Thread: C5 gto
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Old 04-30-2017, 04:25 PM
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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 – inner door frame fabrication

First the good news, I was able to fabricate the passenger inner door frame with fewer pieces and much more rapidly than the drivers side. There’s really no bad news as the result came out nice, even better than the drivers side, so I guess I did learn from my experience.

I did take progress pictures for this one and they are below. GTO project pace has accelerated as I’ve actually been able to focus some time on it. I arranged to take a sabbatical from work and thus have a lot more “garage time” than previously.

The most complicated part of the inner frame is the “Z” shaped section at the front where the door hinges attach. On the drivers side, it took 4 pieces of sheet to build this section. So I started with a new cardboard template and with some trial and error figured out how to do it with only 2 pieces of sheet.



Here’s how it turned out once built with Al 3003 .063. I forgot to take a progress pic here so this shows it after the inner frame top and bottom sections are already welded on.



The inner frame back edge came next. The most challenging thing with this piece is that it’s essentially a curved flange. I used my TM Tech air power hammer with flanging dies to form the sheet into a large curved flange.



So when forming a curved flange of this size, it ends up curving in both ways and not just one.




While it needed to curve both ways to fit the door opening, my first attempt was not quite right and off to the scrap bin it goes. For the 2nd attempt, I put less curve in the flange to start.



I then dialed it in to the door opening with a small pie cut and welded in piece at the top. The curve section at the bottom was made by cutting out a piece and welding the edges together.



Here it is installed on the door frame for a trial fit.



I’ve now made the inner frame front and back edges.



Making top and bottom pieces and connecting them all into a unified frame is what remains.
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