1977 Triumph Dolomite 1850 HL The "Day Job"

Progress update.

As mentioned I’ve been working on Doors, not because they would logically be the priority but mainly because I have twice as many Doors in the Garage as needed and I wanted to get to a point where I can get rid of the old Doors to free up space.

All the original Doors on the car range from beyond saving to saveable with significant effort this picture shows a typical scenario, the other rear door is worse. The Fronts whilst looking better externally due to having been re-skinned have exceptionally rough frames. Therefore I took the opportunity to acquire a car set of NOS Doors for a Triumph 1500 FWD.

The small Triumph Saloon range started out as the Triumph 1300 FWD, which in turn became the 1500 FWD, the Toledo and the Dolomite. All the 4 Door cars share essentially the same Bodyshell between A & D posts, there are some variations which whilst not immediately apparent prevent use in other models. However some are sufficiently close that with modification they can be used where not originally intended.

1300 FWD models have an entirely different Window Regulator to later cars which means the shell is totally different, but as can be seen here the 1500 FWD & Dolomite shells are identical in that area.



The Difference lies in the Door Handle being a more substantial affair on the Dolomite which I believe is also used on XJ6s. This means the Handle hole is the incorrect shape. Having considered trying to cut the 1500 skin to suit, and also insert metal where it was absent I concluded that path was littered with opportunities to mess things up and the quickest way to get the shape right was to cut a section out of the old door and transplant it.

Unmodified Door with patch for comparison



Patch aligned using Handle for alignment



Patch tacked in



Patch welded in and ground back.



The other area where modification is required is in the area of the Latch. I’ve never worked on a 1500 but they clearly have a different Latch to the Dolomite. The areas cut out are larger on the Dolomite and the Dolomite also has a re-enforcement Plate welded into the Door which also has captive nuts to secure the Latch. The Plate clearly needs to transfer which entails locationg and drilling out the spotwelds. For the first door I undertook conversion on I cut out/filled in the relevant areas on the 1500 Door to replicate the Dolomite arrangement and then plug welded in the Plate. This proved to be a faff and for the remaining Doors took the transplant approach.

Two versions side by side



Cut out and ready to weld



Reinforcement Plate



Welded in and ground back



Latch test fitted



Whilst working on the Door I noticed a defective weld, the outer Skin is spotwelded to the Frame in the space underneath where the Quarterlight sits. For whatever reason this hadn’t happened, there had clearly been a spotwelder applied but the two pieces had not taken. It was a simple matter to plug weld and grind back to resolve this.





Door was then hung temporarily on the car as its less likely to get damaged there than anywhere else. Fit is a bit off which I expected, even though the hinges were left on the Car and the captive plates in the rear Doors are fixed with all adjustment being done at the B/C Post. Interestingly the Door touches the Drip rail which is the same situation I found with the Front, yet both have OK gaps to the Sill so it looks like I’ll have quite a bit to do to get these fitting properly when that becomes appropriate. As you can see the Door also stands proud as the rear corner touches the body before the rest of the Door is fully home. A straight edge on the bottom of the Skin indicates its curving in for the last 75mm or so, no doubt a result of rough handling at some point in the past.



On the subject of rough handling I will also have to deal with this damage on the front Passenger door (I knew it was a second when I bought it)



Not sure how well it shows up in the picture but its quite creased and substantially low. Not sure how or even if this can be resolved, a mixture of Hammer & Dolly work plus possibly some heat shrinking? I do have a back up plan in the shape of a NOS Skin ins stock just in case but would rather save the one on the Car already, the spare Skin can then go to help out someone else.

More next week.

The Driver's side is mostly "done" so the strength is there on that side but I'm erring towards redoing quite a bit as I feel it can be done better. Bracing is on my mind, need to get some suitable material in for that purpose.

Lots going on preventing progress. My Son had his car (Audi A4) in for service and investigation of what sounded like a dying Alternator bearing. Unfortunately the diagnosis was rather worse, the High Pressure Fuel Pump is in it's death throes :-( Forecast cost £1600!! The car is already on a decent mileage and I'm trying to encourage him to be pragmatic about maintenance costs of an older car vs depreciation on something newer. We use a VAG independent specialist who I've learned to trust over the last 15 years so if that's what it needs that's what it needs, but it's a big lump of cash so I've spent the last few days poring over Youtube to understand the issue and whether it's something I could have a reasonable chance of doing for him this saving the labour which I reckon is about half the total, it is doable so that will be me for the next several days.

Work achieved on the Dolomite since last time then.

The Inner wing reinforcer was removed to allow test fitting of the new more faithful reproduction from last time.



