15 replies to this topic

[midridge2]

A copy door skin is cheaper because they are not perfect, but with a little bit of work they can be made to fit.
Dont allways blame the bad fit as a fault of the skin, it can be caused by the person fitting the skin wrong.
The door should be refitted to the car with the skin flanges slightly bent over, you will then see if the gaps are correct/wrong and if needed you can still move the skin about to get a good fit.


The main fault of most skins is the shape around the left hand side above the door handle, the contour is wrong and causes a wide gap between the door and quater panel edge.

The bowing in the top centre of the skin is caused because the skin is welded onto the door frame at the top left when the skin top is still bowed.

To fix both problems, after trial fitting the skin and you are happy with the gaps remove the door and bend the flange right over except the top left hand side from the top of the skin to around 12 inches down, now measure the gap between the top of the door skin and the top of the door frame, the centre top of the skin will be bowed out, you can pull the centre in using g- clamp/ welding grips etc so you have a correct measurment, now weld the top of the skin to the door frame.
You now need to readjust the flange on the top left, unbend (if thats a word) the flange and rebend it nearer the quater panel to reshape the gap.

As an after thought, if you cannot move the skin around when trial fitting you may have to bend/adjust the door frame flanges to allow the skin to move.