Doors, Hinges and Window Fitment

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rb1971

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I have a bit of an odd issue and thought there might be some institutional knowledge among the folks here.

My car has been back together and back on the road for a few months. As part of the restoration process, we refreshed and where necessary replaced all the power window equipment, and had the doors readjusted and realigned by a body shop which generally does great work and has done a fine job on my car overall.

The passenger side front window has never worked as well as the other three windows (which all work consistently and well, if not quite as fast as on a modern car). The main issue seems to be that in the fully up position, the chrome below the rear window interferes with the passenger glass, so that you can't really put the window up the last 1/4". I've seen a few coupes where the bottom of the glass was scalloped out to prevent exactly this type of interference, and have been looking into doing the same thing.

However, last week while working on the door we discovered that that hinge has a wobble - but only when the door is very nearly closed. In other words, if you work on the door when it's fully/close to fully open, and move the door back and forth, there is no up/down wobble. However, when the door gets close to closed it moves up and down about 1/2".

My question - has anyone else had this problem? I've ordered a new hinge from La Jolla - should I expect that to fix this problem? If not, I'd hate to go to the trouble of getting it sprayed and installed only to find I have to scallop the glass anyway.

Any thought appreciated.
 
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Sven

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I would think that if the door has this play only in the up/down direction that it would not change the lateral distance that is causing the glass to hit the rear chrome. Both my front windows where chipped because of the tight glass tolerances. After the restoration the glass was a bit closer yet. I had a glass company grind a good 3-4 mm at the bottom and then taper up to point halfway up the glass. They were initially concerned about doing this to tempered glass -but so far no problems.
 
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rb1971

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In case this helps anyone else, the sagging hinge on the passenger door was replaced today - and the glass now fits perfectly. If you have a similar problem, before cutting the glass, you might want to look at overall door fitment.
 
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rb1971

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deQuincey said:
can you explain a little what andhow was it done ?
Click to expand...

Sure thing. The old lower door hinge (which I am currently holding) has two issues: (1) there is a "stop" where it doesn't want to bend at all at about 30 degrees from open; (2) when almost closed (10 or so degrees to go) the hinge had a 'wobble', which didn't occur anywhere else on its path of travel. None of the other hinges, nor the replacement hinge, had either problem.

Due to the weight of the doors and how they are set up, when the hinge wobbled while closing the door, the entire assembly moved slightly down, resulting in the window looking low compared to the driver side, and resulting in the window not being able to be raised the last 1/4" or so of travel due to interference with the chrome trim below the rear window. My initial plan, before discovering the issue with the hinge, was to scallop the glass on the passenger side, something I have seen done to at least 2-3 coupes, and something I thought was an artifact of having a partially hand-built vehicle. After replacing the hinge, however, and eliminating the wobble, the door closes true. Panel gaps are now much closer, but more importantly the window works much better.
 
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