12/19/03
Door Details

It’s been about a month since I had a chance to work on the Ferrari, and I was ready to try and make some progress on this car. The door panels still needed final fitting, so I started by drilling some screw holes in the panels. Although there are plenty of blind clips that hold the door in place, there are some screws that are hidden on the top of the panel that give the panel its precise fit. Since there is some room for play in the panel, I had to make sure I had the right spacing so the door would still close before drilling these holes. Before these panels get secured for the last time, I still have to install the lights, the water shields, and and I’m sure a bunch of other things!

Since the cap pieces that go on top of the doors will be installed soon, now was the time to install the window felts. I bought these felts over a year ago at “Fall Hershey” to save on the shipping. They come in 72″ lengths, and the special oversized shipping costs almost as much as the felts, so I remembered to buy them when I could bring it home in my car!

What would seem like a simple task took well over an hour! Upon closer inspection, the previous owner never drilled out the old pop rivets before painting the pieces. After all the rivets were drilled out, each hole for the felts was drilled one at a time and checked for fit before the next one was drilled. I couldn’t afford to make a mistake because I was only going to get two pieces out of the 72″ piece I bought! If I remember, I’ll color the rivet heads with some black paint to hide them in the felts.

One piece that really needs to be made are the little door pulls that attach to the door pockets. You can see a slight indentation where the pull goes in the center of the door pocket in this picture.

Frank has many of these pulls in his shop to use as reference, and here is one from a black interior. The leather is skived thin, and the small raised section is nothing more than a piece of card board glued to the back of the leather.

With the back piece of leather removed, we can see that cardboard is used to reinforce the leather, and the stitching along with the glue holds everything together. So all I had to do was find some cardboard to start making these pulls.

I figured out that I would need a double thickness of card stock to get the same thickness of the originals, so I glued two of them together.

My first attempt at a door pull was a disaster. The skiving of the leather was not even enough, so it was showing through on the finished side. I had to start all over again, and do a better job on the leather.

By the end of the day, the results were much better. I left these two pulls for Frank to stitch on his sewing machine, so I can install them on the car next week.

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