Door adjustment

As someone we both know would say,"Sounds like a plan" . Keep us posted on the results.

Yeah . If I'm understanding it right it very well might be a big help. I dont know if you would have to go as far as welding it to anything a really heavy duty vise might also work for it. Your just trying to move the pin in towards the center of the van a bit right?

Right, Digz, the pins on my doors have moved too far apart from each other. Either the hinges have bent or the metal frame has bent (or a little of both). The body man's idea of bending the hinges would do the trick, and you could do it in a vise maybe with help from some heat. But what I like about doing it right on the vehicle is that it lets the metal parts decide for themself which will bend, since the force will be applied the same way, just in the opposite direction.

Hey, we don't need to take a hinge apart to do this. If it is really the door frame that is bent, just bolt on the old hinge from the opposite door! Its stop will catch while rotating in the opposite direction. And instead of welding, we could just bolt something strong to the curved part of the hinge, using its threaded holes. You could even use an old door and work on both upper and lower hinges at the same time!

It would be interesting to get the measurement between the two pins from a van that has nice type gaps like Chester's. Should be able to get an accurate measurement from the pointy end of the pins. When I compare that to my measurement, the difference should be my unwanted extra gap. 

Although I must admit, Chester, I didn't really understand what your numbers meant. We're they thicknesses of shims? Or did you actually add metal to the doors?

Vanagain, I actualy welded the 1/8 steel strip to the door and then cut it to get the 1/8" gap all around both doors . The hindges are not bent, my gap at hindge side were good. I think maybe they left the factory that way. Factory's then didn't hold the gaps like they do today with a robot doing the work. QC is much tighter today.
Will try to find a foto of the set up after setting the doors up.
Lester

anyone have a pic of the hinges from inside? my van is panneled and i always assumed i could just shim the hinges. my side door isnt evan close, and would like a better idea as to how theyre attached. hard to believe there is no adjustment. chesters way seams extreme but they did end up perfect.

Here's a quick photo for you looking down into the lower hinge mount of the side lefthand cargo door. Sorry for the bad focus. In this shot, the bolts go in from the right. You can see one of the welded-in nuts on the left. Most of the metal is the thickness of the body but the reinforcement piece (with the nuts) is thicker. That one seems quite solid but you can see the one the bolts first go through is quite bent.



I've got the perfect cut-up parts to show how these work. I'll take some better photos and I'll post a video later showing me applying force to them.

Here's a better shot. I've put the hinge in from the opposite side. Now I'm not so sure about my idea about applying pressure the opposite way. Seems it's just going to push the thinner plate out (by the end of the hinge). It won't unbend the already bent parts. Might just make it sloppier. Now I'm thinking maybe a wedge-shaped shim could be inserted between the thin plate and the hinge to push the hinge more towards the door opening.

thanks for pics. now i understand why you need to bend hinge or metal holding it. i am thinking p.o. had it apart and mixed up the hinges. the top hinge is to far towards other door causing door to overlap the rocker. you would thing years of opening too far would bend hinge the other way

I did try to tack weld a shim to the near inside to move the doors to the center,but was not enough to close the gap. Tried to bend the leaf that goes into the frame but no go with out heating red hot, but that would take the tamper out of the material and make it bend in the futuremore easily. So I took the long way and never regreted it. Just my experience.

VANagain wrote:

To me, I think that the piece of the sandwich that is bent ss the door opening, noticing the separation between the exterior and hinge plate assembly, and the warping along the length of the hinge plate sandwich. I don't know if putting a wedge to flatten out the part next to the actual hinge is the answer.

If you measure corner to corner of your door jambs and various points horizontally, I would suggest that most of our vans are not square anymore, particularly when you consider the force of wind whipping our doors open... now that I think of it a little more, it is most likely that the door jambs have been twisted over time in the directions the doors open.

The perfect tool? Imagine a come-along with hinge plates on the ends, or maybe somehow able to grip around the hinge pins with the doors in place. Give it a few cranks until the door gaps shrink, and then your door jambs are probably reoriented to how they came out of the factory instead of 50 years of wear and tear.

I'm in the same boat with the door gaps. My side doors have a 1/2 gap in the center between the doors. I was hoping when i rebuilt the hinges this would help(no luck) I think vanagain might be on to something with building a tool to bend the hinge pocket back to where it was from the factory. Bob

We'll spent the day in the shop working on the 64. I have a solution to fix the door gaps. I pulled the hinge of the van and put the hinge in my shop press and bent the hinge just a little bit. Then I installed the hinge back on, then repeat the process. Not the quickest way but works. My side doors where really bad and now they are acceptable. Hopefully I can post of a picture to show how this works. I need to bend the rear hinges thursday Bob

is there any adjustment up and down or in and out? bending hinge should make gap correct and raise door slightly but i think it would still need lifted slightly and top of door is sunk in too far.

