Front Passenger Door - Body Damage Part I

Hello,

This body damage has been the bane of my existence lately. I can not find a replacement door so I have been working on this door, the research (good and bad) and then trying different techniques.

It should go without saying avoiding body filler is top priority. This whole body damage has opened the proverbial can of worms.

Since just pulling it out was a popular suggestion I decided to give that a whirl. Again can't knock it till you tried it.... Anyone who knows me knows where this is headed .

The migraine, err door. The front wing was actually worse. But I have a spare.

First step is to strip the door down to an empty shell.

General bric-a-brac out of the way.

In order to remove the glass the upper stops and rests must be removed first.

These two screws holding the track to the window are next, but you need something to hold the window up first.

If you're doing this by yourself, these work great.

Remove the wing regulator and the main window regulator.

All the important bits are out to start yanking on it. For the astute, you will have noticed this skin has already been replaced sometime in the past, along with the pass rear door and pass wing. This car has probably been sideswiped. Then to add insult to injury it was hit again before we bought it. Although it looks like someone was pushing it out of a garage and sideswiped the garage door frame.

Remove the paint and did some analysis; the blue lines are ridges and the brown are ridges. These are the creases to work on, the bulk of the majority of secondary damage to the top portion should just unlock once the ridges and valleys are leveled.

Made some weld on pull tabs. Let the fun, hymmmm yeah, commence.

It is slowly working, well for the skin anyway, but soon I noticed something else.

Continued in part II