Hello again. I appreciate those of you who are taking time to read the posts in my Doug's Drugs Blog. It's been exciting to see the number of views grow each day and interesting to see how many readers are living in Russia! I'm not sure if you're reading because you enjoy the descriptions of the progress on the El Camino or because of the occasional anecdotal deviations. Thank you, no matter what brings you and keeps your interest.
Since we're discussing the El Camino, I'd like to share a technical post that may help some of you who are having problems opening your doors. I'm talking about your car doors, if you're having problems getting in your house you may want to check your calendar and see if you forgot your anniversary or the wife's birthday.
I've been doing body work in preparation to paint the car the stock white color, Code 11 White. I may have mentioned that I swapped the stock doors for a set of doors from the "auto recycle center" that were loaded with power windows and locks. They were also loaded with door dings and some previous body work. I've got that all straightened out now so I stopped sanding the body panels long enough to check out the door latches. When I paint cars I take special care to make the door jambs look perfect. Not everybody notices but since the driver & passenger have to pass through the door jamb to get into the car, I like to make the effort to make them stand out. One thing I do is remove the door latches to clean & inspect them. Often, there are areas that need repair or adjustment to get them to work perfectly. I remove them a second time at the spray booth so I don't get any paint in my clean latches.
I removed both latches and soaked them overnight in parts cleaner. I keep a 5-gallon pail in the shop just for cleaning the grease off stuff. The next day I washed the caustic cleaner off of them in the sink with Dawn liquid detergent and, after drying them with the air hose, I bead blasted them in my small cabinet and then washed them again. You have to be careful bead blasting small components like these with lots of moving parts. That's why I wash them repeatedly.
Here's a picture of the latches from the side that snuggles up to the door jamb inside the door. The three screws you normally see in the door by the latch will screw into the three threaded recesses, one in the top, two in the bottom.
The one on the left didn't require much time, just some lubrication, because it's the passenger latch and doesn't see as much use as the driver's latch. The driver's latch (right) was extremely worn and I considered replacing it with a new one. I checked online for prices and saw them from $89 to $119 each. So, my choices were: 1: rob a liquor store so I could afford the new parts, or 2: rebuild my own latches. I decided to rebuild my own. The hot spots you see are the welds that I used to put the latch back together after reconditioning it.
The "fishmouth" opening is the receiver where the striker in the door jamb hits the rotating latch in the door and is caught and held until released by the door handle. One of the surfaces in the fishmouth had worn so badly that it had split in two halves and one half had bent down and out of use. To repair it I had to separate the two shells of the latch assembly.
In the second picture I've drawn arrows to show the two mushroom tips that hold the two halves of the assembly together. The third is a folded tab in a rough triangle shape at the extreme bottom center of the latch. The top two I used a die grinder to grind off the mushroom tips and the bottom tab required a hole to be drilled in it where it had been spot welded originally. The next photo on the left shows the hole that removed the spot weld and allowed the halves to separate. Don't worry, when you separate the two sides nothing springs out and smacks you in the eye, or shoots across the room and settles in the messiest corner of the shop. Have confidence. Be brave.
I hope this hasn't been too much of a manifestation of my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder for my readers. It's satisfying for me to do this kind of detail work and I'm sure that it would have been noticed if I hadn't made the repair. It's like wearing a clean shirt to church: if you do wear the clean shirt, nobody will say, "My goodness Doug, is that a clean shirt two weeks in a row? May I sit by you?" But, if you wear the same shirt that you wore to church last week and then to Grandma's house for dinner that has salad dressing stains on it, you can be sure you'll be singing your hymns alone. So now, although the new owner probably isn't going to notice how nice the doors open and close, it's not going to be an obstacle to enjoying the car either.
Thanks for viewing!
Doug
Since we're discussing the El Camino, I'd like to share a technical post that may help some of you who are having problems opening your doors. I'm talking about your car doors, if you're having problems getting in your house you may want to check your calendar and see if you forgot your anniversary or the wife's birthday.