Im pretty sure the holes the bolt passes thru are oversized and allow some movement in those ways. The bolts thread into the hinge itself. Looking at that cut away pick , there are a couple things going on. One is the sheetmetal the hinge actually bolts to is bowed. second, it has the sides of the rib flaring out helping to hold it that way. If you manage to push the one area back to flat , you would also have to bend the edges of the rib back into position to hold it.

good, if they arent bigger now, they will be when i am done.

My van is now in a body shop. We talked about the hinges. There are slotted holes for adjusting the door up and down, and in and out (to get the door flush with the body) but no adjustment horizontally for our gaps. The guy said they would insert shims (wedge shaped, I think) between the hinge and the outer part (the thinner stuff that is curved in these photos). Sounds like what Corey said he did (inserted a ram).

I'm liking Bob's method of simply bending the hinges. That has to work. That must be a hydraulic press to be strong enough to bend that 1/4" steel. I like that better than heating them.

I don't think the hinges have bent over time but I have another theory. I bet the door frame itself gets a bit twisted from the door slamming open. The bottom part gets some support being close to where the frame is attached to the floor but the upper one a long way from the floor and roof. I don't know if there's a way to measure how perpendicular it is. Could be my method of applying force the other way would actually end up undoing some twist in that part of the frame. What do you think?

Vanagain, I think you where right out the first thought with the hinges getting bent from being open to far. I'm going to bent the rear door hinges today, I will try to take a few pictures. Yes the press I used is a 20 ton bottle press from harbor frieght. Trust me my buddy(bodyman 25 years+) tried all of his tricks with not much luck. This seems to correct the issues Bob

This is what I ended up doing... extreme measures cutting through the wall, but was the only way I could get the scissor jack centered.

Sorry guys plans changed spent the days block sanding, when I get back to the shop I will take some pictures Bob

My only question is -now that the jack idea seems to be a fix -?? will you also put some metal backing behing? the area that was bent to strenghten it?? Like a 1/4 ' plate welded into the structure?? Just thinkin here ??

Wow, Corey, that is extreme!

I got a good photo of the backside of the door frame. This is the left-hand side cargo door frame. Some observations:

• I kind of forgot that it's so easy to get at (when you've got no interior). That thinner metal that gets curvy is right there, where the bolts go in. You'd have good access if you wanted to beat on it a bit to get it flattened out more against the hinge. And you could weld a thicker piece of metal to it with two holes drilled for the bolts, or at least just put the thicker metal there without welding it, just have the bolts hold it there like a giant washer. Would this help?
  
• I was wrong about the upper hinge having no support. That cross piece is welded in right above it. So the frame probably wouldn't really twist there.
  
• The thicker metal of the "stud" is not spot welded to the outer body skin. You can run a credit card in between there all the way down.

FYI, the Chevy Van shop manual shows that the hinge bolts that go in the door are for adjusting the door in and out, and the bolts that go into the doorframe (shown in this photo) are for up and down.

I measured my door openings from frame to frame, at three points: top, at the upper hinge, and at the lower hinge. The side door opening was 50.75" at all three points. The rear door opening (which has the widest gap between doors) was 51.0" at all three points! If I had measured a door's width, we could subtract two of those from the total opening width and divide the remainder by 3 and that would be our ideal gap. Would someone measure a door?

Here are some extreme close-ups of what the door frames are made of. It's literally a cutaway view! This is looking down on the left-hand rear cargo door's frame, about 6 inches above the lower hinge mount. The two nuts you see are for the strap mount.

Click on these pictures to see the high res photos.

• The whole door frame is made of slightly thicker metal than the body skin.
  
• I discovered that there is body putty hiding a seam where the body skin was spot welded to the door frame! So there are four pieces of metal: body skin, door frame, inner door frame (that has the nuts welded to it for hinges and straps), and the plate with the holes for the bolts. I'd say the three frame pieces were spot welded together first, the frame attached to the van, and the body skin spot welded on last.
  
• I had been thinking that the door frame and hinge mounts were attached to the body but it's really the other way around.

I couldn't figure out how to close my gap, which was wide enough at the top to see daylight. Wookie would say "It's only metal!", so I cut it!!! IIRC, there was a slight bulge in the body skin near the hinge point, which was a sign that the jamb had been moved. My point is that I wouldn't be surprised if there was an issue with the jambs.

Vanagain, measuring across the diagonals will also indicate if the jambs are out of square. I'm curious if you did that. I'm surprised that your rear door opening is wider then the side. But I'm willing to bet that you will have no fitment issues having gone through this.


About my repair, I never reinforced it there, just cranked the jack until it pushed the door too far, and watched to see where it lined up on it's own as I cranked it off... it sort of rebounded close to where it was with the big gap, so I'd jack it out a little further each try until the door was where I wanted it. You think I should have done something like put a cross-brace between the two pillars to keep it square?

I finally posted some news about my van's progress in the body shop. Here's some info about how they straighted out the cargo door gaps. Very simple... The old-fashioned way!