Fitting doors and hood (Question)

[jakester888]

I've had the doors and hood mounted since this summer and have driven her around the neighborhood for almost 1500 miles. It's time now to start thinking about properly fitting the doors and hood.

Need suggestions, please look at these photos below.

For the door : need techniques for sanding & fitting.
For the hood : the bow in the hood doesn't quite match with the body. Almost seems like I need more bend in it. How do you accomplish this?

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[edwardb]

It's hard to tell too much from your door pictures. But normally the PS door lines up pretty easily once the edges of the door and opening are cleaned up. Make sure the sill is pushed in all the way along the bottom, and it should line up. The DS door is a little harder. Again, once the edges of the door and opening are cleaned up, the sill in front should be pushed all the way in and the back pulled out, as I recall 3/4 - 1 inch. That will help you line it up, but it will be low compared to the body at the front lower corner. Been that way since Mk3's, and repeated on Mk4's.

For the hood, for starters your hinges are way out of alignment. Use the adjustment to get it centered and aligned along the front. Then loosen the main bracket bolts just enough so the hood will move, and push the hood down to where it aligns with the opening. Then reach from underneath and tighten. Easy to do without the engine, but still doable with the engine in. This should help get the front better aligned. For the rest, you need to have bumpers around the perimeter that holds the hood at the right height relative to the body. Especially important is the center back edge right in front of the windshield. That may take a pretty large bumper to hold the hood at the right height. Then adjust the hood latches to pull the corners down. You should be able to get it to pull in. Not unusual for a hood to not exactly match the curves of the opening at first. But it can be adjusted, and over time will take a set to the proper curve. HTH.

[skullandbones]

There are some things you can do to the door latches that will help their longevity as they can take a beating if your doors are not in proper alignment. These mods should be done regardless. One is replacing the main fastener mechanism in the latch with a carriage bolt and the other is putting a screw in the round bulb on the end of the latch handle. These will make them much more hardy. You don't want to try fixing them after they break in the OEM condition. You might have to start with a new latch at that point.

Also, I learned a couple of things from Ron Everett at SEMA. We were just talking generally but got onto door fitment. So he shared this with me. I think it is known from ffcars.com but I don't remember it being discussed here. It is about the striker and receiver where you look into the receiver hole you will see a little bit of the catch sticking out. He says to hone that down until you can't see it protruding and then on the striker you drill the hole on the end just a little more so the receiver and striker engage more fully. Of course, this is assuming you have the two pieces aligned as good as possible. Those are probably considered fine adjustments but at some point you will get there and want more! I am still working on my MKIII doors so I can appreciate where you're at. Oh. One more thing. Ron said you can drill a hole and put a bolt through the inside rocker panel to draw in the front body panel. The bolt would be attached to the steel tubing under the rocker. I had not heard that one before. As most people have filled in the lower front driver's side corner with body filler to alleviate that ongoing problem with fitment there. Regardless: it is likely there will be some body work on the driver's side but this may reduce the amount of filler needed. If I make any progress on mine I will send you some pics.

Good luck,

WEK.

[Jeff Kleiner]

You've got a lot going on there and a lot to do to make it better. First of all as edwardb said your hood hinges are way out of adjustment. His recommendation to make your adjustments from below is spot on. As for the outer edges being up from the body the latches are your friend---once you have the front edge set try placing one of the thick rubber bumpers dead center at the rear of the hood flange then adjust the latch paddles to pull the outer corners down to the body. Looks like your latches are set a little closer together than I prefer. Closer to the outer corner is more effective; Mk3 we could get by with them 24" apart but there is more curvature to the Mk4 hood so I like to set them to 28". On Mk4s I usually end up with only 2 bumpers for the hood; the previously mentioned one on center at the rear of the flange and another on center at the front of the flange. Be sure that your gas struts are not bottoming out when the hood is closed; on Mk3s and early Mk4s the location for the hood mounted ball stud bracket was not far enough rearward which resulted in the struts bottoming out and consequently putting a bow into the hood.

