Replace a Door Skin

We head to MBVR where they show us how to tackle some tricky tasks that, with a touch of their skill and patience, they make look easy… First off, replacing a door skin.

Continuing our bodywork series, we’re going to tackle the re-skinning of a Mk1 Granada offside front door on a car that Mid Beds Vehicle Restorations (MBVR) are currently restoring for the owner. This is a pretty exciting car as it’s a late Mk1 built in January 1977 as Ford were preparing for the Mk2 production to start. In fact there’s parts of the early Mk2 in it as well, since both were very similar cars. It’s not unknown for this practice to happen and makes for a

weird but interesting car that can get you scratching your head.

This one is a UK car but was exported for a large part of its life and has survived pretty well. It was rescued by its previous owner from a scrapyard in Spain and bought by its current keepers, Nick Green and Jane Hewitt in 2017. As we’ll see in the coming months, it also needed new rear quarters and we’ll show you how MBVR tackled that, too. Originally the car was finished in Saturn Gold which is a similar shade to Regan’s Granada Ghia used in the late series of The Sweeney. It goes without saying that Nick and Jane are huge fans of said TV show, and are looking forward to tearing round the streets searching for cardboard boxes to crash into…

Meanwhile, we followed along as MBVR’s Ryan Orrell first showed us how to remove a door skin and then fit a genuine Ford NOS replacement after restoring the inner door frame and protecting it from further corrosion.

Door skin removal

With the door on a pair of trestles and with some protection — even removing the door skin, it’s good practice to keep it from damage — Ryan finds the original folded over edges of the door skin, shown in the corner of the door.

With a 36-grit disc in his air version of the angle grinder, he very, very carefully sands the edge of the door skin….

...Until he sees a very feint line appearing — this is the centre of three layers and represents the actual door frame which we want to keep, along with as little damage as possible. Sand too much off and the door skin could become too small when it’s turned over.

With a thin-bladed chisel, Ryan separates the top, turned-over edge of the original door skin…

…Which when flicked up, can be peeled back using a pair of pliers — don’t worry about the face skin at the moment.

You can go virtually the full length of each side…

…But you’ll encounter a couple of obstacles. Hidden in the run will be a couple of spot welds or a touch of brazing, which we can see in the corner of the door.

There’s a couple of ways you attack this — Ryan prefers to knock the top off using an air belt sander, which can be finely controlled to do as minimal damage as possible — just grinding around the spot weld, allowing it to be popped up and ground back. Alternatively, you could also do this with a drill and spot weld cutter.

But it’s not quite that simple because chances are it will be stuck down with old seam sealer, which needs freeing. For this, he uses a thin-blade scraper slid between the skin and inner frame…

Ryan can then peel the whole of the inner turned edge from the entire door — in theory, leaving the outer skin free.

...Which you can also slide along sideways — tapping gently with a hammer if necessary to free the bond.

Once he’s worked his way around the whole door, Ryan turns it over on the trestles and lifts off the skin...

…Which is actually hooked in at the top edge.This bit on a Granada at least is not bonded nor welded.

This section is the crash bar, which is normally also bonded to the outer skin but in this case, it isn’t — it may well have had a skin before and this process was simply left out!

You can see that the frame’s remains and on first examination, it looks a bit rough although most of this is simply surface corrosion, coupled with accumulated crud.

The inner corners look corroded but again they aren’t too bad and with cleaning and rust treatment, will go again.

The bottom edge though has gone a bit further — Ryan will let some sections in and deal with the worst areas to restore the inner frame before fitting the skin.

For this, they will use a product called POR15, which stands for Paint Over Rust. Used correctly, it’s incredible stuff, bonding to rust and giving a protection that MBVR reckon is equal to E-Coating, but the advantage is, you can brush it and do it at home.

Skin fitting

We left Ryan to restore the inner door frame, which he’s done using techniques we’ve recently covered in our bodywork series. He’s coated the whole frame in POR15, both inside and out.

First bit is to run some seam sealer along the outer edges where the door skin will fold into.This goes off very slowly — in fact you virtually have all day to align the skin as it’ll go off over the course of a couple of days, giving you plenty of time for alignment.

Ryan puts some healthy dollops of seam sealer on the crash bar but stresses you don’t want too much otherwise it could hold off the door skin from the inner frame causing a bulge in the door.

He’s also prepared the new door skin — he’s scuffed all around the outer edge with 80-grit so the POR15 will adhere. Note also the top edge, which you can see, hooks over the frame and is left loose.

With the frame on top of the trestles, the top edge is hooked over the frame and then dropped slowly onto the bead of seam sealer.

The first job is to get the new skin in the correct position, which is guided by various areas on the skin.

Here, the top edge…

…And here the fold in the door skin, which goes into a corresponding fold in the frame…

…And here, where the hole for the door handle fixing goes.

Once he’s happy the skin’s pretty well aligned, he clamps the bottom two corners with flat-faced welding clamps so the skin can’t move.

Next he’ll start the process of turning the skin edges over but before we do that, a word on the tools he’ll use.You can buy a purpose-made skinning tool, but MBVR prefer to do it the traditional way with hammer and dolly — this is Ryan’s virtually flat-faced hammer, which has a nice clean face. MBVR find that skinning tools can leave marks — the traditional way, with skill, doesn’t!

In-conjunction with this, he uses a flat-faced dolly although, it has a curved back face, which will come in handy later. Note though, how he’s holding the dolly — his fingers are on the edge which makes the dolly tip very slightly, so that he’s hammering into the opposite edge, which serves to leave a dent-free outer skin face.

Ryan begins by folding each corner about halfway — he just does a small amount, then moves to the opposite corner, then the top corners.This secures the skin in place, allowing you to take off the clamps he put on earlier. If you don’t do this, then you risk the skin moving on the fame — what happens then is, you’ve worked your way round the door only to find it’s run out of alignment!

The actual turning of the edge is done in two stages. First Ryan works down one edge, just folding around halfway…

…Then goes back and folds the edge flat, holding the hammer flat and the dolly beneath, slightly tipped towards the outer edge.

Now you can see what the curved edge of the dolly is for — the curved sections of the door skin! Ryan repeats the two-stage exercise although…

...For the extreme depth of the cavity section, he uses a pick-shaped hammer to get right into the fold

The bottom edge of the door, he also uses the pick hammer as there’s not enough room to use the full size of the other hammer head; since the bottom of the door’s sidewall creates a restriction; meaning there’s not enough room.

He works his way around each length of the door frame in two stages, checking alignment all the time, until the inside looks like this — although he’s left the corners until last.

Ryan admits these are the trickiest sections to get right and look neat. Sometimes they go well others, not so — it’s a bit of a luck of the draw.

Again, you hold the dolly slightly tipped on each edge and the hammer flat — although the dolly is overlapping both parts of the corners, dressing into the door skin.

The last little bit — the thin sections are again the worst of the worst, as you can see here, practise means Ryan’s quite good at it!

The final part of this section dictates a small amount of dressing with a Roloc disc in an air sander, just to trim it perfectly straight.

The last stretch

Before the seam sealer has any chance of going off, Ryan hangs the door — this is really important because the skin still has a degree of movement and it’s often the case that the door will need tweaking to get it to fit dead right. The only way to do that is to fit it to the car.

That of course means fitting the latches….

…Door handles, and anything else that could have an effect on the door closing properly.

Then it’s a case of gently closing it into the aperture and adjusting it on the hinges until the gaps are right.

It all looks OK — now they simply leave it for a day or two for the sealer to go off – and JD. Now onto the rear quarter!