Tag Archives: door

Interior

March 2006 – Door handle details

Winter has been mild in North Carolina, though cold enough in the deep winter months to keep me out of the garage. March usually is the transition month — a month of teasing warmth and, when cold, a month of yearning for spring. This March has been warm. So warm, in fact, that this weekend I opened the front door of the garage to let air and sun in. This is what the car looked like on 11 March, just before the left door handle was put into place.

Please excuse the mess. Winter blows leaves through the cracks beneath a side door, but the rest of the disarray is my fault. I am always amazed to see pictures of other fellows’ neat and tidy workspaces. I’ve never been that organized, and I have kids who use the garage and the tools as well.

This entry might be a little too detailed for most folks, but I found that I spent an inordinate amount of time just figuring out how the door lock/latch mechanism works. I initially thought that some parts had been pilfered, since there seemed to be too much “air” in the middle of the section covered by the can-like “retaining case.” There is a plunger-like piece that slides freely in the rear section of thetumbler piece, and it slides freely when the car is locked, and is held in place when unlocked, so that the plunger is forced out the back end of the retaining case to activate the latch mechanism in the door.

I got a new retaining case from XKs Unlimited. The cases are sided, and so this one fits only the left side. (A tab is labeled “LH” for “left hand.”) The retaining case frequently will fail at the rear end, as mine had. The part was virtually identical to the original, except for the fact that excess metal from the casting had not been trimmed off. This mainly was an issue for the hole at the rear (pictured). Ten minutes of sanding with some 220-grit sandpaper made everything clean and correct. Fit was not good on a small tab that slides into a slot on the door handle, but this was a matter of a little more sanding to bring the tab down to size.

Neither of these were big issues. It is, of course, much better to have too much metal than too little.

This lock and the one on the right side door had apparently been lubricated with oils and perhaps a little grease. They were both caked with grime. I took everything apart and soaked everything in kerosene (aka “paraffin”) and scrubbed with an old toothbrush. This is the usual drill I go through with parts, as I don’t have a fancy parts washer. I’ve decided to use a dry graphite lubricant on the locks.

For the most part, the pictures to the right and their “tooltip” captions, which you get when you mouse-over the pictures, tell the story in excruciating detail. The pictures themselves are probably the most useful of the explanations. Nothing in the disassembly or reassembly requires any special tools, just a needlenose pliers, a couple of screw drivers, and a fairly strong couple of fingers. The springs are not tremendously hard to compress, so you can easily squeeze the parts with one hand.

How the mechanism works perhaps becomes apparent from the pictures. The important piece that manages the locking is the small linkage piece that slips into the slot at the rear of the retaining clip. When the door is locked, this part offsets the plunger inside the tumbler and allows the plunger to slip between the fork-like sides of that section of the lock tumbler. The seventh picture from the top shows this linkage piece in place; the ninth and tenth pictures show the plunger functioning in unlocked and locked settings.

One thing I did that might be an addition, though a small one, was to place rubber seals between the door handle and the two points it touches the body. I don’t have any record of a seal in that position when we disassembled the car, but that doesn’t mean that the original cars wouldn’t have had seals. I cut mine out of rubber from a car inner tube. Worked nicely.

I’ve finished installing the chrome I got back from Ricardo.

