[Bob Carriere]

Doors skins not fore skins you neenee....

Removing the door skin at first appeared fairly easy since some doors were so rusted that we did not detect any spot weld..... has we progressed to areas not so rusted we found that the folded over outer skin had in deed been spot welded...... spot weld cutters.... very sharp samll chisel and the typical abuse of a good screw driver had them popping in no time......

soem doors were so corroded and thenetal so fatigue form years of door slamming that the skin and part of the frame was coming apart.. ley me show you.....

Here is a crude sketched of the profile of the door frame and its weak areas...
the frame is folded back onto itself to provide an area for the door skin to be folded and spot welded to...... with rust and constant door slamming the over folded area breaks loose at the arrow. Far too complex to reproduced we have opted for a simple U bent frame and we will cut out an exact duplicate of the folded over part except ours will be spot welded to the frame and we hpe more solid. The oly part that is different on the frame is the top part which is covered by the external door skin and is actually 1.75 inch wide plus the tickness of a 14 guage sheet.... in the case of the top part the metal is actually folded inside the U shape of the frame.

So we got our courage and cut off the bottom of the door.... you can see the repro part Grant and I fabricated. We simply made a pattern out of old 2x6 lumber and heated and bent the U shape frame by hand.... once hot enough it bacme very plastic..... yeah the wood charred but that is Ok....

We made the cut up to the good metal on the curve side..... and just below the hinge position so as to maintain dimensions. Grant measured everything 3 times beofre cutting and we still had some complete doors to fall back on in case of dimentia....

In between giving me a hand Grant was busy redoing his cab 13 door.... butr that is a whole different story....