Well, to quote the famous movie: "Houston, we have a problem." I did the final fitting of the inner cowl panel, prepped it for welding and did a cursory tacking in place and then brought out the passenger side door to check the opening. While the door did fit withing the opening, it just barely fit at the bottom. It seems as though either the hinge pillar warped some while I was welding in the patch or it was somehow bent sometime else in it's life. I''m guessing it warped. To see what kind of warping I was dealing with, I decided to make a series of measurements on both driver and passenger door openings and compare the two. To do this, I placed painter's tape on both sides of the door opening and made tick marks at 1 inch intervals down the length of the door opening, starting at the bottom of the beltline. I made this scale on both door openings. Then, I measured the length of the opening at each tick mark, measuring from the edge of the door gap in the rear of the opening, across to the corresponding tick mark on the hinge pillar. The results are below:
What you can see from this data is that the door openings are close in size, but not exactly the same. The closest in size that they are is at 35:34 7/8. Otherwise, there is a consistent 1/8 to 1/4 inch difference, until just above the hinge pillar patch panel. From there, the difference in sizes increases until it reaches a 5/8 inch difference. So, it would seem that I have to remove a couple of the tack welds and find a way to reposition the bottom of the hinge pillar to enlarge the bottom of the door opening. I did mentally take note of the added thickness of the "doubler" hinge pillar patch panel. It definitely adds to the thickness, but the door easily fit within the inner opening that isn't visible to outside of the truck. The problem was with the door gap opening, that you can see. I'm concerned about the door hitting the outer cowl panel when opening or closing the door.
I'll be thinking this over for a bit, before taking any action. Thoughts and/or suggestions welcome. Also, sorry for my poor skills in making a spreadsheet on the forum....
