Resolved 2G Door Hinge Nuts fell off (1998 GST)

[YoungDsmEnthusiast]

Prepping my 2gb eclipse for a color change and having to take most of the car down to bare metal due to the previous owner bed lining all the exterior panels. Anyways, I take the front bumper, hood, and fenders off, then I go to take the doors off and realize that the driver's side door has all aftermarket hardware and that the OEM hardware is missing, I don't think much about it and continue to remove the doors by taking the door and the hinge off the body as one connected piece. Well, time to put the doors back on, and the nuts on the backside of the panel for the hinges to bolt to aren't there, and in their place are nonthreaded holes. I managed to get two of them back in because the nuts hadn't completely fallen off, and I was able to get the bottom hinge attached back with the three bolts it had holding it in, to begin with (not sure why there are three anyway??? previous owner...) but I can't get access to the furthest third bolt holding the driver's side door in and I'm wondering what my best course of action here to take is. Does anyone have any good advice on how to access the other side of that panel so I can clean up the backside and tac-weld some new hardware in? When opening the door, the door sags a couple of inches and is a massive pain to close, whereas before it closed perfectly with no sagging. PS. the cutting into the body to access the nuts, I did not do that, must have been the previous owner trying to install the hardware.

Drivers Side Top Hinge

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Drivers Side Hinges

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Passenger Side Hinges

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[Dericsh]

Yikes. Since it’s just one, What about a nutsert/rivnut in that spot?

Maybe I’m looking at it wrong but I can see on the bottom bracket that it doesn’t appear to be aligned with where it was before looking at the paint, is there some adjustment you can make there?

 

[EC17PSE]

its a bugger to get to since its fully enclosed into the metalwork. there is no easy way to solve this really. it does mean cutting a hole and making a plate that have new nuts and stronger fixing to it, best advice i would say is this, ( solely based on my mock up chassis ones also snapping or falling off )

Make a plate exactly like the OEM shape and hole pattern with a fraction wider for support, weld the nuts on well, trim a support hole in the front side to slip the plate through and bolt it up to that, then the access panel you can riv nut 2 ( or 4 ) places and make a water sealed cover and bolt that on, this would always give you access to this in the future should you need to remove the doors for any reason

 

[YoungDsmEnthusiast]

Yikes. Since it’s just one, What about a nutsert/rivnut in that spot?

Maybe I’m looking at it wrong but I can see on the bottom bracket that it doesn’t appear to be aligned with where it was before looking at the paint, is there some adjustment you can make there?

Unfortunately it’s not just one it’s all of them on the drivers side… passenger side is fully intact though, do you think inserting riv nuts in all of the holes then welding the faces could work?

 

[Dericsh]

Unfortunately it’s not just one it’s all of them on the drivers side… passenger side is fully intact though, do you think inserting riv nuts in all of the holes then welding the faces could work?

Ehh I am leaning toward no, best to follow Bobby’s recommendation since it’s all of them.

 

[Mello]

Might look at possibly enlarging the holes enough to slip a nut with the correct thread pitch thru and welding along the edges. You might be able to use a bolt as the handle for holding the nuts in place while welding as well. Just a thought.

 

[YoungDsmEnthusiast]

Ignore the audio in my video needless to say after a few hours of magnet fishing and shoving a ratchet in a hole ratchets were never meant to be shoved in I was able to get three nuts on the back of three new pieces of hardware, and I was able to get an impact on and shoot all three bolts tight. The nuts are just replacing the ones that fell off on the other side of the body, however, they're not welded on so if the door ever comes off again I'll have to repeat this process but I don't plan to have the door off any time soon.

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