Unfortunately a quick look into the passenger side door revealed scale rust eating away at nearly all surfaces, it was a bit surprising how little was visible from the exterior of the door given the condition inside. As I don’t have a fabrication shop at my disposal I chalked the passenger door up as requiring a reproduction replacement.
On the other hand the driver’s side looked to be potentially salvageable, the only obvious damage from the exterior was some pitting in the typically-problematic front lower corner.
In order to get a better look at the backside of the damage I went ahead and cut out the door skin around the corner, leaving the top cut just below the body line.
The extent of the scale rust behind the minimal exterior damage surprised me, but unfortunately further evaluation of the corner led to another discovery.
Though it’s tough to see among the various overlapping paint layers, I found a rust hole in the bend at the bottom of the door frame beneath where the weather stripping attaches.
The placement of this damage puts it directly underneath the bottom of the internal corner brace within the door body. This is especially unfortunate as removing the bracket to get underneath it would mean removing a more significant amount of the door skin. On the other hand if I were to try and get at the damage from the exterior I would necessarily be cutting replacement patches with bends and curves that I have no current tools for replicating. Ultimately I decided that it would be a better use of my time on this project to go ahead and order two replacement doors with the intention of passing the original doors (which were not original to this car, they are from two different donor Mustangs) to someone with the tools and time to try and save them.
It never fails to amaze me how much rust can be lurking on the other side of a panel that appears very minimally damaged.
I guess it’s time to order some reproduction doors and hope for the best as far as fitment goes!