DOORS

Fitting the doors will more than likely be the hardest job you will come accross on the car. The day after I got my body package I spent a whole day trying to get one to fit and got virtually nowhere. None of the holes in the supplied hinges lined up with either the door or the body and even once I had re-drilled them to at least fit the door and go through the body aperture I had to use loads of packing washers on one of the mounting bolts to enable the hinge to fit the door at the right angle. Make no mistake, the door 'job' will appear to take forever, and thats before you start thinking about fitting the other bits like door latches, handles and push buttons.

Without a doubt, this is the one job that very nearly made me pack the whole thing in. I even asked Parallel how much it would cost for me to ship the whole thing off for them to do. As I suspected, paying them do do it just wasn't in my budget, so I had to go it alone. Time, time and more time is all you need to do the job. Theres nothing inherently difficult in making a piece of metal fit between two pieces of fibreglass but it needs huge amounts of patience and lots of door and hinge on/off fiddling.

There really is no single piece of advice I can give regarding procedure. Patience by the bucketload is necessary, and whatever you do, do not drill and tap the holes that are shown on the doors. They WILL be out.

Firstly, get the door fitting the car as best you can. That means getting an even gap all the way round, with the top of the frame coming as close to the body as you can. Once you are happy that it's as good as it will get offer the hinge up to the door and chassis. If it's anything like mine you will find that theres no way the hinge will mount flat against the door without being miles out at the chassis. I had to space the hinge at various angles with washers and nuts. It looks very messy but once everything is finally put together you can hide it all by filling any gaps with black sealant.

Once the hinge is on you can then concentrate on actually trying to get the door to open. You will probably find that unless you want a massive gap at the front top edge of the door you will need to grind away a lot of the door to get it to clear the body when you open it. I found I had to trim a fair bit off the body too in this area. Once the door opens OK, work you way to the back of the door and carefully remove material until it closes just nice, with the door coming flush with the body and as near as dammit gaps around the perimeter. Once you're happy that the door opens and closes correctly and that placement is right you can move onto the latches.

The pictures below show a lot more than any amount of words so I'll leave it at that. One word of advice- don't give up. It CAN be done!

Pictures above show offside door. Note substantial use of packing washers and removal of fibreglass to enable the door to open without a massive door shut gap.

LATCHES

The latches should only be attempted once the door is sitting exactly where you want it, in the closed position. Couple the latch together and with the door shut offer the assembly up to the body through the inside of the door. You should find that the assembly lines up quite well with the door and body. Once you have an idea where the female latch goes take the assembly out and drill the 4 holes for it. I say 'have an idea' where it goes because theres no way you can mark it as the male latch will always be in the way. So, just get a feel for where it goes. Use your judgement. Once the female latch is affixed to the body offer up the male side and click it fully home. You now need to support it. I made up some 90 degree and straight strips of metal which were glued to the door with a hot glue gun which is enough to hold the strips in place until you can get in there with glassfibre and fix them properly. Once the fibreglass had set they were in there plenty firm enough. Drill the strips to accept 6mm bolts then finally fit the latch to the door and check the action. No doubt you will need to fiddle a bit with the door/body clearance and the latch alignment.

DOOR HANDLES AND PUSH BUTTONS

I used genuine Lambo handles and buttons mainly because there wasn't an option. Expensive but there you go. There were no 'pattern' parts available (not surprising) and it's not like you could use anything off another car as they are so unique. As for fitting, it's pretty self-explanatory. Just cut out the holes in the door (you will see where you should be cutting) then keep offering up the parts and trimming until they fit nicely. Once they fit you then need to glass in some supporting steel strip which you can then bolt the parts too using 5mm bolts and nuts. Once the latch, door button and handle was in I looked at how I would link the button to the latch. And looked. And looked. In fact, I spent 3 hours trying to see how it could be done. No matter how I approached it I just couldn't see how it could be done. At least not without some sort of cantilever system, which would be far too complicated. Wouldn't it......?

I rang Parallel and spoke to Naz. Indeed, it turned out that Lambo had done just this, and is how Parallel did theirs. Naz did say that it was actually much easier to do than you would think, and kindly offered to send me a picture of the Lambo parts microfiche to help. It did, and within 2 hours I had a perfectly working pushbutton. Very simple, but one of those things that just didn't appear simple at first.

Once the door is fitting, opening and shutting just as you want it then the next thing to do is fit the door seal. Once on, you will probably notice that the door is now either held away from the body because the seal/frame gap isn't enough or the seal/frame gap is too much and you can see daylight between it even with the door fully closed. Or you could be really unlucky and have both as I did.

The top trailing edge of my door was now being pushed out too far which meant I had to remove a fair bit of material from the door before it would seat correctly. In fact, so much material had to be removed that I nearly broke though the skin. No matter though, it can be filled if necessary.