More than you ever wanted to know about locking mechanisms

New “retaining case.” I bought a new retaining case from XKs Unlimited, pictured on the left (of course). On the right is the torn off rear section of the original case, with the inside portion of the case visible. See the excess metal on the new casting. I had some sanding to do.
Exploded lock/latch mechanism. This is what the parts look like, more or less as they fit together. Above the central line-up is a small brass pin to set the lock tumbler in place. Below the line-up are a small compressed spring (for key lock rotation) and a washer that sits between the small spring and the large extended spring (for the latch push button). The right-most item below the line-up is the linkage setup for the lock. This slips into the retaining case.
Lock tumbler and the latch plunger. Vocabulary fails me, but I think I got the tumbler named right. The “plunger” slips into the slotted rear section of the tumbler. This part confused me, since I didn’t see how the plunger would be fixed in place to push the latching mechanism inside the door. It works, trust me.
Lock tumbler and the latch plunger. Vocabulary fails me, but I think I got the tumbler named right. The “plunger” slips into the slotted rear section of the tumbler. This part confused me, since I didn’t see how the plunger would be fixed in place to push the latching mechanism inside the door. It works, trust me.
Brass pin lock the tumbler in place
The picture is a bit out-of-focus, but the brass pin is shown extending from the hole into which it slides. When you take your lock apart, this hole will likely be obscured by the general gunk of the part. After cleaning, the purpose of the hole is clear. This was an easy slide into place, just a couple of taps did it.
Washer and spring inserted. A special washer fits onto the chromed cylinder and then the spring that provides the resistance for the push button on the handle fits over the cylinder end. Pretty straight-forward.
Lock linkage in place. In order to get the spring-tumbler-cylinder assembly into place, you have to stick the lock linkage into place. It fits in the slot at the read of the retaining case, and you sinply position it so that the hole into which the plunger fits is 100 percent clear. That is the unlocked position. The picture is shows the correct position. By the way, the tab with the two holes shows the “LH” meaning left hand, and the tab opposite that was the one I had to sand to fit the slot on the handle.
The keylock assembly reassembled. Compress the spring into the retaining case with the plunger extended, so that it fits through the hole at the rear of the case. Then take the bolt/nut and screw it into the end of the plunger, until the nut on the bolt fits against the rear of the retaining case. The nut can be adjusted so that the bolt end of the plunger hits the paddle-like part of the door latch. This is a minor adjustment that you do after the door handle is in place.
The push pressed in UNLOCKED position.Notice that the plunger is extending from the end of the retaining case. Also notice the position of the lever at the side of the case — part of the lock linkage.
The push pressed in LOCKED position. Contrast this picture with the one above. Note that the plunger remains in its “unpushed” position. This is because the plunger slips between the forks of the lock tumbler casing. When the push is pressed, the plunger will not activate the latch mechanism.
Lock fitted into door handle. This picture shows the latch tab in unlocked position. Really the only two things holding the retaining case in place are the two small machine screws.
Original door hardware. The original hardware for the lock-latch mechanism and for affixing the door handle. The small screws are 4-40’s, probably 1/4-inch. They attach the retaining case to the door handle. I replaced them with 3/8-inch lengths. The door studs are 10-32s, with a black anodize washer (I originally thought it might be rubber). These were rust-bound. On the original, the threaded stud would be screwed into the door handle and then fitted to the door panel. I just used a number 10 machine screw with a nut screwed on to tighten everything up. It worked nicely.
Door hole clean-up. I cleaned up the holes for the door fitting with a drill bit.
Rubber seals. Rubber from an old tire tube served as raw material for the rubber seals the fit between the door panel and the door handle. I do not know if there was such a seal on the original, but it seems like a good idea to put them in place. There should be less chance of leakage and the paintwork is protected. You can see my paper templates in the baggie, too. I cut the rubber a generously, since I wanted to trim it to fit exactly.
Trimming the rubber seal. This was easy. Just press the handle against the seal, and outline it with a ballpoint pen. Remove. Trim to the line. Done.
External view of the installed handle. Nice to see it in place!
Inside view of the installed handle and lock. The (rusty) clip hold the linkage in unlocked position, and you can see the 10-32 screw with nut that hold the door handle in place. This is a good clean installation. The clip, despite its rust, is sound. Besides, I coated it with grease to inhibit further corrosion.

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Body work, Interior

August/September 2005 – Windshield, right door

This entry ends the third year of restoration work on the car. It’s been a long haul.

Windshield

The Cat Cage in Rougemont had a visitor from Oklahoma in early September. Wallace DeLong, also known as “Dad” and “Grandpa,”visited for a couple of days, and I set him to work in the garage. The right side door needed its insides put back into place. The left side door was enough of a challenge that I figured it would be a good weekend project for us. And we got rolling along and decided to set the windshield into place as well.

It was good to see Dad again, and he was able to see some progress on the car from the last time he was here.

