John's Triumph TR7 Restoration: Paint Prep

Having laboured for years on this project, I felt that I had come to the end of my talents with preparing the body for paint. It was all in primer, but I wanted someone to finish it for me, i.e. do the final flatting & fettling, then paint it. Two £7,000 quotes later I decided that I would do it myself Yikes. So, for the next little while my posts will mostly be about getting panels to fit, treating low spots with filler and applying primer. I'll probably get bored though so you might suddenly find a post about TR7 ash trays or something else equally as exciting.

Right, last time we were here I was talking about the doors. No, not the Californian psychedelic outfit from the 70s, I mean my doors. Well, I got them on the car and they just didn't fit at all. The nearside, in particular, was out all over - the leading edge to front wing; the bottom to sill and the trailing edge to b-post just wouldn't line up.

I am compressing about three months' history into just a few lines here and I don't have any photos, but getting them to fit was a nightmare. Sure enough I got bored, so decided to strip the two old (but original) doors of their fittings, nuts, bolts and channels. While I was at it the stickers from the bootlid were carefully peeled away and kept - they had been there since the 1994 journey to Greece.

I am not sure what the artist was "on" when he drew them, but my particular favourite is the deliciously bonkers "Greece is Nice Not Mice".

Anyway, back to the TR7. It was good to strip the boot and doors of their parts, as it gave me an opportunity to see all of the inner parts.

Changing the hingepin on the nearside door helped no end, and after many, many hours of shimming and unshimming, I managed to get both doors to hang about right. They have to line up at so many places - the front wing, swage line, door tops etc and it is very, very fiddly.

I learned that you have to fit the door rubbers and striker plates to do this job properly, so on they went. However the doors now wouldn't close flush and protruded beyond the b-post quite considerably. The technique used to get this right was a combination of bashing back the frames on the car, and using thin skims of filler to lift the build of the rear wings to match.