Thanks guys for the compliments on the console. Here's the start of another project I started on not long ago: Trail Doors.
I've always had the intention that Coco would never have a full top again, so I wanted to make a set of trail doors for it. These are basically a copy of what my brother Matt did on his Bronco a few years back, and a couple others have done similar ones. These Trail Doors are basically just a stock EB door, stripped down to its shell. I cut the window frames off of Coco's doors a while back, but just this summer started working on the rest of the project. Now that the center console is done, I'll get back to work on these this weekend. But here's a few photos of what I've done with them so far.
The cleanest Trail Doors have the door handles shaved, IMO. A few years ago my brother discovered that the AMC Gremlin exterior door handles made an excellent replacement, mounted to the inside of the door where its easy to reach from in or out of the Bronco. So I headed to the yards searching out Gremlins:
This beauty was at the first yard I went to, but one of the door handles had a broken latch on the inside, so I moved on to the next junkyard, where I discovered that not only do AMC Eagle wagons share the same door handle, but they have TWO pairs so you have spares or a bonus set for future projects or trade bait.
Getting them out is pretty simple. The latch rods disconnect the same way the EB's latch and lock rods do. Then simply remove two Torx screws and the handle pops out. Note that the Torx screws can be a pit of a pain to get to. I had a cheap ratcheting angle driver bit from Harbor Freight that worked great for this.
The other thing you need to make these work is a Lokar door latch cable kit. This is the most expensive part of the mod. Those of you handy with cables, cable clamps and pullies can probably piece a kit like this together a lot cheaper.
One of the things I really liked about Matt's Trail Doors that I wanted to emulate is that, once the window glass and all the internals are removed, the door shells are extremely light weight. You can save even more weight by removing the sheetmetal that the door panel had covered. This has a couple of other benefits too. It gives you better access to the inside of the door for working on the latches and cables, plus the finished door is now a huge storage receptacle for things like tow straps, extra coats, lunch, etc. Anyhow the trapezoid-shaped ridge that surrounded the door panel makes a great perimeter for the cutout, so I started by using the hole saw to punch a hole at each corner.
Connect-the-dots with a Sharpie, then go to work with your cut-off wheel.
Clean up the edges with a file and you now have a light weight half door with a huge door pocket