Journal Entry

This came to me overnight and after weighing up the possible outcomes, one of which was breaking the car in half, I decided to give it a shot.
If you've been following my progress, you may remember the issue of the unequal door openings possibly caused by a rear end collision in the past.
I tried to jack the door opening apart when it was on the rotisserie without much success and it was apparent that I needed to try something else if I was going to improve the fit of the doors and front guards.

The plan involved bracing from the frame rail in the engine compartment and the frame rail at the rear wheel arch up to one of the overhead beams with some landscape sleepers and attaching the chainblock to another sleeper laid under the car. Winching the chainblock up against the other braces would hopefully bend the frame up in the middle widening the door opening a few millimetres.
The pic below shows the setup a bit clearer.
As it turned out I only used one brace at the rear and I winched against the weight of the front of the car.
I could only just lift the car at the extent of how hard I could work the winch so the weak link was the winch and I reached that without the forward brace.
It creaked a little but I couldn't measure any determinable change so I left it at that.
Well, I thought, I tried and at least the the car didn't snap in two.
I went back to plan 'A' and tried fiddling with the door and equalising the gap at the other end to try to get me some more room.
The door had plenty of adjustment at the top hinge but the bottom hinge was at it's full extent.
Closer examination of the hinges showed that essentially the top one was longer than the bottom one and if I swapped them around I may be able to get the door further back. David swapped the hinges and I tried the door again and I was able to creep a couple of millimetres. This coupled with the slight gain which was apparent with plan 'B' was enough to get the guard into 'almost' the correct position.
I checked and pushed and hit with a rubber mallet and I appeared to be able to achieve a satisfactory result.
I laid out the seam sealer on the joins and pushed the guard into position and put in the bolts.
It all went fairly well except that I broke off one of the captive nuts up under the dash.
But even this was easily fixed as I could get at it quite easily and removed the crossthreaded nut from the outside where the windscreen goes down. I'd drilled out the little cover previously and that allowed me access to the captive nuts.
The guard went on fairly easily and after I'd done that I also assembled the front skirt.
I still got a few things to put back together, the glovebox and a few dash bits, but the two guards and front skirt are ready to paint.
I want to check the positioning with the bonnet and the grill before I do that though.