The gallery show the progression of the passenger door which had been damaged in an accident once upon a time. I tried recovering the original panel but my skills were sadly lacking so I have purchased a new outer skin. This however is only partially formed so I am trying to shape it without doing any serious damage.

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This is  major project in its own right and basically the crux of getting the body back together.

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June 2017

As per notes on the front page June is the month of the passenger door with Ray the panel beater putting the skins back together for me. After some concern when I put the door on the car (see before photo) Ray came to my place and tweaked the door with a boot. Ahh the skill of those old panel beaters knowing just how hard to push!!

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Some things I have learnt in this process, The panel you get when you buy a door from Rimmer Brothers and probably Moss Motors as well is not what you expect!. As you can see I gave up trying to flatten the existing door skin and bought new ones thinking I would get a formed skin, What you actually get is a formed topped panel where the top edge rolls into the main door panel and it is flat after that, This obviously is easier to manufacture and can be used for both long and short doors but it means you have to form the bottom of the door. The first stage is cut it to length and then fold the bottom edge. There is 2 issues you need to consider here, the first being the original door has a slight crown in the length of the bottom edge and you cannot fold that into the panel so if you want to make it as original the only way to fix this is to cut the bottom edge after the folding and weld the panel with the crown and risk the heat distortion. I chose not to do that. The second issue is that when you fold the bottom edge the temptation is to fold it at right angles to the main skin face but when you attach the outer skin to the inner frame the skin wraps back in to the centre of the car so the bottom edge is no longer horizontal. The outcome is that the bottom edge of the face panel bows in slightly which you discover in the final blocking process so you need to fill the bottom face. This is a beginners error that would have been great to learn before I started so take heed if you planning to do this.

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The second process is to shape the leading edge of the door to suit inner frame. The photos illustrate how much has to be trimmed and again welding the edge carefully to avoid heat distortion,

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The third stage is too shape the main fold at the top of the door where the panel is meant to curve into the dash cowl, For manufacturing simplicity they have made a straight fold but the front of the door curves in to the cowl rather than follow the line into the guard join. This again is a difficult process where it is easy to distort the panel and difficult to make both sides look right. To be fair here, I got door skins for a friend about 40 years ago and although the bottom half of the door was fully and correctly formed this curved feature was still not correct and needed amending.

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The process of fitting the outer skin to the inner frame is quite simple and I just followed the instructions in Bill Piggotts how to TR2 book. I got my panel beater mate to do this door but I did the other one with reasonable results although I did have some distortion on the triangle shaped panel near the cowl. I also ended up doing a bit of work around the door latch mounting as getting the surface square was not something I paid attention to so I have packed the door latch out at a slight angle to eliminate the latch face jamming on the lock catch on the B-pillar.

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The rest is easy..... As an aside I will go back at a later date and try to flatten the original skins now that I have a little more practice in panel beating but what I will do after that I am not sure.