DOOR ISSUES

Variable panel gaps can be a nightmare, as Richard discovers

One of the most annoying problems with an old Land Rover is doors which either do not shut properly, or pop open as you drive along. These vehicles were, in a very real sense, handbuilt, with the chassis used as a crude jig around which the body panels were assembled using a variety of spacers, slotted holes and a certain amount of persuasive force. The Defender production line must have been the last manufacturing plant west of the Urals to still use wooden mallets.

So even when the vehicles were new, panel gaps and alignment were a bit variable, especially during the long dark years of the British Leyland era. Once a bit of wear gets into the door hinges and catches, and especially when you start chopping off and replacing various bits of chassis and bulkhead, you can end up with a vehicle whose doors only fit where they touch. The same applies to rechassised vehicles, only more so. I like to allow the best part of a day for trial-fitting panels during a rebuild, ensuring that everything is straight and aligned before the panels are painted. It is a lot easier to make adjustments to an unpainted panel than to do the same to one that has a fresh, soft coat of gloss paint on it without leaving any marks.

A certain amount can be done by replacing worn hinges and making minor adjustments to the vertical alignment of the bulkhead, but older vehicles can need more drastic treatment. The one fixed, immovable assembly is the rear body tub. This is the only body section which has no facility for adjustment. It is bolted to the chassis, and everything else is aligned to fit. So, the next item to go on will be the bulkhead, adjusted as necessary with washers between the mounting feet and outriggers to give a door gap of around 34 inches top and bottom. Provided the bulkhead is in the right place and the pillars exactly parallel to the front edge of the body tub, everything else should fit without too much trouble.

The problem with which I was confronted last week was a fairly typical example of the kind of panel fit issues you can face with an older Land Rover. It was a Series IIA 109in petrol hard top in outwardly very original condition. Long wheelbase Series vehicles tend to have a lower survival rate than the short wheelbase ones for two reasons: firstly there is a lot more chassis to rust; secondly, they tended to be bought as commercial workhorses rather than as private vehicles, which means that many were flogged to death long ago. This SII bore the scars of a long and active working life but appeared to have been well-maintained, sounded sweet and drove like a nice old Series vehicle should. There was only one problem: the doors didn’t fit.

The rear edge of the driver’s side door top was catching on the hard top, but I thought I might be able to adjust this out. No such luck with the passenger side, where the trailing edge of the door overlapped the body tub by a couple of millimetres. It would just about shut with a hefty slam, although the door stood a long way proud of its aperture. The door catch had already been attacked with a grinder to give more clearance. So, the obvious solution would have been to move the door forwards: the hinges on Series vehicles (and Defenders for that matter) can be moved fore and aft by several millimetres to adjust the door gaps. But in this case the front edge of the door was almost touching the rear face of the door pillar, and there was no way I would be able to move the door forward enough to create the necessary clearance at the trailing edge. Surgery would clearly be needed, but where?

The chassis had been extensively welded over the years, with new outriggers and rear crossmember. A few years ago I had a Series II brought to the workshop with a very similar door fit issue, which turned out to be caused by a new half-chassis having been fitted so badly that the vehicle had ended up an inch shorter. We ended up putting a new chassis under it. But I didn’t think the vehicle I was now looking at had the same problem. I was more inclined to think the issue lay with the bulkhead. This had received a number of repairs including new footwells and some untidy patch repairs to the top front corners adjacent to the door hinges. On close inspection the door pillars turned out to have been replaced, too.

There was something odd about the alignment of the pillars, especially on the passenger side. It looked as though there was a kink in the pillar, pushing the trailing edge backwards towards the door. A bit of prodding revealed filler in the join between the door pillar and the trailing edge of the front wing, put there to hide the fact that the wing edge and door

“Finally I had doors that would shut one-handed ”

pillar were no longer parallel to each other. The wing has only very limited vertical adjustment at the front end: if the door pillars are not exactly upright you end up with a gap at either the top or the bottom of the join between wing and door pillar. In this case, however, the gap was in the middle.