The replacement fits pretty well, no picture of this as proof, which is pleasing.

As can be seen when fitting the previous reinforcer scant consideration was given to priming beforehand, I also discovered I had missed some perforation of the existing metalwork!

This picture shows the panel in need of repair, as well as the areas mentioned above there are my previous patches that need doing to a better standard and also the support for a closing panel needs to be provided.



The challenge is knowing exactly what it looked like originally, fortunately as with the reinforcer I have a NOS panel to hand, again for the wrong side but sticking with the logic that allowed me to make the reinforcer I'll assume a mirror image is what I need to aim for.



A brown paper template was quickly created.



Tomorrow I'll transfer it onto a piece of sheet and start to fabricate. The plan is to make the entire panel, I probably won't remove the entire original, but I think it will be a good learning exercise nonetheless.

A question to the panel, the panel is mostly flat, it will need to be made from two pieces of sheet as the top right area has some complexity to it which would need a press to replicate but otherwise seems an easy fab job but how would you tackle the two raised sections in the centre? I have a couple of ideas but would welcome the benefit of the experience of the community.

Sean

I'll measure the depth of the raised areas, pictures may be deceptive, doubt they're as deep as 6mm, will confirm.

Your method aligns with one of the ones I had in my head although it hadn't occurred to me to do the holes that way, that's a great idea, I was just going to ease the edges over using grips.

The other plan I had for the raised areas was to either use a router to create a corresponding depression in a piece of Plywood and hammer the metal into that, or I have some pieces of seriously thick plate to hand. I initially pondered milling a pair of pockets into one with my cheap and nasty 3in1 Lathe/Mill but it then occurred to me I could probably cut some pieces of thinner plate to shape and tack them onto the heavy plate and hammer around the edge so rather than hammer into a lower area to create the raised area, hammer the surrounding area down leaving the unhammered area raised in relation.

Great advice as always, thank you!

Latest update.

Picking up on the Doors, with Sill surgery on the horizon I took Chris’ advice to work on the fit of the Doors.
Avid readers will recall all 4 are NOS items, they fitted where they touched but they were at some distance from being a good fit. Starting with the Driver’s side then the front wing was temporarily clipped on to guide what the correct vertical positioning needed to be (Dolomites have a body line running from front to back so this clearly needs to meet at each panel change) Front doors have a generous range of adjustment, the hinge can be moved in and out in relation to the center of the car as well as up and down vertically on the door itself, and can also move up and down vertically on the A Post. The A Post bolt holes also allow for top & bottom hinge to move to the front or rear of the car which allows the whole Door to move front to back in the aperture, or to allow the door to rotate in the aperture to raise or lower the back edge in relation to the front.
Given I’ve already got at the Sill on this side I couldn’t over index on gapping of the lower edge and had to focus on the swage alignment and getting a consistent gap around the Window frame. Reasonably easy so far.
Next the Driver’s side rear. The rear Doors are not as well appointed for adjustment. Nothing at all is provided for on the Door itself. The captive plate is fixed, the hinge fits where it fits and that’s it. The only adjustment is on the B Post where the pate bolts in the same plane as its partner does on the Door therefore you have no front and back movement as you do with the front when they are at 90 degrees to each other, only up, down or in out. This door was too far to the rear of the car touching the rear Wing. Time for a ponder. There are stories circulating that on the production line Door fit was achieved by sticking a lump of wood in between the hinge and heaving on the Door to open the space between the two plates thus moving the actual pivot. Given I had a Door that was too far to the rear it seemed to me that I needed to reverse the process, but how? The hinges are made of something like 5mm plate. Rather optimistically I put one in the Vice and heaved but predictably did nothing. The obvious answer would have been heat but I haven’t got any gas cutting/welding gear so that was not open to me. I toyed with slitting the plate partially to allow me to bend a reduced thickness and then fill up the slit, that became Plan B.
Plan A was, as is so often the case, a BFH. I placed the hinge bend uppermost on my piece of Steel plate and brayed it!. Refitting it to the car indicated that, despite visual appearance of the Hinge suggesting not, it had moved, so it was removed and received a second adjustment along with its partner. Once refitted I was pleasantly surprised to find we now had a gap all around the rear Wing, it wasn’t consistent, but the wing has a repair section that is to be revisited and that was where the inconsistency was. The Sill gapping was not at all good but as already referenced, this would be addressed separately.

The Passenger side was then undertaken in the same way, the Rear receiving the same treatment as the Driver’s side. Dear Reader, both sides took me a full day of back and forth but I finished confident that reasonable gapping will be possible.