The windshield is the original Triplex clear laminated glass. When we removed it we did not take off the chrome finishing strip that sits on the top edge of the glass. The glass shows some reparable scratches from the windhsield wiper frames that must have rubbed the glass a bit over the years. This can be buffed out, since the scratches are indetectable with a fingernail, except for a small section on the left side. Cleanup was quick — some 409 cleaner followed by the “Cerama Bryte” glass stove top cleaner took small scratches and the accumulated crud off quite nicely. One puzzling note: We noticed a dark blue deposit on the paper towel that we used to rub off the Cerama Bryte. This was only on the outside-facing side of the windshield and the right-side door window. It may have been a chemical reaction of some sort, though it might have been as simple as some ancient blue overspray from a body shop somewhere a long time ago.

I’m going to try the Cerama Bryte on the wiper scratches. I did a little hard rubbing on the left side blemishes, and the relatively gentle grits in the stuff seemed to work to make the scratches less visible. I figure a buffer might do a good portion of the job, gently applied.

I got the windshield seal from Classic Jaguar, and the first thing we noticed was that it was apparently intended for a “FHC” — Fixed Head Coupe. The seal was circular, so it was intended to go completely around a piece of glass. I figured there were two possibilities: the seal was mistakenly sent or there was a trick to doing this. I wrote to Dan Mooney, and within a half hour he replied that the seals for the convertible are no longer available and the seal I had on hand could be trimmed to fit nicely.

We looked at the seal in order to determine where the corners were, a task that wasn’t quite as easy as you might think. The seal is molded, but because of the corner curves, it twists in packaging. So you think you find a corner, but it turns out to be a deceptive twist. And then, of course, you need to find upper and lower curves, too. The whole thing moves as you search, so getting a clear idea of where you are on the seal is not so easy.

I tried to mount the seal without cutting it, but I found that was nearly impossible. So I went ahead and cut it in a place I figured (wrongly) was somewhere in the middle of the top edge of the FHC windshield. It turns out I was extremelyclose to the top curve on the right side — about two inches of rubber from cutting into the seal I needed to preserve!

Despite this little near ineptitude, the seal went on well.

One thing that I noticed is that it is best to do the final trim after the windshield is completely in place, because the seal naturally moves down the “A” post as the glass moves downward into position. I initially cut the left side what I thought was rather long, but it turned out to settle down to just barely long enough. My suggestion: trim above the upper curve, and then cut it to size after the windshield is completely in place. The curved seal on top won’t get in the way.

Setting the seal starts in the middle, and setting the chrome strip that’s nestled inside the seal starts in the middle, too. You do get better at alignment as you go through this process. Be careful to get the chrome finishing strip right in the center, because you won’t want to take it out to reset it. The Jaguar shop manual shows a bent wire tool that’s used to set the rubber around the glass and the chrome strip. I didn’t use it, but I found a bent coat hanger to be very useful even though it might have been better if it were a little thinner. The picture below shows it sitting on the car in front of the installed windshield.

Right door insides

I took on the left door earlier this summer, and it was a bit of a job. For the most part the tough part was rediscovering the order of installation. First, do the felt or sound deadener and the water tube. Second, install the lock mechanism. Third, install the window slide frame. Last, install the window and the slide mechanism. A movie would really do the trick to show how these (sometimes big) parts slip into that little slit at the top of the door panel. You just need to think about many angles. For getting the windows and the riser into place, at one time we had the window perpendicular to the flat of the panel. You might be tempted to bend the slit a bit wider, but you don’t need to.

We cleaned up the glass with the same stuff, and we noticed the same dark blue residue on the outside face of the window. Strange. Be careful with the flat connection from the door handle to the latch mechanism. It’s easy to pinch in the anchor for the window rising mechanism (the thing that is firmly set with four nuts). I managed to do that on the left side door, and Dad and I repeated the error on the right door, too.

Dad and I have different philosophies about grease. I am liberal and he’s a conservative. We both ended up looking as though we were liberal with grease, much to Dad’s dismay.

I figure it’ll delay rust; he thinks it’ll just get on the windows. I bet we’re both right.

