Time to fit my ebay treasure to the car.
Starting with the passenger door: Mirror, top piece of door trim, door lock button and guide piece.
The first thing to do was work out where to fit the mirror.
Positioning is crucial because once fitted it can only be adjusted in one place- the mirror rotates on the arm and sort of moves your view both in/out and up/down. The arm itself has no adjustment.
Cue lots of test positioning before marking up to drill.
I seem to always struggle drilling holes in metal, but some better drill bits did the trick and the holes went into place well:
The next steps were tricky.
Firstly in order to get the best view in this (passenger) mirror I wanted it mounted not quite flat to the door, lifting one edge gave a better view. So its wedged underneath with washers and the rubber gasket I made also has a wedge section to keep it all neat.
The next stage was super fiddly.
You can see in the picture the holes go through the door just where the side window pivots (it pivots as it drops). Just behind that point is quite a lot of window mechanism and not a lot of depth.
The parts manual simply shows the mirror screwed through the metal at this point, but that did not feel very secure to me, so I wanted to use small bolts with nuts inside to keep it all nice and tight.
The challenge was access. There is no direct access to the rear of this section of outer door from the inside. Its a case of reaching up inside right from the bottom of the door.
It took me absolutely ages, using a mirror and the nuts attached to various extensions, to wiggle the nuts into place while looking into the mirror.
Different extensions were needed to place each of the 3 nuts.
But after a lot of fiddling (and a few bad words), they did all end up where I needed them to be and the window movement is not obstructed.
(this is a photo of what you see in the mirror, so as if your head was inside the bottom of the door looking up- not a lot of room as you can see).
Success
To do all this I'd removed the interior trim from the door, so whilst it was off I took the opportunity to lubricate the hinges and the door stop mechanism. I also sprayed lots of wax into the door bottoms and added some extra sound deadening to try and make the door shut with a more solid clunk, rather than the current squeak followed by clang.
You can see the silver coloured sheets of sound deadening in this pic.
and then a new vapour barrier
The other thing I did whilst the inside of the door was open was to try and get the external door trim more securely attached. At the moment a couple of its push fasteners pop out every time the door is shut. I did not really do anything beyond push them into place more firmly, but with the interior trim removed I was able to support the door and do this with a lot more force. It seems to have done the trick.
When removing the main door card, some of the fitting clips had torn out, so I reglued them back in place
But this turned out to be a mistake, when I came to put that door card back, none of the clips lined up with their holes. I had to dig them all out, remove the glue and reposition them.
Also repair the damage I made pulling them out of that new glue.
The second attempt was a lot better, although a couple still needed a bit of bending to meet the holes.
I'll be a lot more careful removing this trim when I do the drivers door- I have various trim removal tools, I was just too impatient and did not use them- lesson learned!
It did work though, door cards reattached, "new" piece of top trim clipped in place and lock button and guide fitted
All back to together and it looks a lot better
and the door shuts much more smoothly, with a nice solid clunk.
Ideally it would need less force to shut- I have previously adjusted the lock striker plate and that has helped a lot. I did try and see if I could adjust the hinges, but they were too tight to turn and I don't want to force anything- its improved enough now to be satisfactory.
Having learned a few tricks (and made mistakes), hopefully I'll be quicker doing the driver's door!
Cheers
Nigel
even with 2 nuts locked, it was still too stiff to get the adjuster threaded down, the pair of nuts just spun together rather than the adjuster turning.
