Some of you may have gathered I just put new door hinges on my '66 98 convertible. The doors are no longer sagging and close nicer than I can remember them since I was a teenager back in the 80's. Soft close, little force needed. What force you do need is mostly compressing new rubber seals.

I thought it might help someone who has this job in front of them if I jotted down some notes as to how & what I did over the past 10 days. I'm not a body & paint guy at all, so I'm sure there are some tips I missed.

About 2 years ago my mechanic had refurbished a set of hinges for me. I was kind of waiting for the right time to dig into this. Hello Corona Quarantine!.

This is really only the second time I've ever pulled the front clip from a big Olds. I began by pulling the front bumper, hood, and front outer fenders to gain access to the door hinge bolts. Here's what they look like from the '66 Chassis Service Manual:

Body bolts adjust fore/aft and parallel to rockers. Door bolts adjust lateral in/out of door top and bottom and a bit of vertical up/down

The doors on these cars are heavy. Eventually the upper and lower hinges wear causing the doors to sag in the body making them harder to close and causing them to hang up on the striker. On the 60’s cars, there’s a rubber ring inside the striker which can wear out too.The lowers have springs and a detent in them to hold the door in an open position. Upper hinges don’t have a spring and do not interchange with the lowers. Joe P reports that rear hinges can be used to replace front hinges. I believe Olds, Pontiac and Buick big car hinges interchange, but check your Hollanders manual to be sure.

I had to extract one broken bolt from my driver's side upper hinge, so that slowed me down a bit. After that I decided to clean up all bolts and nuts with a tap & die kit. No sense in fighting hardware when you’re aligning heavy doors. 4 shorter bolts connect the hinge to the body. The 3 longer ones connect the hinge to the door. The “body” 4 bolts control the up/down, fore/aft, and gap/alignment of the door to the A pillar and rear quarter. The 3 door bolts influence the up/down position of the door, but more critically control the in/out of the door skin relative to the rear quarter. If the door bolts are wrong the doors can be cocked in or out like a “ V ” or the other way like “ ^ ” when what you want is “ || “.

Before doing alignment I removed the door strikers and convertible wedges. They can mislead you on where the door ends up in closed position.

If I have it right, the goal here is align each door to a consistent ~1/8" gap (Olds specified max is 3/16" s gap) between the door trailing edge and rear quarter leading edge while maintaining a parallel relationship between the door bottom & rocker panel.

At first I tried using a floor jack, but I couldn't get the closed door aligment right with the door sitting on the jack halfway open. Then I settled in on using a ratchet strap to hold the door weight while in closed position and using a couple of plastic "gappers" to set gaps. I'm just one guy in his garage so I had to get creative with tools to hold stuff in place while I tightened and loosend bolts a few hundred times.

Here's what the plastic "gappers" looked like in position:

The 1/4" thick gapper plastic went under the front corner of the door to get a decent gap between the door bottom and the rocker panel

At the door rear I used a 3/16's gapper. I was aiming for a consistent 1/8" gap. I think I got close since the 3/16" doesn't quite fit now:

3/16"s thick plastic gapping "tool" used to set the fore/aft position of the door during door hinge alignment. Rear quarters before fenders since quarters can't move...

Basically aligning is is tons of trial & error. You place the gappers in the voids you're trying to maintain, set the ratchet strap with the top rear corner of the door just a little bit high, then tighten the bolts, remove the gappers, release the ratchet strap and see where you wound up. Hinges being hinges, they will sag just a bit -- like 1/16" or so, which means you have to compensate for that in setting what amounts to a hinge preload.

My key measuring that preload was using the top rear corner of the door. During aligning it should start just a bit high relative to the quarter corner, when you get it right, it winds up real close to here:

Aim for consistent 1/8" gap between door trailing edge and rear quarter & no sag between the door top rear corner and top front corner of the rear quarter.

So, eventually I got there. I'm not claiming to be any good at this, but I'm happier now with this driver's door than I have been in 35 years:

Gaps look o.k. to me, but there's surely room for improvment by a professional.

Convertibles also have door wedges which hardtops do not. They look like this:

66 Olds Chassis Service manual says aim for 1/32 of interference between the body and door wedges. My 98 convertible boxed frame bends going over some bumps. These seem to help.

I believe the wedges limit door movement when the car goes over bumps and the frame bends just a bit. Just like the slip joint in the TH-400 transmission allows the drive shaft to slide.

I did my adjustments with the glass, power window motors, regulators and vent panes in the doors figuring these weights will influence how the doors close long term.

Once you're happy with the raw door aligment, the strikers and wedges go back in. These too can take time to set properly. I set my strikers first and have more or less concluded I could use fresh strikers too. Mine seem pretty worn out since they worked best at very high in their travel. They're designed to be adjusted to pull the door in or out at the rear and up or down just a bit. I set mine to pull the door rear edges flush with the rear quarter and not hang up (much) when I close it. You're supposed to use a hex key to loosen/tighten, but one of mine needed some persuasion with a pair of vice grips.

Hope this helps some of you. I'm not proficient, but at least I've tried it once and it's better now than I can remember.

I replaced the rubber door conduits while the fenders were off. This was a good move since it was easy to get to and I had some wires that were just about to break. This time I used Steele, 20 years ago I think it was Metro. Both work, but the Metro was one piece and hard to manipulate, the Steele piece is a tube and 3 donuts which you can manipulate separately.

I adjusted my convertible top second after the doors, you'll find that post on here under my name. Basically the idea was to get the doors right, then get the top right, then wrap up with the windows.

cheers
cf