skin me

Oh, some super exciting progress here at the workshop!  We have re-skinned the lower half of the passenger door!  I am ecstatic!

First we started with careful measurements, cut the 18g sheet metal to size, then bent the 3 edges on our brake.

 Our brake does bends to 135°, so this was perfect for the tool that we purchased that does the rest of the bend when it's on the door.  So, with a little tweaking on the length of the patch piece, we put the panel clamps on and Brian spot welded it in place on the face, being careful to cool down each weld as he went.

 We removed the panels clamps and he filled in a few more spot welds

Then, we were ready to use our new tool - ''The Skinner'' by Wivco.  Worked pretty slick!!!  You do have to use a dolly and hammer to get the seam started for the tool (I used a block of fir for the dolly so as not to damage the outside of the skin).  The Skinner tool has teflon on the skin side of the tool, so it doesn't cause any damage to the outside.  It does make some little marks on the fold side from the traction on the roller, but they won't be noticable once it's primed and painted.

Here is a short video of the tool:

And, the seam after it's been rolled down.  Awesomsauce.  (The corner will get welded)

Double awesomesauce!

Yes, I am very excited about how well this turned out!!!  Now, we do need to cut a little notch out for the lower hinge.  We we are tentatively looking for ONE more hinge because I think we might put a third hinge on the doors if we can find just one more hinge.  We only have 5 total usable hinges right now, so we don't want to commit to 3 hinges in either door until we find a 6th hinge.  Which might be tricky :P  But, with how much flex the doors seem to have, I really think a 3rd hinge like the original doors had would be good.  The '40 that we got these doors from only had 2 hinges, but the original doors had 3 (which were all rotten beyond use, but the previous owner had found 5 rebuildable hinges that we had restored).