Studying the pictures, it seemed that, quite simply, the A post needed to move up and back. The bracing that I put between the A and B posts was not capable of providing vertical support - face palm in hindsight.
While I contemplated the significance of this, I tried to get the bonnet up there to see how that was going to fit. In the end, however, it was too heavy to get in the proper position by myself. But given that I knew the bonnet required nose repair, I blew some time by seeing how much Bondo really was up there. It was a lot.
No holes for the T R I U M P H letters and badge. Must be some Bondo under there!
With the evident hills and valleys in the nose and the lack of holes for the Triumph letters and badge, I was confident there was damage. Given the amount of Bondo I had found elsewhere on the car, I was also confident of Bondo. With that, I took my paint remover disk on my 4.5" grinder and went to town. These paint remover disks are nice, by the way, because they won't take any metal, so they are great for, umm, investigative work. As an aside, the ones I use are from Harbor Freight, but I couldn't find them on their site, so the link is to a generic Amazon offering.
I used the paint removal disk to find the "Bondo Line" and worked my way in to expose all of the damage.
I've bounded the damaged area, finding the Bondo "line".
The last little bit.
Some wild animal was walking through here! Lots of Bondo dust...garage is still a mess.
The end result was damage that was not as bad as I thought it would be. No random holes or rust damage. Some pitting, but nothing a lot of hammer and dolly work won't take out, I don't think. It'll be great practice! Besides, I have a spare bonnet (with similar damage) from the black car so if worse comes to worse, I can always swap metal.
Craters of the moon! The link is to the national park in Idaho. Been there...cool place.
After that, I decided there wasn't really anything else I could do constructive at the garage until I had come through all of my options in my head, which would require sleeping on it. One final measurement I came up with was to check the droop in the dash as it fell from the center out to the door. I figured this would be a slick way to see how the two sides were different assuming that they really shouldn't be.
To do this, I used a 24" I-Beam Level with the far end resting on the center of the dash (using the instrument cluster panel mounting holes as a reference for center). I lifted the level until it indicated level and measured the distance from the dash top (right at the windscreen frame mounting hole) to the top of the level. For the driver's side it was 4-14/32" (yes, I know I can simplify that fraction...I have a elementary school child that does fractions!)
Results of driver's side (the side in question). About
For the passenger's side, the unmolested side, however, it was only 4-6/32".
And the passenger's side. A good bit of difference.
Because of the way I was measuring it, this meant that the driver's side dash height was 8/32", or 1/4", too low (assuming the height of the passenger's side was proper, that is). While a 1/4" may not seem like much, this difference is translated horizontally by the 2ft+ distance of the door. While I'm not sure the correct angle (if I was, we could solve the expected gap using simple geometry), hopefully you can see that the 1/4" difference at the front of the door would be exaggerated at the back of the door; hence the huge gap.
With that, it was settled in my head that I had messed up welding in the lower A post. Now I had to figure out the best way to correct it to minimize potential damage and limit re-work, all while taking into account that I've come too far and done too much good work so far to cheat.
Getting a bit behind in my updates. Here's the most recent video that I haven't talked about on the blog (though it's been up on YouTube for a while) that deals with the inner strengthener and my initial finding that the driver's side door is going to be a problem.
As I mention in the video, I had cut a hole in the lower inner B post for the wiring harness to transit to the boot for the brakes lights and such. I ended up drilling a bunch of small holes in a circle and then just snipping the remaining metal with some wire cutters. I smoothed the hole out with a grinding stone on my Dremel.
I see you!
I used a small piece of fish tank air tubing, split it, and ran it around the hole. I used some 3M Weatherstrip Adhesive to tack the two ends together. Not the most glamours of solutions, but I think it will prevent the wires from chaffing, which is what's important.
Yup, just air tubing. Not very exciting.
Wrapped around hole and glued.
With that done, I could then move on to putting in the sill strengthener. I did my normal routine of punching plug weld holes in in, placing it, and welding it in. I was pretty happy with the result.
Installed and ground down. Not too shabby.
Down the strengthener, looking back. Some more work to be done!
And, now that the sill strengthener was in, I could go back to those last few plug welds on the B post side of the inner sill. I waited on these, if you remember, to prevent welding a seam shut that I didn't want to while fitting the sill strengthener.
Done. That one large gap between welds (top seam) will be filled when I repair a small part of the B post.
With that, it was time to move on to the outer sill. There were several fits, moves and some metal cutting, but all in all, it seemed to line up pretty well considering the original part. Everything will require final adjustment prior to welding in, but nothing that seemed to tell me that anything was way off.
Rear gap. That won't work, but I was able to notch the front a bit and move it back far enough to work.
Where the A post to outer sill transition piece will go.
The original transition piece fit back in. Adjustment required.
Unfortunately, my original repair to the bottom of the upper bulkhead had to come out to accommodate the new outer sill. I guessed on how it was put together since I destroyed that area taking the old outer sill off.
Interference with my original repair. Oh, well. I was proud of that thing, too!
After that, I took all of the internals out of the driver's side door to take the weight off and mounted it to the body. The gaps were, and continue to be, horrible. I'm still trying to figure out why this is. My worst thought is that I put the lower A post in wrong and it shifted the mounting points for the door. More to follow on that.
Wow, that's looks good. Happy about that gap.
Not so much about that one, though. Door would not close properly like that.
Gap gets worse as I move towards the back of the car.
I think that's good for capturing the video in write-up. The door is a big deal, still. Frustration abounds with getting the proper fitment and, as of today, 8/4/17, I haven't fixed it. More to come!
