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Hinge repair pt duex

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Old Dec 4, 2006 | 01:04 PM
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Hinge repair pt duex

I have added additional pictures to my hinge repair gallery documenting the repair to the door side of the pass rear door lower hinge.
To recap: Evidently that door had been sprung back sometime in it's past and a (poor and quick/dirty) repair was done by a PO resulting in a large seam gap on the body side and contact between the doors in the center as well as some unsightly patching. I decided to repair it properly. The first part deals with the repairs done to the body doorpost side. The damaged inner structure was removed and a new one built and installed using two layers of a gauge thicker metal and a building in a little more hinge adjustment room.
This weekend I tackled the door side of the hinge. On this side, the hinge is riveted to a large inner support structure and a skin of sheet metal covers it. The skin has holes cut over the rivets likely for assembly purposes, but it is a lightweight non structural part that is not attached to the hinge originally. When the door was sprung, the rivets ripped out of the inner structure (as shown in the photos) so someone welded the sheetmetal cover to the hinge rivets. The welding was poorly done and the metal was not strong enough to support the door properly so it ended up bending it all up. Note the picture of how much the hinge was bent!
I cut off the outer skin and drilled out the rivets, revealing what was left of the inner support and the damage done to it. I made a couple false starts to repair the support in place. Realizing I was not going to be happy or confident with repairing it that way, I bit the bullet and drilled out the spot welds holding the main portion to the back of the inside door panel. I removed it to check it's condition and either repair it or totally replace it as I had done on the body side. I found it to be sound except for the portions that had been broken initially around the rivets, so I decided to repair it. In replacing the damaged portion I welded on a solid 16ga plate rather than two "ears" as in the original, and welded nuts on the back so I could use countersunk allen head bolts to resecure the hinge rather than rivets. after installation I'll fill the socket in the bolt heads so they look like the original rivets.
The rebuilt structure was too large to fit thru the hole in the jamb so I cut out the center of the inside door panel to gain entry into the door. I was planning to do that anyhow for access to remove the dents in the outer skin the springing of the door left. After I straighten the outside of the door I'll put in a new piece of metal in place of what I removed. It was full of dents from things that were once carried in the truck when it was a working vehicle, and will likely end up covered with upholstery anyhow.
Now all I have left to do is replace the cover skin over the inside of the hinge to complete the repair.
 
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Old Dec 4, 2006 | 01:49 PM
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Nice work. I just replaced the entire hinge post on the driver's side of my 53. Kinda scary to rip that kind of stuff out and hope the doors fit properly. To modify an old saying, "measure 127 times, cut once"
 
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Old Dec 4, 2006 | 02:45 PM
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Oh sure, now that Gracie is sitting comfortably inside her palace, go ahead, make great forward leaps and strides towards getting her ready (if you like, I'm sure someone around here will volunteer to come by and toss some dirt and leaves at you just in case you miss working outside)

Wow, that hinge was tweaked pretty bad! The repairs are looking great, going to be super stong too.

Lookin good
Bobby
 
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Old Dec 5, 2006 | 08:34 PM
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Old Dec 5, 2006 | 11:59 PM
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I have not completed the hood hinge work yet. I needed to fix the radiator mounting and the mounts for the AC condensor and electric fan to properly hang and align the front sheet metal (a PO had made the front clip into a flip up and removed a lot of the front suports in the process) before finalizing the hinge work. Work on Gracie stalled out not too long after that due to weather and the building of our garage. The area around her was all dug up in the regrading until she was sitting on an 18" high island in a sea of mud which made working on her impossible for nearly 12 months. I finally got her inside Thanksgiving weekend and started back working in earnest, now she will have to sit again until after xmas. Xmas should bring more goodies to make progress much quicker, I hope to get a new large tool box to organize my tools into, a new large shop air compressor to run several new air tools and supply air for my plasma cutter as well as allow me to spray permanent primer and paint from a spraygun rather than stopgap use of rattle cans that will need to be sanded back off.
As far as the hinges, stay tuned as soon as I verify their operation I'll post more details about them. I plan to use an electric trunk soft latch to latch the hood, and have a set of support struts to counterbalance the hood and hold it open.
Fortunately the inner hinge support that rusted due to carelessly discarded insulation scraps stopping up drain holes and holding water is the worse rust I've found so far, the body is very solid, so it mostly needs cosmetic straightening and a few minor repairs of not so perfect work she received in her first life as a commercial vehicle. I made the cover skin for over the door end of the hinge and replaced the temp bolts with countersunk allen head bolts (which fit the rivet head countersinks in the hinge leaf perfectly by the way) earlier tonight.
 

Last edited by AXracer; Dec 6, 2006 at 12:04 AM.
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Old Dec 7, 2006 | 06:35 PM
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Old Dec 7, 2006 | 08:19 PM
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I can tell you the center of the hood latch panel needs to be filled and trimmed where it bumps out in the center which also requires the center grill support to be reshaped to fit.
 
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