The Stovebolt Site Forums The Shop Area Paint and Body Shop Doors Looking for the Goldilocks Door Seal!

First of all, about The Filling Station and Steele Rubber, a couple of years ago I worked with Steve at the Filling Station who was doing his part negotiating with Steele to come up with a weatherstrip that came closer to the 1/2 inch gap that should have been the AD truck standard. Originally what Steele had made for the Filling Station was represented to The Filling Station as 1/2 inch, but truthfully it was only 3/8 inch and it just wouldn't work. We got Steele to run it in 7/16" thick and that's as close as they would go...using an extrusion die left from other work they had done in the past. Profit is very important for these folks, it seems. 7/16" being the lip measurement and not the valley measurement. The rounded lip should face outward on the door as that is the sealing part. The GM manual for the truck says anything from flush to 1/16" out (sticking out away from the cab is what they meant to say) is within factory standards. They didn't just throw these trucks together with no concern about fit and finish...but they did have tolerances and for the doors there were certain important design issues---more on that in a moment. So, we (Steve and I) figured 7/16" was as good as we were going to get out of Steele and we left it at that. The original Chevy weatherstrip (I used to purchase it from GM until the mid 80s when they finally stopped having it made for them) was shaped similar to the generic product being sold by all the usual suspect sellers out there, but it was 1/2" tall at the outer lip edge...the outer edge being the part that actually was the weather seal. The valley section was 11/32" and there was a heavy string set in the bottom to keep it from changing dimension when installed. What is being sold today by everyone but the Filling Station is 11/16" thick and it absolutely will not work. Please see the images attached below. And even using a CNC laser cutter, you can't reduce the height of that 11/16" rubber to the correct measurement unless you build a special jig and take a LOT of time. You'll need to run at least 4 passes per piece and you can only cut about 13 inches per pass in length at a speed of 50mm per minute (limiting movement to the X axis only so the table is stationary). So this as I said will be a genuine investment in time and it smells to high heaven. And cutting it with a razor is pure futility. The self-stick "D" shaped hollow rubber would theoretically work ok, but there are a couple of fundamental design points I believe need to be made...one: on the AD trucks, the "weatherstrip" also acts as anti-rattle and that is very important. That's to say it must in a perfect world keep the door held tight in the jamb. Two: the AD door lock (latch if that word is more familiar to you) works best when this pressure is present...and that's why about 2 inches below the central latching point there's a rubber bumper in the jamb. So, if we use a modern type door seal (a soft hollow type seal that presses nicely against both door and jamb but takes no real pressure to close) it won't work as the original weatherstrip was designed. Again the lock isn't the same design as today's mechanisms. Today's locks work differently and equally important is the understanding "unibody" construction brought interesting changes as far as doors, hinges and locks were concerned. Now if you adapted your door to use modern locks (and by this I mean anything used from around 1964 forward---when door hinge, latch and weatherstrip design began changing), you could use the pillow-soft hollow foam and it would seal just fine. That isn't to say modern foam isn't also an anti-rattle component. It is, however not nearly as much as it was in the early days. Try this and see if you don't believe me...rebuild your hinges until they're like new. Then rebuild your lock and striker plates until they're like new. Or buy new ones. Adjust your doors so that they "latch" correctly and then drive around town without any weatherstripping in place. Even with the little hard rubber pads in place, your door will be moving and shaking pretty much all the time. If you have somebody else drive and put your finger at the lock side gap of your door and cab, you'll see just how much flex there is even in a more/less perfect world. Now roll down the window in a newer vehicle and put your fingertip out on that gap and see how much less movement you feel. It may be so slight you don't notice it at all. My whole point is I've tried to find the Goldilocks door seal also...for decades. I've decided the best solution is to understand your door at a point of even to 1/16" out and a weatherstrip like The Filling Station sells may be as good as it gets. But I don't like rattles...especially at the lock/striker. Those can be really disturbing because in these trucks, you're talking metal banging on metal and amplified by both the door shell and the cab...there's no nylon coated metal latch being cushioned by a spring-loaded nylon wedge. So any kind of rattling and banging is harsh and distracting. Good luck.