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livingskies Samba Member
Joined: April 18, 2020 Posts: 208 Location: Western Canada
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Posted: Thu May 06, 2021 9:37 am Post subject: Cargo doors adjustment, door gaps - any ideas? |
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Now that the '64 has fresh paint, I installed all the weatherstrips. The front doors and rear hatch fit fine, but the cargo doors won't close properly now.
All the weatherstrip pieces on the doors are in and installed correctly. The rear door closes and latches reasonably well, considering that it closes against new weatherstrip. But when I close the front door, the doors touch a little where they meet in the bottom part of the door. The gap at the top is fine and it becomes progressively tighter towards the bottom.
I know that the weatherstrip also needs to adapt to the doors and that they will close easier with time. But that may not help with the tight gap. For now, I can force the front door closed and lock it, but I am afraid that the paint will eventually wear where the two doors touch each other.
I can't see any sideways adjustment on the door hinges to increase the middle gap at the bottom of the doors. Am I missing some possible solution here, other than reducing the size of the doors? Definitely not the time to do that, considering that the new paint turned out very well.
No metal work took place on the door posts or on the door skins; same size as before with the old factory weatherstrip. They worked fine then, although I expect that the bottom gap was smaller than at the top even then. |
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BonTonRoulet Samba Member
Joined: September 29, 2020 Posts: 356 Location: Mississippi
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Posted: Thu May 06, 2021 1:08 pm Post subject: Re: Cargo doors adjustment, door gaps - any ideas? |
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If you are using a uniform shape piece of weather stripping without custom fitting the backside of the weather stripping to the channels in the cargo doors then that's your problem. The channel in the doors isn't uniform, especially around the hinge areas----both spots where if you have low hinge doors you'll also have to trim around the areas where the high hinge was used in earlier models. I like to use a dremel tool with a sanding drum to remove the foam material on the backside of the weather stripping. And use a respirator or dust mask when doing it. |
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livingskies Samba Member
Joined: April 18, 2020 Posts: 208 Location: Western Canada
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Posted: Thu May 06, 2021 2:41 pm Post subject: Re: Cargo doors adjustment, door gaps - any ideas? |
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Thanks for the suggestion. I did cut out all the recessed areas on the backside of the weatherstrip. The original factory pieces served as patterns. If I could move the bottom hinges a little farther apart, that would look after the issue. But I don't know how to do that without damaging the bodywork. |
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