Gord, I had the same idea and spent quite a bit of time researching them and checking out pictures of them on Advance Design trucks. In the end I decided I liked the look of having handles though. It seems to help break up the expanse of the doors and if nothing else this thing has plenty of expanse.
Double Dingo and Turbo4whl welcome along and I hope you enjoy the saga.
Like I told Gord I spent lots of time thinking about what I wanted it to look like in the end and once I came up with a look, I just had to figure out how to get there.
I wanted the exterior handles on the front and back cabs to be at the same level and I wanted the interior handles to remain in the stock locations. That way the passengers would have easy access in and out of the upper cab.
I looked at changing the latches out to one of the aftermarket ones but in the end the stock ones seemed to be the best option for my needs and look.
The original latches were in very sad shape. I spent a couple hours cleaning them up good enough to get a good look at them and oiled them up to see if they were worth saving. But in the end, they were badly worn and some of the welds had cracked so I decided to replace all four of them.
The interior handles were just a matter of putting it back together, but the exterior needed to operate the latch at the original elevation but the lever to operate it was 22" lower on the door. I wasn't sure how I could tie the two together but then I remembered when I was a kid. A couple friends and I had those gas-powered Cox airplanes that flew by string. One person would get it running and the other would hold on to the handle at the other end of the two strings. Then the guy at the plane would launch it and the other guy (the pilot) would control the plane up and down as it went in a circle. The pilot would spin around until it run out of fuel or crashed. Well, I crashed more than I ran out of fuel. The reason I'm telling you this is that whenever it crashed it would usually break into pieces or at lease crack the plastic it was made out of in several places. We would heat up a screwdriver with a propane torch and use it to melt it back together. But inside the fuselage where the strings attached was a bellcrank. It was an arm with an offset arm that would control the flaps by a tie rod between the two. It was the same function I was trying to accomplish on the doors. So, I started working my way through the design.
First, I drilled the new holes lower in the doors where I wanted the handles. When I installed them, I noticed that the doors were curved in at the original location for them but curved the other direction at the new location. The handles didn't set on the doors level because the bases were slopped but pointed down. I was just about to start grinding on the bases, but I noticed that the handles spun 360 degrees, so I switched sides with them, and they were perfect. Then on the latch end I took a square pin and inserted it in the latch, but it was to floppy to work properly. It needed to be secured on both ends. I didn't want to just weld a cover in over the old holes for the handles with an anchor point for the pin or if something happened to the latch you wouldn't be able to remove it without cutting it out. So, I made a cover plate that would attach to the doors using the same holes as the old handles with a sleeve to receive the latch pin and allow it to pivot freely. Then I cut it into the shape of the Chevy Bow Tie so it would look like it belonged there.
From their it was just a matter of making offset arms with a square hole on one end and a round one on the other. The square hole would fit over the pin at the latch and the square end of the handle. I had to run a tap and put a nut over the end on the handle shaft so it wouldn't fall off. On the other end of the arms, I put clevises and tied them together with all thread. That way I could fine tune the adjustment. Once I had it all installed and adjusted it worked great.
Then I stripped everything back out of the doors and moved them to the body shop to get them ready for paint.
Last edited by COCOE; 12/24/20234:21 PM. Reason: Fix Typo