Body work, Electrical system

June 2005 – Data plate, door, headlights

Data plate, final episode

I might as well get this done right now. I finished the truer-to-the-original data plate with the able help of Eric MaLossi, and I’m quite pleased with the results. The plate is a little thicker than the original, so it resists a bit more under the mallet and die, but it should be easier to handle at installation. I have placed mine aside until I can be sure that the numbers that I’ll have on the car are what I expect. I know the body number will remain the same, but I haven’t had the engine block or the gearbox thoroughly evaluated. I’m not expecting any problems with either, but things have been known to happen unexpectedly in restorations.

The data plate could be improved with the adoption of a more original technique. The originals were probably done with etching and subsequent anodize. My plate uses a technology that might not have been in existence in the early 1960s. It’s called “photoetching.” It is quite durable and scratch resistant, but the black print is flush with the aluminum surface — no ridge at all at the edges of the letters and borders. Since the plate’s contents are true to the original, it is nonetheless superior to many, if not all, of the data plates currently available.

I believe I’ll never look at a plate in quite the same way again. Last night I was going through a book that displayed a plate of a “very fine” restoration, and I picked it out easily as an aftermarket “almost” reproduction.

Left door back together

Putting the doors back together is just slightly easier than taking them apart, probably because you can remember some of the pain of the initial door disassembly. The process is basically the reverse of the disassembly, and the trick is getting the bolts for the door latching mechanism and the window crank in the correct places. You need to think about the ways that the bits weave around one another. First the door latching mechanism, then the window assemblies.

I cleaned off the mechanisms with a steel brush and wire wheel, and they came quite clean. The door shell needed to be fitted with the drainage hose (don’t miss the clam that holds it in place) before any of the mechanicals could go in. The last items to be placed were the black skirts that close off the lower access holes. These seem often to be removed and never replaced, as far as I can tell. Pictures I’ve seen of reconstructed doors lack these little steel features, perhaps because they serve no practical purpose except for noise control, maybe. They’re pop-riveted on, and I used strips of neoprene padding to control vibration. Along the edge where the rivets are placed, the pieces were originally caked with a rubbery sealant-adhesive that may have served the purpose of dampening vibration.

Getting the left door set up took an entire afternoon. I’ve put off doing the right door because it is a bit tedious to do the job.

In order to fit the door, the weatherstripping and seals needed to go in. I got a very complete rubber kit from Classic Jaguar, and it has so far been extraoridinarily complete. I used 3M Weatherstripping and Gasket Adhesive. It’s basically a contact cement, and the tube I got was unfortunately full of a yellow-brown cement. The stuff shows up very brightly on Opalescent Dark Green, I can tell you! I did not follow Dan Mooney’s advice to fit seals with masking tape before cementing them in place, so I couldn’t adjust fit. I just cemented the pieces on, using a healthy amount of blue masking tape and some paper towel to hold the seals in place.

I did have to trim pieces of the seals, of course, but that was easily done without doing the taping to fit. Other sections of the car might need more careful treatment.

Fiat lux! Let there be light!

The bonnet having been prepped and clearcoated for a second time, we set about making the bonnet harness and installing the lights and horns. Of course this entailed redoing the bonnet harness that extends from the male bonnet plug receiver to the lights and horns. I used the same approach here as I did with the rear harness. That is, I used the original wiring on the bonnet plug receiver to connect to a new spade-connector connection block, and from there the hand-made harness reaches to the end points. The bonnet harness deviates a bit from the original in that I did not use exactly conforming color coding, though the wire gauge meets or exceeds the originals. The wiring colors were similar (a reddish/pinkish replaced the original red, for example). I was also uncomfortable with the grounding scheme.

The schematic diagram shows that wires go from the light housings and such to ground, probably on the bonnet somewhere. It’s a mystery to me exactly where the wires originally grounded on the bonnet, though my documentation shows that some grounds ended up on the mounts for the horns. Instead of grounding to the bonnet, I decided to run ground wires to a grounding point near the bonnet plug that can be connected by another ground wire to the car body itself. It seems to me that the bonnet connections to the car body are simply too insulated with new paint and lack unambiguous metal-to-metal contact.Of course, the original grounds worked, but I want the grounds to be unambiguous, just like the other wiring.

