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).

outta gas

After some nudging by me, we got some work done on the truck on Sunday......

We have been working on re-skinning and stiffening up the doors.  Brian was ready to do a little welding, but realized that he had turned the gas on the welder all the way ON instead of OFF the last time he welded.  There must be a leak somewhere because there was NO gas :(  That meant no welding, darn!

I took these pics with my new Galaxy S5 - it has a 15 megapixel camera, but the pics are odd shaped compared to what I'm used to (longer in one direction, I guess like a flat-screen monitor)

We decided how much rotten skin had to come off, marked the line:

 Scary to cut that much off, but it had to be done

 Yikes!

Well, no turning back now!

The orginal door had an oak support for the skin - so I made 2 from a hardwood decking material.  It's as hard or harder than oak and has less open grain.  Brian made a new bracket for the wood support - and there is where we realized we had no gas for the welder, boooo.

You can see the slight curve shape the wood has for the skin-side.

We actually made this new skin on our brake two weekends ago - 16g steel to match the orginal thickness.  Our brake was able to bend the edges at about 135degrees, so we slid it on from the bottom to test fit.  We will have to trim it about 1/4'' off to get a shorter reveal on the bottom edge, but it looks about as close to perfect as we could expect!  We are very happy how this turned out!  We were very nervous about how we were going to crimp the skin when we were ready to have it finalized, so we did some googling..... and realized that our best option was to get a tool for the job.  We might not have if we only had a small section to do, but both doors need this much replaced.  So, I've ordered the skin-crimping tool  and am praying it gets here by next weekend! :)

The view from the inside.  The wood support will be screwed to the brackets (one new, one original)

Now, I'm off to the welding store today to get some gas - and maybe some more panel clamps if they have them (we just have 5, it would be nice to have twice that many when Brian welds the skin on).

Karin