On the other side, the front of the door where it runs down the windscreen pillar had a big gap (about 10mm) between the door and the seal. There really is no other option but to cut a strip of something (I used a bit of fibreglass cut from the interior bulkhead panel) and bond it to the existing doorseal lip, thus bringing the doorseal out to meet the door. It's a bit of a pain because when you open the door now you can see that the seal has been brought out compared to the rest of it but hey, thats kit cars. At least it's better than getting wet.

DOORSEAL

I bought the doorseal from a kitcar parts supplier as there isn't really any special part required. No real problems in fitting other than to go round the mounting lip on the the car making sure that it's not too thick in places which would make pressing the seal on very difficult. I found that once the seal was on the door was held out at several places which meant I had to trim more material off the door to shut properly. On the other hand, I had a big gap between the doorseal and the door all the way down the windscreen pillar. The only real solution for this is to extend the lip out by glassing a strip of fibreglass (I used an off-cut from the rear bulkhead panel) all the way down which you can then put the doorseal on, and hopefully it will then meet the door. I found that both doors needed this procedure, the offside being particularly bad. The downside is that when the doors are open it looks a bit ugly in that the doorseal sticks out quite far from the windscreen pillar but with the only option being to get wet theres no alternative. I must admit this job really is a pain in the backside as not only did it take a good  6 full days to do both sides (around 48 hours) but it would also be extremely easy to avoid if Parallel had just moulded a wider strip on the body in the first place. I had actually thought that it might be my own bad luck when I asked Naz if he had come accross this doorseal gap problem before and he said 'no' until I actually saw his own silver demonstrator at Donnington Kitcar show in September 2002. After looking down the door pillars near the windscreen it was clear that it had exactly the same problem, and that his own car certainly wasn't as well-sealed as I had been led to believe. Clear gaps between the door and rubber weather strip were evident. In Naz' defence, he did say that he did not fit the doors.....I didn't pursue it any further as my own questions had been answered.... The picture below shows the first stage of fitting the fibreglass strip. I will try to add more pics as the job goes on.

INTERNAL PULL RELEASES & CONNECTION TO LATCHES

You will more than likely be doing as I did and using the original Lambo pull releases. Not only are they (relatively) affordable at about £30 each but finding another release that would not only fit (the originals are quite slim) but also has the same amount of travel could be more aggro than it's worth. My advice is get the genuine ones without a doubt. First thing to do is cut the slot for the release. Turn the release upside down, lay it in the centre of the front face of the interior door panel and draw around it. This is JUST your guidline. Obviously, if you cut your hole to this size the release will just fall through. So, use your judgement and cut the slot a good 5mm smaller all round than the line you have drawn. Then, it's just a case of opening up the slot with the trusty Dremmel until the release is a nice fit. Remember to cut the slot a little larger than needed as when the door is trimmed the clearances will close up. Fixing it in there is simple. Just bend up a U clamp and use a 6mm countersunk bolt. Do not overtighten as you wil crack the plastic. It only needs to be nipped up to provide a perfectly good fixing. Remember that the release fits in such a way that the lever has to be pulled UP to open the door, not down.

Once the release fit is right, drill a small hole in the lever to accept the cable. Remove the inner cable from the outer and feed the inner cable through the drilled hole until the 'lollipop' nipple on the end is stopping it from going any further. Slide on an adjuster before refitting the outer cable. Thats that end done. On the other, bend up a bracket (I used 20mmx4mm steel strip) to hold the cable & adjuster. Affix to the door as you want. I used a hot glue gun as theres no real strain on the bracket, and what strain there is is pulling it onto the door anyway. Be careful that your bracket does not hit the window frame and check the locking lever travel as it's very close. Once thats done, it's a simple case of drilling the hole in the latch bigger to take a 5mm nut & bolt bolt which you can can then wrap the inner cable round and then clamp up. You could use a solderless nipple on the end instead but as it would mean that the cable itself has to pass through the hole it would rub against the edge and may make it fray after a while. All the cables and adjusters came from Halfords. I think they were bicycle rear brake cables if I remember rightly. Once the little amount of slack was taken out by using an adjuster they worked perfectly, first time. Woo Hoo!

Above left: the pull release bracket. Note that the extra hole drilled is nothing other than a mistake!

SOLONOIDS FOR LOCKING MECHANISM

Naz informed me early on in the build that making the doors lockable via the Lambo push buttons is so much aggro that to date he's never fully done one. The problem is getting from the rotational action of the key in the push button to the side-to side action of the locking lever on the latch. To make matters worse the latch is pretty much directly under the push button so nothing short of a complicatad array of levers/cables/bars/pullies will do the job. Add into the equation the relatively short travel needed and it's not hard to see why it's far easier to lock the doors via solonoids. This does bring with it some problems though:

1: The best way to control a door lock solonoid is in conjunction with an alarm system. So thats an added expense.
2: If the battery goes flat you can't get into the car.
3: If a solonoid fails you can't open the door.