I ran individual ground wires to the electrical parts, since simultaneous loads at night with the horns blaring might make up a fair bit of current, and I’d hate to heat up a too thin wire. The horns use a pretty fair amount of current, and so they need to find their way to ground in a safe manner, too.

The headlight housings were caked in tar-like rustproofing, and they needed a thorough scraping, scrubbing, and sanding before being painted. The internal areas of the housings were in good shape, including the chrome light retaining rings. These just needed some buffing to bring back to life. The original rubber fittings on the housings served well, though they were quite tight, since the new wiring I inserted was slightly heftier than the original wires. The original wiring was pretty badly decayed, particularly the cotton loomed insulation on the two “hot” wires going to each headlight bulb. I used plastic coated wires, not cotton loomed wires.

The lights work, and it seems as though adding them returns a little bit of the car’s soul. Sure is nice to see them in place!

Body work, Paint

November/December 2003 – Holiday greetings to all!

Yes, more primer but also greetings!

North Carolina weather has not cooperated with working the in garage, so I have set about some short moments priming and sanding the car’s body shell. There is not much new to report, though I will post some photographs after the Christmas Holiday week. I’m taking most of the week off, and perhaps warmer temperatures will be a nice Christmas gift to us this year. One thing that is needing some handling is a high spot on the right door. I’ll document the handling of that little detail, since there is a little difference in body correction at this stage in the game, that is, during the final points of priming and preparation for “spraying color.”

Holiday Greetings from the Cat Cage Garage! The picture perhaps offers little to the diehard restorer — it is, after all more about my wife and me than the old car behind us. She is beautiful, don’t you think? (I will let the indirection of that sentence remain, for the reader to resolve.) Thanks to John and Susan and Alec Boutin for giving us the picture that they took during a Thanksgiving visit!

I hope you will overlook the mess in the garage. I do have to contend with other objects in this little domain, and many of them get carted outside when it’s time to work on the car. In parts of rural North Carolina, people’s wealth has been counted by the number of outbuildings scattered on their property. This is probably a hold-over from the time when tobacco farmers cured their own leaf in small wooden curing barns. I am thinking that having another outbuilding wouldn’t be such a bad idea, since the garage is given over to my project and the accumulation of implements, tools, and children’s debris. The old chicken coop houses much that is not exactly poultry now. So, a small place out back somewhere for non-Jag equipment? Maybe in 2004….

Even though we can’t rev up the Jaguar yet, it has been one of a great many blessings given to us over the past year. We here in North Carolina wish everyone who visits this little space on the ‘net all the greatest and most wonderful of holidays and a fine start into a New Year 2004.

More on car restoration next weekend — this weekend we wish all of you and all of us restoration of other kinds.

Body work, Taking apart

March 2003 – Right door cleaned and fitted, right front suspension disassembled

Right door cleaned and fitted

Removing the guts of the right door was considerably easier than doing the left door, since I had already been through the process once. In a nutshell, this is the process: 1. Remove the window crank and the door latch handle by pushing the escutcheon away from the handle and pushing the lock pin through the hole. Remove the door panel 2. Remove the lower door hole access plates by drilling out the pop rivets that hold them in place. Scrape off the rubbery weather seal with a knife. 3. Remove the hardware attaching the chrome window rails from the top section of the door and from the two tabs inside the panel assembly at the bottom of the door. 4. Slide the window rails out through the top of the door carefully. 5. Remove the bolts and screws that affix the latch mechanism and the window crank mechanism to the door panel assembly. 6. Carefully pull the window glass through the top of the door and, after the glass is completely free, remove the window crank mechanism. You will have to adjust the crank mechanism to pull the glass free without binding the mechanism in the door panel assembly. 7. Remove the bolts that hold the exterior door latch handle. This is done inside the door panel. Then unclip the door latch mechanism from the inside of the latch handle. 8. Remove the handle from the outside of the door and then the latch assembly through the access holes in the door panel assembly. (You can remove the anti-drum material any time you can get a hold of it.)

