Rebuilding Door Hinges

Here's another SNAFU, this should be easy to do but there is always one that doesn't cooperate. All the door hinges on the LTD are loose and needed to have the bushings replaced. Seems like it should be easy, I went to MAC's and bought several kits that indicated the year and car it would fit. That was mistake 1-20; in trusting MAC's website. The bushings weren't as long as the OEM's on 6 out of 8 hinges on the doors. Not less forgetting the detent spring only worked on the rear doors. So there was that nonsense to deal with.

But the main dilemma was the 2 out of 6 hinges (rear door upper hinges) that were completely different from the rest.

Here are the passenger side hinges. Ignore the upper ones, they are for another car. The lower right side are the rear door hinges and the lower left side are the front door hinges.

Here's the first inconsequential problem. The Mac's bushings aren't as long as the originals. But they will work. Here's the interesting bit, I looked through Dorman and they have bushings listed for Chrysler that are the same dimensions as the old Ford bushings. Plus order through Rock Auto and they are much cheaper than these parts ordered through Mac's. However these bushings will work on front door hinges (both) and the rear door lower hinges.

But this is where the pound head here problem starts. The upper rear door bushings are conical in shape. I couldn't find these ANYWHERE. Plus on all the 3 four door 3rd gen cars here, all the upper hinges had the pin working its way out. It's as though the splines weren't holding. And here's why, the whole upper rear door hinge is the only hinge made from cast aluminum.

All the other door hinges are made from cast iron/cast iron, or cast iron/stamped steel.

This is the little blighter that caused this kerfuffle. And the hinge more or less had the bore to match the conical shape. I mean why????????? Why not use the same bushing the other hinges use. No, Ford had to create this little mutant. After a long mental dwell time on this, my goal was to use the same bushings as the other 6 hinges on the car and also fix the hinge walking out problem as well.

This was my solution, a sleeve that would press into the the hinge body that had the correct bore to accept the standard bushing used on the rest of the hinges. The problem is I couldn't use regular steel to make the sleeve because the hinge was aluminum. One bit of moisture trapped between the two and all kinds of unhappiness (corrosion) would quickly ensue. So this had to be made out of stainless steel. And that is a cow to machine because of the hard chromium content.

The other difficulty was how to fixture the aluminum hinge to bore it out true to the hinge centre line. The hinge is funky casted and the only true side is the mating flange to car body.

So basically insert gets pressed into bored hinge. Next, fix the walking pin problem.

The hinge pins MAC's sends you are so generic you have to cut them down. So I did but the upper hinge pin a little longer and machined a slot for a C clip. Problem solved.

You can better see how that hinge body is casted quirko-tweakolated and it's really hard to fixture in anything other than the car.

Bushing pressed in.

Done!

Holy cow that took 2 days when it should have literally been a 10 minute job.

Lower rear door hinge done. This was a 5 minute job.

The front door hinges were a doddle as well. They are all ready for paint now.

The saga slowly presses forward.

The rear door hinges on the 4 door hardtop or post are the same, even the '68 LTD 4 door has the same hinges. The uppers are aluminum. Again makes no sense as it wasn't for weigh savings mindset. They used the same front door hinges as the 2 door. Really over kill, make those out of aluminum. Or if Ford really wanted to save weight on their big block cars, use aluminum intakes on all FE cars regardless of pitiful output of the engine. That would whack off easily 50 pounds off the car.

Again the seemingless crazy things big companies do will probably be a mystery forever as those people are probably long gone. I just posted to an old post I started a couple years ago about some of the absurdity of my Chevrolet Caprice Classic. Again, it was crazy-ville there too.

Here's that link if anyone is interested

Converting a GM 12 bolt rear axle to a Ford 9" axle