I’m so happy right now I could hug a tree, because for the first time in almost twelve years of ownership, I can close the driver’s door of my 1965 Dart without slamming it, and I can open it without applying 750 lb.-in. of pressure to the door handle button. Getting there was a multiple-step process involving several months, a Mopar specialist, and a tree, and it all culminated with my wife mentioning that “rednecks aren’t just from small rural towns, are they?” Owning an old car is always an adventure, isn’t it?
I took the first step in repairing the door back in March or April 2025. The driver’s door hinges were both worn beyond their service life, as the good men and women at Chrysler didn’t design the lowly Dart to be around in 1970, let alone in 2025. My research disclosed that the lower hinge (pictured above) is extremely hard to drill through and requires specific reamers to ensure pin alignment. Because buying the tools and figuring everything out would eat up a fairly significant amount of time and money, the general consensus among A-Body aficionados is that sending them to a vendor in California named “MoparLeo” is the only way to go, so I did. Leo will only rebuild an entire set of four hinges, so the passenger hinges will most likely end up baffling someone at my estate sale.
Because I keep the Dart at home from November through May and rarely drive it in the summer, I didn’t want to pull the door off and wait weeks for hinges while I was still driving the car fairly regularly, so I bought a set for a very reasonable price from a guy who was parting out a ’65 Dart sedan. I sent them out and Leo had them done in a couple of weeks, primed and ready to paint. This summer, I bought a can of “Medium Turquoise Metallic” and gave the hinges a splash so I could have them ready to install when I brought the car home from storage.
This is the old lower hinge; I include this illustration to show that I don’t just fix things for fun; this hinge is completely wasted.
Replacing the hinges is not that difficult. Removing the door makes the most sense, but I usually work alone and remounting the door would have been bulky, so I replaced the hinges one at a time. The first step is to remove the fender apron, which is held on by six bolts. I also jacked up the car and removed the tire to give myself more room to work.
This is what you’ll find behind the apron – good access to the hinges. One bolt for each hinge enters the A-pillar from the outside, while the other two are accessed by removing the driver’s kick panel inside the car. Therefore, each hinge is held to the pillar by three bolts.
Then, I removed the two bolts holding the hinge to the door, replacing the top hinge first. Because I bought the Dirty Dart from a salvage yard and it is clearly a beater, I wasn’t terribly careful about watching the paint, and indeed I ended up chipping the front edge of the door (worse than it already was – I’m not the first person to try a door adjustment on it).
Before I reinstalled the pillar bolts, I wrapped some 3M “Strip-Calk” around them to seal out water; Chrysler had done something similar when the car was new.
Here are the new hinges installed; the next step is to wrestle with door adjustment. I’ll save you the profanity and tell you that it took about an hour to get it to a place where I was reasonably happy with it. Fore-aft adjustment is handled by the pillar bolts, left-right adjustment by the door bolts. There are myriad combinations, most of which are wrong.
Afterward, however, the door was just as hard to open and close as it ever was, even though it was no longer bumping the center post on its way in and out. The reason was this: at some point, something clearly fell on the car and bent not only the drip rail but also the door frame itself. This is the driver’s door.
This is the passenger door. See how the door should be just about flush with the pillar? The driver’s side was squishing the weatherstripping and putting undue pressure on everything from the latch up.
Therefore, I decided to use a tree to pull the frame back into position. My lovely bride took this picture of me setting up my come-along and straps, and this is what elicited the redneck comment. She comes from a small rural town and is accustomed to seeing inventive methods to repair things, and hey, if it does the job, who cares how stupid it looks?
This is a close-up picture of things before they miraculously didn’t go wrong. Every once in a while, the gods of internal combustion smile on a “mechanic,” and a plan comes together as said “mechanic” intended. I cranked on the come-along and pulled the door frame in various locations past the point where I wanted it to finally rest until it settled in roughly the right spot.
And this is how it ended up. For the first time in years, the door opens and closes as Mother Mopar intended it to do, which probably wasn’t that well, to be honest. It’s no Riviera or Thunderbird, but I don’t need to slam it, and that’s a good thing.
