The 'E' Type Forum

Yeah Yeah Yeah there's too much been written about door alignment / panel gaps already, why write another thread ?

Well, I've never seen anyone admitting to bending their doors, especially once they have been painted.

And I've never seen anyone mention the striker-assembly pins, the dowel on the door lock that engages into the groove in the striker mechanism.

So here's a bucket-full of suggestions that might help others.

Pins first :



Those 1/2" pins, on every E-Type I've ever looked at, unless someone has fitted new repro locks, always look f--k-d.



They live a terrible existence, trying to keep the door in position - vertically - whatever the condition of the hinges, and I think they ought to be considered a "wear" item as they are actually really easy to change.



Furthermore, you can make them of a length that suits your car so that you get fuller, and optimised, engagement by making them as long as you can, less a millimetre or so.

Test with Plastiscene or whatever to see what extra length your striker-assembly will swallow - I managed to add an extra 3.50mm in length on both of my doors, up from the standard 1/2" or 12.50mm, hence the 16mm seen on the drawing.

Next remove the lock assembly from the door and drill out the swaged rivetting on the back, mine cleaned up at about 8.40mm.



Make a pin from 1/2" bar, with an 8.40mm nose (I actually did 8.45 and pressed it into place) around 1.80-1.90mm deep, just short of the thickness of the plate, and tap it 5/16" UNF to take an 1/2" Unbrako cap-screw, which because of of their quality manufacture you can get really tight, with a Schnorr serrated washer under the head.









Having pins that look this good will of course bring a smile to casual bystanders.

They are a part that SNGB should knock out by the thousand, multiply the cost price by 50, and then retire.

Bending Doors :

My shell has been through the hands of some of Britain's finest, panel-shop then paint-shop, but STILL the doors were not quite right, whatever I did with adjustment - hinges - rubbers.

Unless the panel-and-paint guys have had a fully-loaded door, with all the lock parts and accessories in place, and a shell that has all the rubbers in place, it is now my opinion that you cannot predict what the panel orientation will truly look like.

I could get the gaps perfect, and the front panel alignment perfect, but I had a slight toe-out towards the bottom of the rear.

So in desperation .................. and you have to be pretty desperate to try this - bearing in mind that when I suggested this to Andy Rayner at Hutsons he said "Welcome To My World, Rory", which those of you you that know him will read with a smile .................



So my 6-foot length of 30x30x3mm T-Section steel is now named after Andy.







You need decent 6mm thick semi-penny washers behind 25mm x 6mm bolts going through the top and bottom trim holes on the rear edge of the door, otherwise (ask me) you can actually deform the panel around the holes.

Ever aware that I might be about to ruin the doors, and the paint, by applying the greatest torque I could possibly obtain with my two bare arms, I can tell you that our doors are surprisingly flexible AND I have indeed managed to correct their alignment.

I did the first one six months ago, and was so amazed that it was possible that it has taken me 6 months to pluck up the courage to do the second one.



Hard to photograph, and reflections can be misleading, but in the flesh they look a million dollars.



If your car and its doors are not painted yet, WHATEVER you do make sure you get all this sorted - and your doors bent if need be - before you go any further.

No professional that's only doing part of your shell restoration will ever spend as long as you can to get this right.



Striker Plate Screws

It seems that most of us have struggled to get the striker plates far enough in.

I'm aware of the "waisting" of the screws as one possible approach.

However I managed to gain 2 or 3mm like this.



Firstly by grinding down the inner edge of the nut-plate, effectively moving the holes in-board.



Secondly, when re-fitting it, I first of all used 3 bolts to clamp it as far in-board as it would go (having eased the holes in the B-post first) - critically, before folding the retaining tab over.



Otherwise, the action of folding the tab tends to deform the cage, and you can lose quite a bit for nothing.





We all know that the door-fit (together with the bonnet) is the defining signature of a restoration.

Because our cars were - in places - essentially made from bits of bean-cans, and were never designed to have the levels of finish or fit that we now self-impose, these can be really difficult to get right.

Nice work and nice writeup as always Rory.

I've never bent a door but we often have to tweak the boot lids on an OTS for proper fit. A scary experience the first time.

abowie wrote: ↑

Fri Jan 30, 2026 9:53 pm

Nice work and nice writeup as always Rory.

I very much agree with that. The only frustration I find with Rory’s work and write up is that I neither have a fully equipped workshop with lathe, etc. nor the skills to use them. Sadly, butchering a piece of round bar in a vice with a hand drill won’t produce the finish required.

