I mentioned in post #115 some of the "features" of the original IFG door panels including being warped, coke bottle-shaped, and having the rocker panels integrated as part of the door skin. Here's a photo showing an original panel with the rocker still attached:
Cutting off the rocker panels must've been easy enough, but then Don had to close off the bottom of the doors with new panels. Before the new door bottoms were fabricated though, he addressed the warping and coke bottle-shape while the door skin was more flexible.
The warping and curvature are harder to photograph since they're subtle and run the length of the door. It's also difficult to capture the entire length of the door in focus while sighting down from one end to the other. Nevertheless, here's a photo Don took many years ago that somewhat shows both problems. In addition to being curved as the yellow line shows, the original doors were also twisted front to back (notice the gap):
To cure both problems, Don slit each door into three pieces, realigned the parts, and 'glassed them back together:
Then he fibreglassed an extension to the front edge of each door to make setting an even gap between the door and the front fender easier to do than it would be if he had to reshape the entire front panel:
Next, he fibreglassed recesses for the door handles in the stock F355 locations:
Once that was done, Don wasn't happy to use the cut up, pasted, and body-filled doors, so he used them as bucks to make new moulds. Here's the butchered driver's door, painted in gel coat, ready to be covered in fibreglass to cast the mould.
Here's the passenger door mould in the making. His modified doors were gel coated, covered in several layers of fibreglass, and reinforced with some wood stiffeners to make sure the moulds would keep their shape:
Here's the passenger door mould after it was peeled off the old door buck:
The next step was to prep the door moulds and lay up the final door skins:
When the final layers were cured, he pulled the new door skins out of the moulds, and reattached the front and rear faces as well as the new door bottoms. Notice how he inset the rear door panel leaving a 1" wide lip at the trailing edge of the door skin. Again, this was done to allow much easier creation of even door gaps later on:
The last step he took was to finish off the door scoops where his mould couldn't reach because of the under cut. These are significantly wider than the original IFG door scoops. Notice the faint black vertical line... that's how much narrower they used to be:
That's where Don left things off... many miles ahead of where these doors started out. In fact, there's virtually nothing left of the original doors except the front surfaces, and the return flange along the top edge.
When I went to fit his door panels to my car, I found that the rear face of the door panels were too thick to fit the available gap between the door jamb and the metal door:
I could've either slid the metal door further forward to open the gap, or trimmed off the offending part from the fibreglass door panel. I chose the latter since I didn't want to mess with the stock door alignment. So I made a template marking out where I needed to make the cut:
Once the panels were trimmed, I was finally able to mock them up:
The doors are straight and true, but they still need a few tweaks and lots of final finishing. Here's the first attempt at lining them up on my chassis:
The door aligns fairly well with the rear quarters, and the swoopy upper line is continuous and smooth on the passenger side:
The driver's side doesn't flow as well though. The upper body line crests at the rear of the door rather than at the peak of the rear fender arch:
From this view, it appears as though the problem may partly be that the swoop in the door top is a little too aggressive, and partly that the top of the rear fender arch is far too flat:
I'll need to take a closer look at this later when I begin finessing these parts.