It’s been a good weekend of Dirty Dart maintenance; I drained the radiator and the block and refilled the system with new antifreeze, and I flushed out the brake fluid. Since Michigan has a humid climate with wild temperature swings, I do both every three years or so. I’ll also need to replace the tires before I start putting miles on the Dart on dry days this fall, winter, and spring; the tires are 10 years old and that’s when they get replaced, regardless of tread depth. There’s nothing handier than a beat-up old station wagon (other than a beat-up old truck), and I just made the Dart a little more pleasant to cruise around in. And my neighbors weren’t even mad about my using their tree.
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Nice, always been an advocate of no points for style, whatever works. This is nothing new, as I heard of a chap who worked at Pontiac on the line, and was standard practice to slam a 2×4 in the door jamb so the door would close.
“If it looks stupid but it works, it ain’t stupid!”
Drove my Beetle into the back of a car with the right front fender badly dented. Since I was in high school and not enough money to even fill the tank, I removed the fender myself and bashed it back into shape with a hammer, a mallet, and block of wood in my Dad’s driveway. With a few bucks from Dad, I found a can of green spray paint which was only one or two shades off. Lasted a few years till I got rid of the car.
Very good, sometimes you have to dispense with the niceties and get the brutal tools out.
It’s helpful to have a good tree available. I’ve used our maple to hoist up a motorcycle for tire replacement.
Brilliant solution; I’d consider doing this too.
Bending metal has been done by me on bicycles, with OK results. Work included returning forks to the original rake after an old Schwinn had obviously been crashed into something and spreading chain stays and seat stays so the rear dropout can be made to accommodate a too wide rear hub for which the bike was not designed. Bogus engineering for sure but both worked.
“Hi, Aaron!” I, too, am part of the “body repair by tree” club (two different cars, even).
It’s a *really* good feeling when you get it back in reasonable tolerance!
That is one fine looking automobile. Thanks for keeping it going!
Nice long roof .
I know and do quite a few “Farm Fixes” I have learned over the decades, you’re very brave to post this, I give technical advice in numerous places but am cautious about sharing the grittier methods due to push back from those who don’t understand .
-Nate
The tree worked. That is all that matters. It was a great idea and it’s good to hear the door is working as it should.
I’ve only once been brave enough to take a door off. Thankfully, the neighbor who was with me was a retired body man, so I knew the situation was not as dire as had I been solo.
When my son rear ended a car in our ’92 Caravan, I used a come-along to pull out the front end. But since there was no tree out front I parked the F100 with some wheel chocks in front of it to attach it to.
That come-along has been handy every once in a while including just very recently when it was out to use raising the transmission in my xB during a clutch job.
What no article on the clutch replacement?
Tomorrow.
A come along and a big tree are great body work tools. Way back when my friend in college didn’t get to take the car he shared with his younger brother when he went off to college. His younger brother needed it to get to and from his part time job. Well on his way home one night he smashed the front end of their B210. His dad of course was pissed and told my friend he could have the smashed car. I already had a come-along so we stopped at the hardware store for some eye bolts and other misc fasteners. The problem was the only tree in the yard was maybe 3″ in diameter. So we went to a local park of sorts with a gravel lot for maybe a dozen or so cars. But they had parking stops, one of which was right in front of a ~3′ diameter tree. While doing the pull an old lady turned in concerned we were trying to pull the tree down. (Imagine that in today’s world). We convinced her we weren’t doing any damage to the tree and completed our pulls. We did get it back to the point where a headlight could be reinstalled and point in the right direction and that was about it. No new body parts, just bashing and pulling the existing parts back sort of back to close enough to work. He ended up driving that car for 2 or 3 years.
Great solution.
In the back of my mind, a come-along is a basic automotive tool. I’m sure that this comes from early exposure to my mother’s brother, who provided most of my formative experiences related to automotive “repair” (use of quotation marks to indicate that said repairs did not always result in actual repairs). Having to generally work alone, he would use a come-along to pull just about anything that couldn’t be pulled by the bulldozer or tractor. After both the bulldozer and the tractor became idle and un-repairable themselves, the come-alongs were used more frequently. Engines, bumper-straightening, frame-pulling, tugging cars out of the dirt that they were often sinking into, etc. To your wife’s comment, yes, my mom’s family in rural Maryland were absolutely aspirational hillbillies (and actual rednecks). Not that there’s anything (entirely) wrong with that.
I have one, but I’ve confined myself to using it to pull and straighten all manner of fence posts and poles.