1925-25 Wood Repair

[dibarlaw]

Not wishing to dilute Hugh's 1925-25 pattern project I would like to show what I did to temporarily repair some missing/rotted out parts. The project started with chunks of wood falling out of the drivers door each time it closed. I also wanted to reproduce the door pockets that were not included when the car was re-upholstered in the 1960s or70s. So I removed the panel and found a diagonal steel plate to hold the rotted front bottom corner together. Next door removal,  re-create the wood, re-fit and re-hang door then find that the cowl hinge post is also spongy on the bottom. I remove and redo that. Great!. Now the door closes easily with a soli click. I learned a lot as how to get everything to align properly. Now, I might as well do the passenger door which had a loose sloppy fit and the passenger had to fight to keep closed.  Good news! They had already made new wood pieces for this door. The hinge post was quite solid and not spongy. Unfortunately whoever did the work did not even prime the exposed inner flange of the door and it was vintage rust. Just nailed the rusty skin on to the new wood and painted the outside.  So while I had the door off I cleaned /primed and painted these areas. The strike bar needed redone since there were many years of misalignment scars. The rubber bumpers had turned to rocks and needed to be reproduced. I had already did some temporary work at the base of the strike post (glue in some splinters of wood in the old holes and longer screws). Now I needed to strengthen the base of tis area. Well, one starts digging and before long I had several handfuls of shredded rotted wood, bent upholstery tacks etc. I had removed material up to 5" above the sill until I could find reasonably solid wood. I needed to engineer a piece to be solid yet fit around the bolt that connects to the support plate.

    This is what I came up with.

I drilled holes for long #4 screws. These holes allowed me to thread a wire through them so I could get the smaller piece behind the bolt and then pull everything together. Using the wire and stick like a tourniquet. My intention was to maintain pressure on the bolt to help strengthen and stabilize the post at its base.

                       

After I glued all in place and allowing for some set up time I removed the wire and installed the #4 screws to pull things tightly together. I fitted some veneer shims and then trimmed all before final prep for re-finishing.

Edited April 27, 2016 by dibarlaw (see edit history)

[jscheib]

Larry,

 

Reminds me of the saying, "where there is a will, there is a way"

 

John

[ROD W]

Good job Larry.   That will probably keep the body tight for another 50 years.  Its always a worry when your digging out rotten wood,  what initially seems like a small amount of rot, after further removal of rotten wood to get to good wood can end up being much larger.  I often find after epoxy glueing up a bad  part and gluing in new pieces where the rot is,  the part can come up nearly like new,  and  making a new part isn.t required.  This front seat corner block was falling apart.  but after epoxy saturation and gluing back together it could very well  have been re used.  but I ended up making new ones.