Door Hinge

As can be seen from the photograph, there is evidence that the driver's door on TC4985 has dropped. The sill plates were installed in about 2013 by a previous owner, who then didn't drive the car. Then the next owner also hardly drove the car, in fact there were only 148 miles on the clock when I bought it in 2015. So most of the wear on the sill plate must be down to me. Finally in July 2020 I got around to investigating it.

As I lifted the door, the two parts of the top hinge did not move on their fixings to the tub and to the door, but the pin joining them did. However, when I removed the pin it didn't show any sign of wear, so it seems to be the holes through the hinge parts that are worn. Once the door was removed, the 'slop' in the hinge parts was evident. The brass ball that sits between the upper and lower hinge parts (and on which the door rotates) also showed some looseness around the pin.

Clearly, replacing the pin and ball would not help matters, so I needed to put bushes in the holes. I didn't have any 1/4" ID tubing and I didn't want to start by drilling out the holes in the hinge parts, so I thought I would try cutting a piece of steel alloy sheet, about 16 thou thick, wrap it around the pin to form a tube and push that into the hole in the hinge part.

Before I had removed the door I tried making a single tube to go the whole length of pin, but it wouldn't go through because the hole in the brass ball was not as large as the holes in the hinge parts.

So after removing the door I made three tubes. For the brass ball I hammered the sheet to thin it and then, after wrapping around the pin, used a needle file to reduce its diameter until it would fit in the hole and allow the pin to rotate. The photo shows the three tubes that were fabricated.

Initially I thought that the spring on the end of the pin would fit over the tube, but it wouldn't, so I had to make a shorter version of the lower tube.

After re-installing the door and tightening the nuts on the pins I found that there was no noticeable difference; the door was still dropping! I found that the movement was nearly all in the lower hinge part, so I removed the door again and made a double tube. This had to be filed down so as to get it to go into the hole in the hinge. However, after tapping the tubes, which were only about a quarter of an inch long, into the hole I found that the pin would not fit, so I had to file the hole down the centre. I tried using a 1/4" reamer, but it simply dislodged the tubes.

On reassembly the tube in the brass ball was pushed out, so I left it out. However, there was a noticeable improvement in the door movement. In May 2018 I had noted that the driver's door was not closing properly and so I adjusted the catch. Well, it was still necessary to slam the door hard in order to get it to catch properly. I was going to remove more wood, but found that the part of the catch on the bolt was not vertical. When it was, the door closed with less effort.