MOPAR Leo has retired. Door hinge rebuild information.
Leo: Again, many thanks for your service to our hobby over the years. Everyone gets to retire - including you! Thought I'd forward the following to you (and everyone else). I just got off the phone with a superbly experienced bodywork guy who is also retiring now at the age of 70. In any case, I told him about the vertical play that I can feel when I grab the rear end of the driver's door on my 1974 Duster. Seems like roughly 1/8" of vertical play. The passenger door has zero play. In any case, he mentioned the old trick of making a metal shim to place between the door and the lower hinge face. This would presumably lift the back end of the door vertically to close out any elongation of the hole that the pin passes through and get rid of any play. So lo and behold, I discovered that some previous owner of the car had already been in there monkeying with the hinge by shimming it with washers (see photos). The skinny washer is on the top and the fat one is on the bottom. So since it has already been shimmed, I'm thinking that my best bet right now is to simply buy a complete lower hinge from AMD, Year One, or any of the other large suppliers. I'm sure all their hinges come from the same Taiwanese supplier. Looks like a pretty straightforward one for one remove and replace job, with some adjusting afterward. What's your professional opinion of this approach? I don't think shimming my old hinge is going to work.
Leo: Again, many thanks for your service to our hobby over the years. Everyone gets to retire - including you! Thought I'd forward the following to you (and everyone else). I just got off the phone with a superbly experienced bodywork guy who is also retiring now at the age of 70. In any case, I told him about the vertical play that I can feel when I grab the rear end of the driver's door on my 1974 Duster. Seems like roughly 1/8" of vertical play. The passenger door has zero play. In any case, he mentioned the old trick of making a metal shim to place between the door and the lower hinge face. This would presumably lift the back end of the door vertically to close out any elongation of the hole that the pin passes through and get rid of any play. So lo and behold, I discovered that some previous owner of the car had already been in there monkeying with the hinge by shimming it with washers (see photos). The skinny washer is on the top and the fat one is on the bottom. So since it has already been shimmed, I'm thinking that my best bet right now is to simply buy a complete lower hinge from AMD, Year One, or any of the other large suppliers. I'm sure all their hinges come from the same Taiwanese supplier. Looks like a pretty straightforward one for one remove and replace job, with some adjusting afterward. What's your professional opinion of this approach? I don't think shimming my old hinge is going to work.