[PatJ]

Jumping a little out of order here to post the things I did this weekend.

The doors were driving me nuts. You have to slam them ridiculously hard over and over to get them to shut. I just couldnt take it anymore so I started on the path for some door improvement solutions.

I knew that my pins and bushings were worn so they were first up to bat. I had read and heard that first you want to drill some holes in your hinges to help you align things back to factory when you go to reinstall the doors and that seemed like a great idea. With holes drilled I began to remove the hinge bolts. This is where the nightmare started.

The top hinge came out pretty easy with no real issue but as I removed the bolt for the bottom hinge I noticed that they bolt into a late behind the body that sorts floats around a bit. It seemed a little looser than it should be and as I took out the last bolt that sucker fell right into the body. FUDGE.

I looked online and couldnt really find any info on this ever happening to anyone or what to do about it. The only option I could think of was to cut a hole to access the plate that fell and deal with the aftermath later.

With the hole cut I could get the plate and also hold it in place to reinstall the doors. Both driver side and passenger side lower hinge plates fell so I had to cut a hole on both sides of my inner panels. If the top plates would have fallen that would of been much harder to get to and hold back in place.

With that done I had a pretty tough time getting the pins out of every hinge. None of them would come out and I had to heat then all with a torch and beat them out carefully. Only of them broke in 2 places and I had to spend a lot of time drilling that pin out of both parts of the hinge.

With that all done they went back on the trick pretty well but driver side door closed even worse after the new bushings and pins.