Doors fitting I moved on to fitting some bracing to the Shell in readiness for removal of it’s structural integrity. Material of choice would be Steel box section. Probably hugely oversized for the job but a local seller on FB Marketplace had as much 40mm x3mm as I wanted in 2.4m lengths, being a handy size for lots of things I grabbed 6.

The bracing plan was to fit a longitudinal member on each side tying A,B/C & D posts together. A Transverse section in the front Passenger area tying each side together, and in the rear compartment the longitudinal members were braced to the rear cross member. I took care to fit the longitudinal sections a specific distance above the inner Sill to allow them to be used as reference points as for the Driver’s side at least I’m expecting to replace the inner Sill so knowing how far from the bracing it needs to be will be useful.

This is what the finished job looked like.




At this point I was out of Gas for the MIG. Contacting my local Hobbyweld Stockist revealed they had no 5% in, only 15%, but I wasn’t to worry, it was just as good, hmm not convinced about that. Having recently procured a bottle of pure Argon for my new TIG welder I’d had to source it elsewhere as said stockist also had no Argon in and I’d found myself with a bottle from SGS via a local Motor factors. A quick call confirmed yes they had plenty of 5% in and I could have a 10L or 20L bottle. I nipped over and put a (sizeable) deposit on a 20L bottle. Further research reveals my Hobbyweld bottle was 9L filled to 137 Bar. The SGS bottle is filled to 200 so if my maths is correct I’ve now got a 300%+ larger bottle! Only downside is I can’t put my hands on the receipt for the Hobbyweld bottle so may not be able to recover my deposit.

Work then started on removing the Driver’s side outer Sill. I fitted it (badly) many years ago it is a NOS panel and very rare. I really want to get it off in a useable form. I do as it happens have another but if I can succeed that can go to another owner. As I write I’m about 30% of the way through with the aim of getting it off tomorrow.

Thanks for reading.

More later in the week.

Sean

Further progress today. Attacked the Outer Sill and after several hours of cutting, grinding and drilling it came off, and I reckon with some remedial attention could go again.

This is where we stand as of this evening.









Next task is to remove the Diaphragm and then the Inner Sill. Reflecting on that latter I think a touch more bracing is in order as the removal of the Inner sill leaves the floor edges, and more importantly the two Crossmembers. One already features in my bracing scheme but not sure I've provided vertical support for it, rather it's fulfilling a gapping function for the A,B/C & D Posts. The other Crossmember is not apparent to casual observers but is underneath the front Seat area. I think something can be contrived fairly quickly. That will have to be on Friday as I'm on Dog sitting duties tomorrow!

Thanks for reading.

Sean

Afternoon all

Countless distractions slowing progress, I must pop a thread up to detail them lest you all think me a slacker!

So my search for a better section of bulkhead eventually yielded results and after a road trip to Bromsgrove in the newly acquired VW Van this arrived



Spent two days unstitching it to get at what I was after, as well as a serviceable bulkhead repair section it also yielded a good Driver's side inner wing which I will offer to others, plus a passenger side inner wing which may allow me to repair mine rather than replace it with the NOS item I have put aside. As well as that I also recovered the inner wing brace intact and the panel the the A Post attaches to rendering my approximate facsimiles redundant 

Most of the usual grot spots were exceptionally well preserved due to underseal over an inch thick in places, even the original brake pipes had survived and unfastened without protest. I also recovered a good haul of nuts and bolts, half a wiring loom and both master cylinders all now in my just in case stock.

Sean

More work today, finished off the salvage of the sections needed imminently and removing the remaining underseal.



Time to reach for the brave pills now. Whilst the original plan was to repair the A post panel it occurred to me that if I have a whole one it would be a better job to replace all of it, but that's probably going to mean changing the A post itself. The good news there is I have one and although I had repaired the existing one in the door shut area just now I managed to poke more holes in it with a screwdriver. So off it needs to come.

However the risk here seems to me to be of losing alignment. I need to repair the bulkhead with part of the section in the picture but to do that the inner wing needs to come off. Not as scary as it sounds as the car uses a subframe, and as only one of the four locating points is on the inner wing the subframe can serve as a jig to locate it.

The bulkhead repair should be straightforward to align with the car as it carries numerous pressing and holes that can be used against the corresponding features on the car. Once fitted that panel will in turn allow alignment of the A post panel by virtue of me having the spot weld holes that will show the relative positioning.

I will then contrive some form of jig to align the new A post based on the location of the original probably using the hinge mounting holes.

Sounds fine if you say it all quickly?

Step one is to remove the inner wing doing as little harm to it as possible!

Sean

Thanks Chris and my existing bracing is now in the way as its attached to the A post! Careful planning required to avoid that definitely required!