I've been doing body work in preparation to paint the car the stock white color, Code 11 White. I may have mentioned that I swapped the stock doors for a set of doors from the "auto recycle center" that were loaded with power windows and locks. They were also loaded with door dings and some previous body work. I've got that all straightened out now so I stopped sanding the body panels long enough to check out the door latches. When I paint cars I take special care to make the door jambs look perfect. Not everybody notices but since the driver & passenger have to pass through the door jamb to get into the car, I like to make the effort to make them stand out. One thing I do is remove the door latches to clean & inspect them. Often, there are areas that need repair or adjustment to get them to work perfectly. I remove them a second time at the spray booth so I don't get any paint in my clean latches.
I removed both latches and soaked them overnight in parts cleaner. I keep a 5-gallon pail in the shop just for cleaning the grease off stuff. The next day I washed the caustic cleaner off of them in the sink with Dawn liquid detergent and, after drying them with the air hose, I bead blasted them in my small cabinet and then washed them again. You have to be careful bead blasting small components like these with lots of moving parts. That's why I wash them repeatedly.
Here's a picture of the latches from the side that snuggles up to the door jamb inside the door. The three screws you normally see in the door by the latch will screw into the three threaded recesses, one in the top, two in the bottom.
The one on the left didn't require much time, just some lubrication, because it's the passenger latch and doesn't see as much use as the driver's latch. The driver's latch (right) was extremely worn and I considered replacing it with a new one. I checked online for prices and saw them from $89 to $119 each. So, my choices were: 1: rob a liquor store so I could afford the new parts, or 2: rebuild my own latches. I decided to rebuild my own. The hot spots you see are the welds that I used to put the latch back together after reconditioning it.
The "fishmouth" opening is the receiver where the striker in the door jamb hits the rotating latch in the door and is caught and held until released by the door handle. One of the surfaces in the fishmouth had worn so badly that it had split in two halves and one half had bent down and out of use. To repair it I had to separate the two shells of the latch assembly.
In the second picture I've drawn arrows to show the two mushroom tips that hold the two halves of the assembly together. The third is a folded tab in a rough triangle shape at the extreme bottom center of the latch. The top two I used a die grinder to grind off the mushroom tips and the bottom tab required a hole to be drilled in it where it had been spot welded originally. The next photo on the left shows the hole that removed the spot weld and allowed the halves to separate. Don't worry, when you separate the two sides nothing springs out and smacks you in the eye, or shoots across the room and settles in the messiest corner of the shop. Have confidence. Be brave. 
I then removed the small panel from the fishmouth opening that had been so badly damaged by grinding away the mushroomed tabs that held it in and I welded the face of it up with my MIG welder.
*Thanks to my wise and beautiful wife for having the foresight and wisdom to allow me to buy this welder several years ago. It has been a great enabler.
I had to weld it back into place after grinding it smooth on my grinding wheel. It was important to replace it in the same position so it would have the same guiding relationship to the doorjamb striker. It's role is kind of like being a grandfather.
The next picture shows the reshaped tab welded back into the latch shell. At this time I welded a bead on the curved lip of the fishmouth receiver, since it had also been worn badly by being poorly adjusted for many years. After lubricating the moving parts I reassembled the two halves and welded them where the mushroomed tips had been and I checked it's operation. Very nice!
However, I noticed that the small tab that strikes the door release mechanism had a slight wear pattern from the many pulls by big, strong door handle pullers. I've experienced door mechanisms in the past on other cars that required a determined effort to pull the handle up far enough to open the door. It's embarrassing. I didn't want to sell this car and have the new owner not be able to open the driver's door. To remedy this I welded a small bump on the worn lever that you can see by the arrow in the following photo. Now it should open as effortlessly as a new car. Am I some kind of guy, or what?
I hope this hasn't been too much of a manifestation of my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder for my readers. It's satisfying for me to do this kind of detail work and I'm sure that it would have been noticed if I hadn't made the repair. It's like wearing a clean shirt to church: if you do wear the clean shirt, nobody will say, "My goodness Doug, is that a clean shirt two weeks in a row? May I sit by you?" But, if you wear the same shirt that you wore to church last week and then to Grandma's house for dinner that has salad dressing stains on it, you can be sure you'll be singing your hymns alone. So now, although the new owner probably isn't going to notice how nice the doors open and close, it's not going to be an obstacle to enjoying the car either.
Thanks for viewing!
Doug
No comments:
Post a Comment