Good Day / Bad Day ?

Why is it when you have had some really good days progress on the car, you can have a bad day when nothing seems to go right ?

Started the morning by going to BOC and getting a refill of Argon Shield, as it happened I need not have bothered.

Next job was to have a good tidy up so I wheeled the car outside, picked all the scattered tools up and swept the floor. Now I have cleaned up a few times during the course of this project, but the quantity of grinding wheel dust did surprise me. The picture doesn't show it, but that pile of rubbish is several inches deep.

So back to the car, time to start on the doors, so i started by stripping the mechanisms and glass out. For those of you who have wondered how to get the glass out of a rear 2000 door, the secret is to remove the pop riveted plate from above the door lock

and then rotate the glass out of the top of the door, putting one corner through the hole uncovered by the plate

I then hung all the old doors back on the car

They all fit and the gaps are reasonable, so no distortion in the shell either.

Decision time now, all these doors have rot, some more than others, but I have some really nice doors from another estate. You may remember that I fitted the passenger side doors previously and they didn't line up at the top of the door aperture, but I thought I would try again on the driverside.

So nice primrose door in place, and it doesn't fit, as before is not the body of the door thats wrong, but the top window frame.

So there is nothing else to do but fix the old doors. I started with the rear driverside door, I  thought this would be simple, removed the skin, and had a look at the rot. No wonder Zeibart went bust, despite all the holes they had drilled large areas of the door were not protected. The black streaks are the Zeibart.

Now the simple way to fix this, is to cut a repair section out of the spare rear blue door, but when I looked at this door, it was bodged with a previous repair and no use - I need a spare rear door in good condition now.

So moving on, I removed the passenger rear door skin

This was in far better condition and only needs a simple repair, until I found the rot in the frame area

Thats not so simple to fix, and really requires a channel rail transplant. In desperation I tried the blue door in place of it, and no it still doesn't fit correctly, even though it looks OK it catches the door frame at the top right

There ended the days work with no welding, and a feeling of not having made any progress.

Getting the shell outside into the daylight also made it clear how many little areas need attention in terms of regrinding welds down, or doing little bits of remedial work.

Not my best of days on the car, I hope tomorrow will be better, or I will have to visit Dave Pearson for some encouragement!

Hours worked 503 - 9 hours today