By the way, the right door was in better shape than the left. There were no rust holes, and what rust there was stayed on the surface. It hung a little better than the left door, too. We did a little channel work on the left door, but the right door didn’t really need anything. I’ll probably get fussier, though, and mess with the fit a little bit.

Right front suspension partially disassembled

We removed the right front suspension intact a while ago, but it became time to disassemble it. I would like to have the wishbones, the fulcrum shafts, and other parts nickel plated, so we needed to completely take the thing apart. Also, many internal parts will need replacement, such as the brake cylinder rings and rubber parts and the wheel bearings. We were able to get much of the assembly apart, but I decided to bring the tough-to-disassemble parts into a local British automobile dealership and service shop. They had the tools and the experience with the items to take them apart completely, and I didn’t have to puzzle over it.

I have already the retrieved the disassembled parts from the shop (I’m writing this on 23 April), though I haven’t looked at the work yet. We have another suspension assembly to take off the front frame, and I’d like to get it into shape for plating. It’s still not clear to me how much nickel plating will actually cost. This is not super smooth chrome plating for a bumper but much rougher, and I’m hoping it won’t cost too horribly much.

Body work

March 2003 – Left door cleaned and fitted

(Done 23 March 2003.)

I did some final touches to the left “fillet” and fit the taillight chromes to the body. (The taillight chromes were often hand picked and adjusted to fit the specific car bodies when E-types ran through the Coventry assembly line.) The body shell is getting close to the point where I can move on to other things more permanently. Aaron and I turned to the left door for the most part of Sunday. I disassembled it and truly appreciated Mark O’Neill’s comment when we picked the car up some six months ago: “Jaguars are very complicated,” he said. “That car door alone is more complicated than an entire MG ‘B’.”

It is apparent that the internal pieces of the doors come out (and, I imagine, go in) in one specific order. Once I got it apart, I inspected the integrity of the door itself. The “skin” of the left door looks quite good. The lower section where the internal box-like door body attaches to the external metal sheet was a little rusted, with a few small corrosion holes poking through. But the metal resisted pressure all right, and we will go ahead and repair the corrosion from the inside of the door. I suspect that the doors corrode in that section because of the weird way that moisture is handled. Water that spills from the body on top of the door falls through a small drain hole, and that drain hole spills into a rubber hose that diverts the water around the internal section of the door hinge attachment inside the door panel. But the strange thing to me was that the hose simply dumps water into the door panel. I would have thought that the hose would have diverted the water all the way through the door to an external hole. As it was originally designed, the water flows into the door panel and then out through two slits on the bottom of the door. The effect is that water can easily collect inside the door panel, and may even be retained by the anti-drum material fitted inside of the door. This material looks like a rubberized felt, but it seems to be still somewhat absorbent. I will probably just replace the hose as I found it, but I have thought that maybe I should alter the door a bit to give the water flowing in a more direct way out. The interior of the door panel will at least be well rust-proofed, so the next generation can renew the door skins if they need to.

Aaron did the sanding and sandblasting of the door panel and the hinge (after we had removed the hinge from the door panel). Then we refitted the hinge to the door and fit the door once more to the body. It was wonderful to see the door frame filled with a door! We took a look at the channels between the body and the door, and decided that the front channel had to be expanded between 1 and 2 mill1meters (something I noticed when we first inspected the car). Since the hinges are already set on the door panel, I decided that we’d alter the space by using spacers (really, just washers) where the hinge attaches to the body. This worked just fine. The rear channel will need a little attention at the point where the lower part of the door meets the body. This channel is too tight, so we’ll have to grind and weld a little. Once that is done, we can remove the ripples on the door skin and get it all ready for paint.

I’m hoping the right door is in as good shape as the left. I’m thinking that the right door will be about the same. We stripped the paint from it long ago, and so we could see the skin. It’s in solid shape, too, I’d bet. I don’t recall the status of the bottom part of the door. That’s still a question, but one soon resolved.