The doors came in from CJ Pony Parts in a matter of days, largely unscathed by their cross-country excursion.
The first order of business before hanging the new doors was to clean up the backing plates that sit on the interior side of the car’s door jams. Never painted, they were looking a little worse for wear.
A couple quick passes with the sanding wheel, chasing out all of the threads, and a coat of rust converter left them looking much better. I’ll probably toss these into the bucket of miscellaneous parts for powder coating later in the project but this state will work just fine for now.
After initially mounting the reproduction driver’s door with the replacement hinges the gap to the quarter panel was overly large despite the hinges being adjusted as far back as possible.
I took out the hinges and used a die grinder to extend the bolt hole openings into an oval shape in order to allow further rearward adjustment of the doors.
After adjusting and re-installing the hinges I validated that the gap to the quarter panel was closing up as intended. At this point I wasn’t worried about getting the gap perfect, more important was having the body lines consistent with the existing quarter panels so that once they’re removed I can use the doors as a reference while installing the reproduction quarters.
The passenger door was the exact same story, after extending the bolt holes in the new hinges I was able to get the door aligned well enough for the purposes at hand.
With the doors in a “good enough” state or adjustment the next step will be to cut out the quarter panels and what is left of the wheel housings.