If your answers to the above are the same as mine ie:

1. You should be fitting an alarm system to a car of this nature anyway you tight git, for the anti-hijacking facility if nothing else.
2. When did you last have a battery go flat without it showing any signs of doing so? (and no, that doesn't mean that it's not your fault for not disconnecting it when you last went to Ayia Napa for two weeks).
3. A good solonoid will last far longer than a kit car. And even then, 2 would have to fail at exactly the same time to be a problem. Unlikely.

Then you will be fitting solonoids to the car. To start with, I found that the link to the locking lever would have to be different. On one door I needed to extend the lever with steel strip to miss the bracket I had fitted for the internal release cable. On the other I could go straight from the solonoid operating bar to the lever as the bracket for the cable was in a slightly different position. It's no big deal, but it does mean that you need to have a good look at seeing how it all works before starting to make up any brackets or levers. I decided to bond (SikaFlex) the solonoids directly to the door as I couldn't see that they are likely to need replacing at any point. Remember to check the location of them, as well as the operating bar and any levers you make with the window and window frame fitted. It's amazing how cramped it gets in there once all the bits are fitted, not to mention the intrusion from the door card. The solonoid travel can be operated by hand so you can check the full sweep and correct operation of the locking lever by hand before making them permanent. Oh, and make sure the solonoids work before bonding them in.

DOOR RAMS AND SUPPORTS

First thing to do is get the supports for the chassis fitted. I bought mine from Parallel as they are very reasonably priced and will save you a bit of aggro. They really are needed because if you try and affix the body side of the ram directly to the body you will find that after a while it will punch it's way through simply due to the amount of weight on it, so Parallel wisely decided to make all the strain go through the body and end up on the chassis itself. A much better solution indeed.

First, offer up the support and see where the ball joint mount will poke through. Mark it then cut the slot as small as you can while still letting the metal pass through. You will probably need to trim the inner arch to fit the support between the body and the arch, and as usual take off small amounts of material until the support is both in line with the chassis and has enough poking through the body for the balljoint. Unfortunately the next step is one job where you really do need to weld I'm afraid. I had hoped I could put this car together without any welding at all but there really is no easy way of fixing the support using metal strap or other such bolt-on bracketry. I managed to borrow a MIG welder from work and after a crash course in the basics I was able to run a single line of weld along the top of the support where it meets the round bar of the 'A' pillar. For good measure I put a couple of spots on the bottom of the support too, where it meets the edge of the chassis although with the top edge firm there should be no way it's going to move anywhere. The weld does not have to look the best as you will never see it which is handy. As long as it's structurally sound thats all thats required.

Above left: the offside support. Above centre: the nearside support, fitted. Above right: the balljoint mount.

below: the internal door bars. Note that the bars are not fully fitted with rivets.

The internal door bars are fairly straightfoward but unfortunately are another one of the few jobs on the build that requires welding. As far as I can make out, there really is no other way of making something similar without it being a bit too messy for my liking. You could bolt the shorter bar to the main bar by using 4 or 5 mm steel plate either side but it just wouldn't be as nice or as strong. One good thing is that if you don't make the main bars too long you can actually fit and remove them as a whole, which means that you don't have to take the whole door to a welding shop to have them fitted in situ. I made my bars from rectangle box which I got from B&Q. Buying steel stock from places like this is horrendously expensive but thankfully you don't need a lot of it. I bought 2x 2metre lengths and that was enough for me to make both my door bars and rear bumper brackets. Total cost was about £25.00 for the metal which isn't exactly crippling but you could probably buy the same amount from a major ironmongers for about 5 quid.

As regards to placement of the door balljoint for the ram, you will find that there really isn't a vast range of placement for it. The easiest way to start is to open the door fully, with the ram attached to the chassis and see where the end of the ram comes to. If you sweep the end of the ram up and down you will effectively draw an arc, and your ram will attach at some point along this arc. You will find that with the glass, door bars, doorcard and everything else in the door the length of this arc reduces by a fair bit, and I found that after looking at the setup I only had an arc of say 5 inches in length where I could attach the balljoint. I settled at about the mid position which meant that my rams, with the door fully closed, would be horizontal. Which is abut where you want them to be.

I used the same big-headed rivets as I did when fitting the front boot and body to also fit the door bars to the door skin. Once in place, fit the window frame and window and connect up the ram. VERY carefully de-gas until you can just about close the door without putting too much strain on anything. Once you have opened and closed the door a few times to check the sweep and action leave the ram well alone until the door is fully built up after painting and being fitted with the trimmed doorcard. Only once the door is fully ready to go should you even think about de-gassing anymore. Use the same ram to do the other side. Not only will it mean that you don't have to fit the glass and frame but also that if you DO de-gas the ram too much you've only wrecked one and not two.

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