Door Adjustment - In and Out

[Dad]

Hi

Can someone please explain how to get a door to close ‘tighter’? My driver door doesn’t align with the body panel at the trailing edge but the hinges are correctly positioned. I’ve read around it and advice seems to be to loosen the big screws holding the strike plate and move it inwards but I don’t find this to be an option; the plate doesn’t move.

It looks like it should be simple but I’m a bit stumped.

Thanks.

Dom

[Gfhug]

Dom, have you taken off the strike plate completely and checked how the door looks and to ensure there’s nothing stopping the door fully closing? What can be counter-intuitive is that sometimes you need to move the strike plate outwards. All to do with getting the lobed cam (star wheel as below, couldn’t remember the correct term, sorry) into the right place on the strike plate.

Geoff

[Allrand]

S1 doesn't have a lobed cam, it has a star wheel. Protect your paintwork with masking tape and, using a suitable drift give the striker plate a sharp tap, it should move. If it doesn't move far enough, with the screws loosened but not removed, observe how far in they are in the slotted holes. If they're at the limit of travel you can gain a bit more by removing the striker completely and elongating the holes further with a rotary file, but there's a limit that the threaded plate will move inside it's cage. Seems to me to be problematic with a lot of E-types I've seen which have protruding doors at the trailing edge.

[Gfhug]

Yes, star wheel is the correct term. Mea culpa

[Dad]

Many thanks guys. Will try this today.

[Dad]

Did as suggested and it seems the sliding plate inside the car body to which the strike plate is attached is as far inboard as whatever it slides up to against will allow. So do I embark upon the quest to get inside the car and adjust how far inwards the sliding plate moves, or is there another, simpler solution?

Yes - upon researching this, it would appear to be a pretty common issue.

[Dad]

Actually, scratch that. Did more ‘general E-Type kind of fiddling*’, and now it works! I guess the ‘general E-Type kind of fiddling’ got me the 2mm or so I needed and now it sucks in nice and tight.

*stand looking at it, baffled and muttering. Think hard about the special kind of tool needed. Go and grab something that might work. Doesn’t work. Look at the book a bit more. Search for some videos. Gently bang it with a bit of 2x4 and a mallet. Wiggle it. Go back to the books. Do some more standing looking at it. Grab a beer. Wander around a bit and come back to it, this time hitting it a bit harder. Accidentally bend something and swear. Bend it back. Magically find that you’ve fixed it somehow

[Allrand]

Yep, well done.