More surgery, this time fitting the doors

If anyone read my last post, they would have seen how I used scrap styrene to reinforce the dash panel, dash top and kick panels. Add to that an ENORMOUS amount of measuring, cutting and sanding. Next I needed to get the door cards to fit properly into the door skins, AND get the combined door assemblies to fit into the door openings, and finally, create functional door hinges that don’t look like an escapee from a slasher movie.

A couple of weeks ago I reskinned the fascia where the roadster tail becomes the door jams. I had planned to put somewhat realistic looking door locks in, but in the interests of getting the bloody thing finished I decided to simplify a bit. So now I will have a (very strong) neodymium magnet behind the door jam and a matching one in the trailing edge of the door. That will keep the doors properly closed, but able to be opened and posed. I will still put in a faux lock/striker, just for show. Ok, some pictures…

The above shows the front of the car roughly lined up with the back. The headline is that after all the surgery, “it fits”. The next thing is making the doors work. I took a pair of doors from a donor kit and tried fitting them with liberal use of files and sanding sticks. This looked ok, but I had to carve off a lot of material.

Knowing that I could make them fit, I set about modifying the “real kit” doors. The geometry of the doors is quite unobvious. We tend to think of car doors as being fairly upright things, but e-type doors aren’t at all. The inside door cards are tilted inward at the top and outward at the bottom. The door hinges have to be perpendicular to the floor for the doors to open properly (no, it’s not a Lamborghini).

That’s what those weird slits and goofy hinges are about in the kit. But even that is a bit of a dog’s breakfast. There is almost nothing in the way of locating pins to line up the inner door cards with the door skins. And it turns out that the doors are NOT even symmetric… so this

And this…

And …

So long story short, I shaved the door skins and where the inner door card locating pins conflicted with the inner door, I removed them, or modified them to fit. Then I added structure to the inside so it’s all properly located. While I was at it, I reshaped the kit door windows to be consistent with the roadster windows. They will be operable to a point, but will probably be posed with just the top of the window peeping out.

In the 3rd picture above you can kinda see what I mean about the way things are angled. I glued a sheet of styrene over the big locating pins for the kit hinges (both doors) and I put yet another magnet behind each one. I have many more pictures of all this, but won’t bore you with them.

I have figured out how I’m going to build the hinges - there will be another post for that. The real car has a simple “L” shaped gate hinge, so I’m going to do the same. And the piece that goes inside the door will have a magnet as well. This will allow me to positively locate the door/hinge combo while also allowing the doors to be removed during the remaining preparation and painting process.

Cheers,

Chris