That pesky door problem revisited and the Mar-K 5/16 rivnut debacle.

 Well, that troublesome drivers' door is back at the forefront of my mind at the moment. Did I mention a guy called James was gonna do the resto work for me? Well, that all fell into a stinking pile of dog poop, like just about everything else associated with this project.

I do have a professional shop interested in doing the work for me; that is, finishing off the fitment of the panels and getting it to a stage where it is ready to paint and if satisfied go ahead and paint it. But that is  a couple of months off at this stage.

In the meantime I am going to try and deal with the situation as best I can. 

I threw this picture out there on FarceBook and I did receive some excellent responses. The general consensus being that I need to address the cab front as the door actually looks pretty decent. It was obvious the panel needed work as it sits dead flat, and that probably reflects its aftermarket heritage. The original panel has a slightly concave curve to it that matches the door, but as you might be abl to make out, this panel is flat. So, what happens now? Well, it has to come apart for one thing and it has to be massaged into shape. Easier said than done, but I am going to have a crack at it anyway.

Did I tell you the story about the Goddamned Rivnut saga?

I bought the excellent Mar-K f100 tub kit and began fitting up the tailgate to the unit. 

If you go to this posting https://56pickup.blogspot.com/2024/08/mar-k-tailgate-latch-for-truck.html 

you'll see how the instructions tell you to screw the nutsert into the side of the tub wall without using a rivnut gun. Well, to be honest, it kinda sorta worked, but the reality was, it didn't really work that well. One side didn't lock tightly into the steel and the other side twisted the nutsert to a point where the bolt wouldn't tighten. 

So, I guess you could call that a bit of a failure.

So, I decided to fork out and buy a rivnut gun. I wanted one that had the 5/16 mandrel, and they were very hard to find for a reasonable price. However, I found one on Temu for around $90 with a number of mandrel sizes and lots of rivnuts. So, I bought it. Several weeks later it arrived. After spending about two hours trying to figure out how to change mandrels, I had it all ready to go.

So, what was the problem? Well, the nutsert thing that Mar-K supply has a wider outer diameter than the standard nutsert. This means, that if I go and fit the 5/16 nutsert up, it will fall through the hole. The weird 17/32 hole that I was told to drill. That alone was annoying as it was an odd size and a rare and expensive drill bit to get. I did find one through Gasweld.

So, bottom line was, I should have just bought a cheap metric rivnut gun kit in Australia for half the price and used a 10mm nutsert and be done with it.

But wait, there's more...

The problem is, the bolt that needs to go into that nutsert is a 5/16 shoulder bolt. A special sized thing that is designed to slide along the ridge of the bar that attaches to the tailgate as you lower and raise it.

So, I decided to use the 10mm nutserts as they fitted snugly in the drilled hole, and correspondingly, I needed to find a 10mm shoulder bolt. Wouldn't that be an easy thing to find? You would think so, and I did find a couple, but they were stupidly priced, and as much as I like to shop locally, I wasn't going to pay three times the price for a 10mm shoulder bolt that I eventually bought on eBay from China.

Go figure all that out.