The doors...oh we could talk for hours about the doors! to save myself some typing I'll cut & paste some comments I have made to others when door fitting questions have come up:

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Keep in mind that you aren't just adjusting the doors to fit into the hole but you are also moving the hole to fit the door. What I mean is that a big part of the equation is moving the body as well as the door to strike the best balance. There is a lot of give and take involved in the process. Although fitting them is tedious I have never used shims/washers between the doors and hinges, hinges and chassis or had to slot or enlarge any of the mounting holes in the hinges. That isn't to say that it might not ultimately be necessary is some case but I haven't encountered it. You are trying to strike a balance at 4 different places; the upper front of the door where it meets the cowl, the upper rear where it meets the rear cockpit opening, plus the lower front and lower rear. To further complicate things along the upper part of the doors we're dealing with both horizontal as well as vertical interfaces. Adjusting for one invariably affects at least one other. And people wonder why body men drink... I've had the best luck adjusting for the door tops first. While dealing with the top area of the doors do not completely ignore the lower door edge's intersection with the main body but keep in mind that the lower body can be moved in/out independently with little to no effect to the upper cockpit openings. On both Mk3s and Mk4s I've found that the passenger door has been easier than the driver's side; once the adjustments were made to get the tops in order it just took a bit of outward movement to the lower body to have it meet the bottom edge of the door. On the other hand with the drivers side once the tops were fitting the bodies had to go in at the lower front corner of the doors and move out a great deal at the rear. I've found that these cars and bodies are quite consistent and one of those constants is that you'll need to push the rocker panel in as far as possible in front of the driver's door and pull it out at the rear. I can assure you that you aren't going to get all 4 corners ro meet perfectly but your goal is to get them as close as possible so that they operate without interference and to minimize the bodywork necessary to match contours between the main body and moveable panels. This is another point of consistency; the areas that need attention to match contours, one of them being the door tops to cowl intersection that you mentioned. These photos are of two different cars but you can see that they both needed pretty much the same work:

http://i269.photobucket.com/albums/jj43/jkleiner/100_4328.jpg

http://i269.photobucket.com/albums/jj43/jkleiner/Mk4%207276/100_2403.jpg

I just finished up another and although I didn't take any photos it looked exactly the same!

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If you are asking about the top rollover of the doors I use a piece of rubber radiator hose about 4" long and split longways so that it curves around a little more than 180 degrees. I just cup it in my hand and use it to drag the mud. Some guys use split PVC pipe for the cockpit roll on pre-Mk4s but I couldn't ever get comfortable with that method.

http://i269.photobucket.com/albums/jj43/jkleiner/Mk4%207276/100_2208.jpg

If the "sand the edges" question relates to rolling the door, hood and trunk panel edges I just knock the point off of the corners and ease them over by giving them a few strikes along their length with 150 or 220. The buildup of high build primer, basecoat and clear will naturally form a some radius so there is no need to try to create too much in the fiberglass. As long as we're on the subject of door edges there are a couple of other things that I do. First is to back bevel the inside leading edge of the doors to allow more clearance to the body as they swing through their arc when opened. This will let you tighten up your gaps a bit.

http://i269.photobucket.com/albums/jj43/jkleiner/RyanW/100_4148.jpg

I do the underside top edge of the deck lid this way also for the same reason.

When it comes to matching the contours between the doors and main body one of the first things that you'll notice is that the door tops are typically lower than the cowl and also that the main body takes a pretty severe dive or roll into the door opening. To straighten these areas out I bridge all the way across between the door and body with filler then cut through right before it cures:

http://i269.photobucket.com/albums/jj43/jkleiner/RyanW/100_4314.jpg

I then start working to get the margin consistent all the way around. Note that I'm not building filler up on the door edge but rather on the body where it returns back into the jamb. After a couple of applications once the body and door lines are flowing nicely I butter it back into the door jamb and square the edge off:

http://i269.photobucket.com/albums/jj43/jkleiner/RyanW/100_4336.jpg

Once it's all done you will wind up with something like this with consistent lines and margins:

http://i269.photobucket.com/albums/jj43/jkleiner/RyanW/100_4543.jpg

As mentioned earlier it's all a game of give and take working not only the door but also the hole that it goes into.

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One thing to be sure of before you get started is to assure that the dash ends that run beyond the hoop and tuck behind the hinges are not in contact with the underside of the cowl and pushing it up which will make the doors fit even worse than usual. If the dash was installed too high this will occur. Regarding my buddy Ron E's comment to skullandbones about pulling the door flange in with a screw: Ron and I have discussed this as well as a slightly different method that I have adopted to achieve the same result which is to install one of the rubber bumpers on the front of the door flange at or about height of the bottom arm of the hinge. There is no stress between the body and chassis with this method. It still requires filling areas of the door (both sides) to match the body contours but these methods reduce it.

Carry on John, keep us updated on your progress and ask questions if you need help!

Jeff