As we enter 2018, the newest of our trucks are now 20 years old. All these years of neglect and abuse have taken a toll on the interior panels - and the most abused one, the drivers door panel, is the most difficult to find in decent shape. Even harder to find is the crew cab, power option front door panel from 1995 to 1997 - and some colors, are downright impossible to find. I've written this guide to help restore and maintain these particular door panels (and yes, this will also work for the single/super cab panels) where the switch pod mounts to the door panel itself.

Effectively these panels were plastic welded together, which has proven to be a less-than-effective method of fastening for parts that see interaction with the driver on a daily basis. These plastic tubes protrude from the pod, through the panel, and and squeezed out on the backside to "weld" them together. These tubes are hollow, and I am using them to hold the pod to the door by putting screws through them with large washers. Your door panel will more than likely look like this:



Remove the door panel from the door by the following method/video


(credit to Mudmaniac95)


Once it is removed, cut back the jute that is glued to the back of the door panel. you will be able to clearly see the "welds" that we have talked about - all we are doing, is installing screws in the 'tubes' that form the plastic welds. I used the screws pictured below with washers to form reinforcement along the pod to re-attach it to the door panel:





You can purchase the screws from Amazon HERE.






Once you've installed the screws, the door panel can be reinstalled, and should look like this:





You may have also noticed that the switch bezel was replaced as well - the crew cabs use a bezel that has not been produced by ford since 2000-2001, and finding them in good shape has been difficult. You can now purchase replacement bezels from my ShapeWays store to replace your broken/worn/missing bezels in THIS thread.

 

Now you just need a door panel without a screw hole in it

 

Thankfully this wasn't my door panel. This was for the owners of a shop I used to work for - it had all that tacky wood screwed into EVERYTHING as part of a conversion.

 

Great idea.
The biggest problem I have witnessed with these door panels (at least the standard cab ones) is the way they crack where the panel turns up to meet the window sweep from the drivers arm constantly applying pressure.

Has anyone come up with a way to make that area look better?
Some kind of an adhesive backed mylar or vinyl?

 

Your best bet would be to reinforce the backside with fiberglass and a two-part adhesive. Do you have pictures?

 

No pictures, but what I did to one of them was similar. Mesh aluminum w/ 2 part epoxy spanning the crack on backside.

Worked good for stabilizing the crack but you can still see the crack and the area adjacent to the crack is now smooth- my arm has worn away the texture of the plastic.
Just wanted it to look better.

I wish someone would repop the panels closer to original than the ones Coverlay is doing.

 

This why I have dozens of these door panels in storage

 

Hi Are you still 3D printing the window bezel? If so id like to order one.

Thanks

 

https://www.ford-trucks.com/forums/1...for-order.html

 

I'm going to go a little deeper into this subject. We just scored a 97 cc XLT and it has those little pods for the power window switches. The interior is gray. The pods are not broken from the door panel, are still in good shape, and we repaired the bezel using some little backing strips on the back. Little repaired cracks are right below the child window lock switch. My sons did a good enough job that I didn't see the repair.

I might be persuaded to sell both left and right panels. Let me explain.

We are all tall, and that pod is in the way of knees. What's more, one of our speaker grills is broken, on the passenger door. Looking at the photos in this thread, it sure looks like the speaker grill fits to the pod and only on the pod-type door panel. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that speaker grill is probably as hard to find as the pod and pod panel.

What if I were to install door panels from a single/super cab? The switches sit flat on those panels, horizontally, right? We have a 1989 super cab like that. So if I fit single/super cab panels, I'd recover knee room, and be able to source speaker grills, but I'd lose perches for three switches (the back windows and the child window lock). We could live with that, if the rear window switches work with the front switches removed. Ours back windows are not working at all right now so I can't test that. Anybody BTDT?

If this idea works, I'd have front window switches on the front doors, and back window switches on the back doors. I'd lose the pods to recover a few valuable inches of knee space, which is the main goal.

What do you think? Is my idea worth exploring? I bet one of you would like to buy our pod-type door panels.