Door adjustment, alignment

[dknight]

So i decided to give a look at my door today as since buying the car it never appears to sit right.

When i shut it the back section that meets the body, where the door handle is sits and looks fine, but the front section appears to sit too low, like it is sloping forwards (see attached picture shows it is not lined up right with the windscreen edge.

I have had to remove the front striker pin as it just would not shut right with that on, when i bought it it took me days to actually free it off.

Anyone point me in right direction of what and where to adjust?

thanks!

Dan

[dknight]

Well after a bit of investigation i think someone has already messed with the bolts to the front of the door, the rear i can loosen and get a bit of adjustment but the front due to the torsion bar the arm is naturally pulling up to its highest position and try as i might i can not get any leverage for adjustment, therefore leaving the door sitting how it is in the picture. So at least i have figured out the problem.

So the dreaded torsion bar, i have a suspicion now that only way i will get some true adjustment is to loosen off the torsion bar. My plan was to remove the striker pins completely and adjust it till it sits somewhere near.

Ive watched many videos with torsion bar adjustment, they all scare me a little. Will get a second set of hands see if that can help me adjust the front in situ.

Ive attached a picture which i think clearly shows my problem

[MikeWard]

The striker pins are there for a reason. Don't remove them.

[Chris P]

The bolts on the door are usually very, very tight…….when you have finished, it can very difficult to do them up tight enough to stop them moving again.

It was a job I wished we never started!

The 'Door Repair Men' at the factory often used to twist the whole door to get them to sit right.

Personally I think its a job best left to the experts.

[dknight]

like i said ive only removed the pins to get the natural hang right. Someone else has had a go at it so i have no option but to have a fettle, will keep trying to adjust this front part

[dknight]

well can of worms has been opened haha

i am now certain someone has had problems with this door, the bracket that mounts the torsion bar is twisted and appears to be botched, compared to the other side it sits flush

to add to the problems both front bolts are threaded (prior to me touching it) *sigh

[dknight]

it does look like i am having a conversation with myself now but at least its here for others to reference

Torsion bar has been over tightened for whatever reason, front hinge was not tight but what i thought was 2 captive nuts that were going to cause me alot of grief is infact a sliding piece of metal so the threaded bracket is no big deal now.

Will get another bracket made and put back together, door already looks to sit better now i can adjust, just near impossible to work on without a spare pair of hands, nearly lost my head a few times

all is good

[Rissy]

I'm listening...

I like pictures.

Doors are not easy. I've played with mine quite a few times, but I've limited my adjustments to removing striker pins and opening up the fibreglass hole the pins screw through, playing with different combinations of washers and of course the over all tightened position of the striker pins. (Finished off with surrounding body panel alignment and outer rubber door seals.

It's pretty difficult even to get that all that right, never mind adding on top of that torsion bar tightness and door bracket tightened position.

Just be careful. Can you not borrow another set of hands to help you? I'm not sure of the sequence of adjustment required, but I'd have thought it to be brackets first, then torsion bar, then rubber seals, then striker pins, and then finally surrounding body panels.

[dknight]

Yeah all the talk on the net did put me off but ive jumped in in the deep end and it seems to be going according to plan, the miss alignment appears to be the door is too far outwards on the front hinge, ive drawn a picture to better explain, adjusting the upper brackets with the torsion bar in place i would say is near impossible to do, the stresses it automatically puts on the front bracket as soon as you loosen it, it pings up to its highest fitment.

Hoping to give it another go today, will update with how it goes

[Chris P]

Hi Dan, when we did it, we propped the door up, look ALL the tension off the torsion bar, then adjusted the hinge on the door….doing the bolts up very tight and then re-tensioned the torsion bar. Does that help? or have I misunderstood your problem?

[Rissy]

Looking at your very first picture showing the front sharp corner of the door. I've heard stories from the past that the factory had some trouble at least with the earlier cars in this same area. The issue they had was that corner getting too close to the windscreen and actually breaking it when the door was closed with any excessive force. I'm wondering whether your car suffered this very problem and someone has made some adjustments to bring that corner out and away from the windscreen to stop it breaking it...? Even looking at where your door is positioned now, after being adjusted out of kilter (loved your graphical illustration by the way) you can see it's still very close....


At least you might now know the reason for the seemingly odd adjustments which have been made...?

[dknight]

chris what you have done is exactly what i plan on doing, the tension part is not really anything to do with my initial problem.

in hindsight my problem was clear from my first few pictures, the hinge bolts you can see daylight/gap/something which should not be there, and explains the subsequent gap my following crude diagram shows.

readjusted briefly today whist i called in work and all sat so much better, will give it a good go next week and show my findings.

I really do not want to tempt fate with something i already said looked a nightmare of a task, but all seems to looks quite straight forward?????

[Rich H]

Looking at your photos, you've got a dropped front door edge.

When I first got my car, the windscreen had cracked in the corner where the door tip collided with the aluminium trim if the door was closed hard. It's a nightmare to fix, and, after 10 years, I'm still not 100% happy with mine.

I bet your passenger door is a perfect fit right?

Twisting the door as your per your illustration won't solve your problem. You need to shim underneath the front hinge. Unfortunately that has two side effects. The first is the top windscreen trim will be below the roofline of the door. That's easily fixed by adjusting the trim. The second is that the roof of the door will start to catch the stainless centre T section when you open the door. That means moving the T section towards the passenger side by slacking of the securing screws.

Your door is as bad as mine was and it'll need a major amount of shims to get it even half decent. Without wishing to sound defeatist, you're in for a tough journey with that one.

You cant adjust the front hinge without taking off the tension on the torsion bar. There is a HUGE amount of torque on that front hinge, you wont be able to do anything with it while the torsion bar is wound up and risk serious damage to self and/or car if the hinge lets go while you're messing with it.

[dknight]

well i keep finding more problems, looks like the front mech has been levered and damaged, so new one of them is now needed!

might just smash this one up to get it to actually locate for the sake of still making progress

annoying!

[dknight]

well all has gone really well? ha

got the latch back on the door and by myself managed to just raise the torsion hinge up a tad and readjusted and it sits much better already, this is without rubbers and fine tweaking so once i get everything back together i think as already said the key is to doing it little by little.

not a great pic but sits at a much better position