It is possible to fit new door pillars and footwells to a bulkhead without removing it from the vehicle, but it isn’t easy, especially as most replacement pillars and footwells are a less than perfect fit as supplied. You have to take lots of measurements and keep rechecking throughout the welding process, as heat distortion can pull things out of square without you realising.

I now had to consider my options. The wing and door would have to come off regardless, so I set to with spanners and dismantling fluid. One of my pet hates is the use of Nyloc nuts where Land Rover originally specified plain nuts and spring washers. Nylocs always seem to seize more readily than plain nuts, and even when nice and clean they still have to be ratcheted all the way off rather than loosened and then spun off with the fingertips. Needless to say this vehicle had a Nyloc nut on every single bolt.

With the panels removed I could see that the central part of the door pillar was distorted. It is welded to the outer edge of the footwell to form a hollow box section: somehow this one had moved the outer face of the pillar backwards relative to the footwell. Sometimes, when faced with widespread bodgery, the only sensible solution is to chop the whole lot out and start again. But the restorer always has to take account of the condition and value of the vehicle, the use to which it will be put, and the available budget. In this case there would have been little sense in replacing the door pillar without also dealing with the badly-repaired front face, the incipient rot in the upper corners inside the vehicle, and the ill-fitting footwells. This magnitude of work gets very expensive very quickly.

At some point in the future the bulkhead would need to come off for a full restoration to deal with the upper corner rot. However, if I could somehow sort out the alignment of this fairly new, rot-free but wonky door pillar, the bulkhead might last another six or eight years before the rot became too serious to ignore any longer. The vehicle in question was not a show-standard or utterly original, untouched example, so I came up with a plan...

First I removed the support upright between the footwell and chassis. It was rotten and needed replacing anyway. I also loosened the windscreen clamps, nuts and bolts to allow the maximum amount of flexibility in the top corner of the bulkhead. Next I cut through the door pillar with a thin cutting disc – front, outer and rear faces – at the top of the curved section just below the upper door hinge. I then hooked a ratchet strap round the trailing edge of the pillar just below the cut, with the other end anchored to the rear crossmember of a conveniently positioned, derelict Series III with the handbrake firmly on. I tensioned the ratchet strap enough to put a bit of pressure on the pillar without bending it, then belted the trailing edge forwards with a lump hammer. Amazingly this crude and brutal treatment worked: the lozenged box section returned to something approaching a square profile. There was now a slight mismatch between the upper and lower halves of the door pillar, so I gave the upper half a few smacks with the hammer. Then I took some measurements.

Door gap – just over 34 inches top and bottom. Door pillar leading edge – straight. This was looking good. I welded up the cut line to join the two halves of the pillar back together, refitted the support upright between the footwell and chassis, tightened up all the bolts, and rechecked the door gaps before releasing the tension on the ratchet strap. The door gaps stayed pretty much unchanged, so I hung the door back on with a new set of bolts, and after a bit of fiddling with the hinge adjustment I had a door that would close. Time for a cup of tea.

I still had more fiddling to do. The door catch bolted to the rear body tub is adjustable – up and down, in and out – and can take some effort to get right. The tongue of the latch needs to engage centrally with the catch, otherwise the latch will not engage properly and the door will pop open as you drive along. The door tops on both sides were still perilously close to rubbing on the hard top, and looking at the way the rear end of the hard top sat on the body tub I reckoned the entire hard top was sitting fractionally too far forward on the tub. So I loosened all the fixings between the hard top and the body tub and once again deployed a ratchet strap and large hammer to shuffle the hard top backwards a few crucial millimetres before bolting it firmly down again. Finally I had doors that would shut one-handed from inside or outside, didn’t pop open and fitted acceptably all the way round.

I still had a bit of welding to do to the chassis, which to be honest is starting to get a little thin in places due to old age. But after sorting this out and replacing a couple of blown bulbs I ran the 109 down to my friendly local MOT station, from where it emerged an hour later with the coveted piece of paper to confirm that it was fit for another year’s service.