So a few years back the hard point that is part of the lower hinge on my drivers side decided to Kiel over and die.

GM Vetts, Cameros & Firebirds of this era all have ultra long and heavy doors and after some serious use can encounter issues with the hinge hardware.

The Door panel it’s self is made up of chop gun roving and once you get into it, it’s not too difficult to repair. Buying a new door from Generous motors or a used one from a Junk yard was not in my plans.

There is a metal backing plate with some threaded inserts for the door hinge but the structure it’s self is quite week.

Once the door was free from the car the first thing I did was to get an accurate flat pattern of the area using  cereal box cardboard.

The bad area was cut away and the surrounding area was roughed up for tooth.

 

First few plies of actual Aircraft Grade Fiberglass Cloth (vastly higher strength and load transfer capability over the original chop gun roving) The plastic transfer method was used for all the plies, this also helped keep epoxy out of the threaded inserts inside the door.

I now started adding tapered plies (accounting for .010″ per ply of 3733 cloth and filling the void till I got to the correct finished door hinge “datum” I established that the hinge should be on the same plane as the upper hinge, I made a template to get around the gusset in the door to figure out the final depth.

Some more card board templates to figure out the shape

 

Peel Ply around the edges to keep the edges uniform & connected to the rest of the layup.

 

Some Automotive metallic red out of a raddle can to finish everything up.

 

Hinge re mounted.

 

In its lower position the slight difference in red paint is barely visible when looking inside the door jam.

 

Old “trusty” is back together again.