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May. 1st, 2020 07:34 pmAmong the tasks I'm expecting to need to do on Ai at some point, the doors are getting kinda crusty and may eventually need replaced if they can't be patched up. As for compatibility, supposedly any door from any hatchback from 1994 to 2001 will fit. When that time comes, I want to make damn sure that's true.
Let me tell you a story about my experience with that and why I'm concerned about those kinds of details. Years ago, our family had a station wagon that my dad bought for fairly cheap because one of the doors was bashed in. Not hard enough to prevent it from closing, but it couldn't be opened from the inside. When I was about 15 or 16, my dad bought a replacement door for it and he was getting it ready. He got it from the junkyard; it was pulled from a 4-door sedan. Early on in the process, I remember asking "shouldn't we measure the doors to make sure they're the same size?" His reply was that the doors from the sedan model were the same as the station wagon. From a distance, they certainly looked close enough.
We began the task of preparing the new door. It was a different color, so we had to paint it. Similarly, the replacement door didn't come with the power windows and power locks that were present on the car we had. So, we took all of the power bits off the original door, transplanted them to the new, and this required some drilling to make it all work. Then we were done and the new door was ready to be installed. We bolted it onto the hinges and discovered the door from the sedan was about an inch longer than the station wagon's door, preventing it from closing.
And so we made a retreat, taking the door off again, moving the mechanisms back over, and putting the original door back on. I didn't say "told you so"; it didn't need to be said. My dad tried returning the door; the junkyard he got it from wouldn't take it back because of what was done to it. It ended up sitting in the yard behind the shed, even after we got rid of the car itself some years later.
So yeah, that's why I'm sometimes persnickety about this sort of thing. The devil is in the details.
Let me tell you a story about my experience with that and why I'm concerned about those kinds of details. Years ago, our family had a station wagon that my dad bought for fairly cheap because one of the doors was bashed in. Not hard enough to prevent it from closing, but it couldn't be opened from the inside. When I was about 15 or 16, my dad bought a replacement door for it and he was getting it ready. He got it from the junkyard; it was pulled from a 4-door sedan. Early on in the process, I remember asking "shouldn't we measure the doors to make sure they're the same size?" His reply was that the doors from the sedan model were the same as the station wagon. From a distance, they certainly looked close enough.
We began the task of preparing the new door. It was a different color, so we had to paint it. Similarly, the replacement door didn't come with the power windows and power locks that were present on the car we had. So, we took all of the power bits off the original door, transplanted them to the new, and this required some drilling to make it all work. Then we were done and the new door was ready to be installed. We bolted it onto the hinges and discovered the door from the sedan was about an inch longer than the station wagon's door, preventing it from closing.
And so we made a retreat, taking the door off again, moving the mechanisms back over, and putting the original door back on. I didn't say "told you so"; it didn't need to be said. My dad tried returning the door; the junkyard he got it from wouldn't take it back because of what was done to it. It ended up sitting in the yard behind the shed, even after we got rid of the car itself some years later.
So yeah, that's why I'm sometimes persnickety about this sort of thing. The devil is in the details.