Geoff

Hi Geoff....you can buy internal threaded bush/bar/round nut...and in various sizes/options stainless etc.....so a non machines diy option is possible....Steve

That's what can be called meticulous. My hat's off, Rory!

I'm more concerned at what appears to be the complete lack of waxoyl/dinitrol in the B Post box panel area!

Gfhug wrote: ↑

Sat Jan 31, 2026 9:53 am

I neither have a fully equipped workshop with lathe, etc. nor the skills to use them.

Geoff

Go on, you know you want to.

You can get a small combination lathe and mill with a footprint of a couple of square feet for not very much, and Youtube will teach you all the skills you need. I learned by buying and building a small model steam engine.

Of course, once you have a small lathe, you will then need a bigger one, and you'll end up like me :-)



This week's job has been designing and making an alignment tool for reinstalling the head on my friend's 1934 MG ND. It has an overhead camshaft which is driven by a shaft that runs off the front of the crank. This shaft is attached to and driven through the armature of the generator, and they all have to be concentric or the generator shakes itself to bits.

B-Post Seals :

Nothing remotely "machine-shop" and 0.01mm-precise about this, but it might inspire somebody.

Finding the door-seals too "fat" is a very common complaint - I've even tried to get COH Baines to consider making a more slender version, but they're too busy Virtue Signalling to actually reply to my email.

The bottom one is quite easy to narrow down, even in situ, provided that you accurately constrain the rubber, adequately protect your shell, then use a coarse flap-wheel on the grinder (I use 80-grain) that cuts against your constraining and guiding edge - I used a 4mm plastic 40x40 angle "martyr" last time.

The against is critical, the wheel direction needs to push the rubber against the martyr, which behaves as the edge of your guillotine.



The more complex B-post seal - above - is a lot harder, and has to be done off the car.



I found that by stretching the curved length along a piece of 10mm pine strip, about 30-40mm deep, taped in place to begin with, with sandwiching pieces of pine strip on either side held in place by spring loaded clamps, you can use an 80-g flap-wheel to remove material in a pretty controlled way.



You use the adjacent cheeks, whose height you can tweak, and whose relative inclination can be adjusted, as a register for your sweep of the grinding disc, so you can remove material in the specific areas that are critical to the perceived thickness of the seal when you close the door.



Well, slam if it's my car



In this way there is little tendancy for the abrasive to "grab", tho' you need a good abdominal core to make those lateral passes dead regular and flat

The idea is to leave the "sealed" and visible outer-edge of the seal intact, and just remove - and inevitably leave rougher - the hidden rear faces.

I have always uses Loctite 5910 - sparingly - to retain the seals, and it's obviously critical to let this cure with the door shut - but I always use 10 strips of masking tape across the rubber to stop it rotating during the curing, as the adhesive can behave as a grease and you can discover a seal that has moved when you open up after 24h.

The 5910 is not strictly an adhesive, but a gasket cement - however it was recommended to me by Loctite themselves, and does a very good job.

(I have even had great success using it to glue extra closed-cell black foam onto an A-post seal, where - in the windscreen-base-block area - the seal didn't fill the gap ; using masking tape, actually in contact with the 5910, to hold everything together, I discovered that once cured it did not adhere to the masking tape and that I had unwittingly made a mould for the seal, which had a nice smooth finish. So worth experimenting.)

A wild punt to close :

The seam on the shell next to that B-post seal always looks a bit scruffy on my car - you catch it with clothes, your belt, and the older you get the more often it catches on your exiting frame.



So I have tried to put a hard-rubber section over it, held in place with slower-curing and rubber-compatible Superglue, and then bonded it to the B-post seal ........... sounds pretty ambitious and may be a flop, BUT it's not that difficult to try, and as I now treat B-post seals as Wear Items, a bit like an oil-change, it seemed worth a roll of the dice.



There is probably a more suitable profile out there, the groove could be nearer 1mm, but it's what I had in stock.



Running it along a cloth-wrapped edge wet with mid-weight thinners should hopefully remove any release agent or w.h.y. left over from the manufacturing process, often an issue with Baines' seals.

I did one side with Superglue between the edging and the B-post seal (they are hard against one another, so you feed the adhesive into a widened gap, using a plastic scraper), and on the other side I tried the 5910, so will report back once the whole lot has been subject to some abuse.