Body Repairs 2

The side door slides on a runner concealed behind a removable panel held by a couple of screws, and along a bottom rail which is part of the sill.

It's a real bugger to get the side door off, the workshop manual is not much help, but with two brains we managed to work out how to do it.

We didn't really care whether we scratched the paintwork getting it off, we'll have to be very careful putting it back on again when the job is finished.

There looked to be a lot of rust behind the side panel, but it was all just flaking paint and nothing that had corroded through.  Some work with the powerfile and a few coats of primer soon sorted that out.

We were more concerned about the bottom runner, which was badly rusted and at first it looked like it was an integral part of the sill.  The main problem was the channel holding the door rubber.

Not so, the u-shaped channel is spot-welded onto the sill and can be removed and replaced.  Simply drill out the spot welds, clean them all flat with an angle grinder, drill holes in the replacement runner and plug weld it in the right place. We used the rubber surround that was taken off the opening to locate the exact height for the replacement.

That wasn't very painful at all.  Unfortunately, while doing this we noticed that the bottom corner of the 'C' pillar was rusty, and that was a real fiddle to repair.

After cleaning it up we had to make a shaped repair profile to weld in place. The shape of this pillar is complex as it has both a u-channel to hold the door rubber and a channel that forms a drain, and that is not a profile that we could make out of one piece of metal.

This shows the repair section in place ready to be welded.  It is in two pieces, the shaped part shown in the previous picture, plus a flat plate (with the blue 'o' on it) which completes the u-channel that retains the door rubber down the side of the pillar.  There's no way to clamp it all in place until it's welded, so it's clamped up by the self-tapping screw.  Once it's all hammered to a close fit and welded up the screw could be removed, but it's doing no harm, so we might as well leave it in.










This repair secion also butts up to the newly-replaced bottom channel, so that could all be welded together.




The result is not the prettiest repair but will clean up, and it's all hidden behind the door rubber anyway.






The remainder of the sill is fine and it cleaned up really well.  The upper channel is the door runner, the lower one is the replacement one for the rubber.  In fact, the door runner section doesn't get exposed to long-term road salt and dirt because it's on the 'inside' of the door rubber, which is probably why it's survived so well.

So, that's pretty much the back half of one side of the van repaired, at least in terms of the bodywork.