Thread: C5 gto
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Old 05-19-2017, 11:31 AM
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heinke heinke is offline
MetalShaper of the Month Jan 2018
 
Join Date: Nov 2009
Location: Prescott, AZ
Posts: 487
Post Passenger door – door locks

Not really metal shaping, but still part of the GTO build project. It occurred to me that I’d forgotten to make provision for a door lock in my door card design. Not that surprising as the original GTO didn’t have door locks given it’s racing heritage. But in this day and age, it seems only prudent to have door locks on a street driven coupe. The bear claw latches I used have an “L” shaped metal bar that slides up about ¾” to lock and down to unlock. On most cars with manual door locks, the door lock actuator is located somewhere on the door card.

I thought about various ways to do this but none felt right. Then I thought about “hiding” the door lock actuator in the door pocket. I first started mocking this up using a bicycle brake cable and was going to fabricate a lever to push/pull the cable. This showed promise but I wasn’t convinced the cable would be stiff enough for the push operation.

It turns out that later that day I needed to mow the grass around my house. While operating the mower, it occurred to me that it’s throttle did both a push and pull operation. So I went to my local saw and mower shop to see what I could find. For $7.50 each, I was able to buy mower throttles that included the lever and plenty of cable made with solid wire so it should be stiff enough to push for the un-lock.



I made up a bracket so that the lever tip would be accessible from inside the door pocket and thus out of sight. The flexible cable runs back to the door latch to pull and push on the door lock bar. Sometimes a great solution is simple and not the most intuitive

On the door card, I used a bead roller to emboss the diagonal pattern on the surface. I plan to leave this as polished aluminum and didn’t want it to just be plain. I hemmed the edge around the door pocket opening so it wouldn’t have a sharp edge. Turns out hemming an inside edge requires quite a bit of stretch to turn it over, so not an easy task. It’s good that I did a practice run on a piece of scrap to figure out a good technique that would minimize hammer marks.



The door card will be fastened with stainless button head screws and I decided to space them every 3 inches. This is way more screws than necessary but adds more eye candy to the door. I checked my stock of rivet-nuts and don’t have near as many as needed. Oh well, time to order more.
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