Hi guys, Rob from Rides by Kam. Today's custom car building tip is install a set of flush door handles.
So in the custom car building world everyone's really always wanted to have
a clean sleek look on their door. So most people usually in the past got rid of
their door handles all together and had nothing. It's not legal to have a shaved
door handle, so in this day and age we've kind of got the best of both.
This ends up being a flush fit door handle
which is a real nice streamlined finish and still operates like a door handle.
So this handle in particular is made by Dave Kindig from Bitchin' Rides.
We've probably all seen it before they're a really cool product.
Really well made. They come with some little options like a change of direction which
will help you on a door like this one for instance on a Mopar.
We've used these handles on lots of our builds.
Everyone would have probably seen it on the Havoc and the Cuda
that we're working on at the moment it's got a set on it as well.
The first step on your door after you've dismantled all the components out of the
door is to get it back down to bare steel so you can get your area ready for welding.
So to do this we use the 3M orbit with the 80 grit Cubitron II sandpaper on it.
Works a treat. We use another cool product of theirs which is a welding and
spark deflection paper. So it pretty much protects all the area that we're not
working on on the door and the 233+ tape again. We use this quite
a bit as well because it's quite thick and it will hold all this down so you
can actually cool the area down and it'll hold the paper down as well.
So the next step is to make up your template to fill in the old door handle
or the factory door handle hole. When you do this you want to make sure
that you weld in your new piece, so we've already made up our template it's
already contoured to the body line, and this is the piece that we will weld in
there to get rid of the old handle. But we don't just stop there. You pretty
much treat this look you're actually going to finish it flush fit with no door
handle, because you need to get this whole area dead straight, dead flat
everything's got to be perfect. If you've got any lows you need to fix that now
before we install our new handle. If you've ever welded in this section of
the door before, you know that being this far in and down in the door it's
prone to being able to be warped quite easy under any heat from just even
simple welding no matter how careful you are. So it's really important to get
this area exactly how it would have been dead straight like if it was this
section here so that when we do install our new handle
it doesn't create any problems for us or any lows or warps or whoops in the steel.
So now that we've got the handle filled up we pretty much go to a
bare canvas again, the blank canvas to start with. Now we can start working out
where to position our new flush fit door handle. Now there's a few things to
consider in that most importantly how it's going to line up with your striker
that's inside the end of your door here. So the mechanism has to be sort of in
the right spot, and you also want to get it in a pretty close to being factory
position to where a door handle would look so it doesn't look odd.
The next step for us will be to get our template there, that's our hole size
that we need to cut in the actual door itself. So we'll get that hole cut out.
We'll actually take the center section out of the door handle, we'll insert this
from the back, we'll weld the back section of the handle in place, and then
we'll fine tune it from there and make the the flush fit handle final fitment.
Okay, so flush straight door handle install's done.
The steel side of it is finished.
Now it's on to the rust treatment and then your etch primer
getting it ready for bodywork and we'll show you how to do those steps in another episode.