FHC resto nr. 83; Door handles part 2

Well over a month ago I found out that the matching ignition and door lock set wasn’t fit for purpose. But because the ignition lock wasn’t functioning properly I decided to go for plan B: Use the original door cylinders from my DHC on ‘t Kreng and use the surplus set from ‘t Kreng, together with the matching (and superfluous)  ignition lock, for the’76 FHC.

So yesterday I spent half of the day to swap door cylinders on ‘t Kreng. Nothing too difficult, but sadly a few things turned out to be broken even before I touched them. These included my trusty Avanti map reading light and both door mounted interior lights. I see another winter project looming!

Another (lesser) set back was changing the lock cylinders themselves. I had hoped that it might be possible to change the lock cylinders without removing the door handles and locking mechanism, but unfortunately it couldn’t. Removal of the lock cylinder was easy. But fitting the spring clip, to keep cylinder in place, proved to be impossible with one pair of hands. So everything had to come out. More time consuming than difficult. And just past noon I had swapped the cylinders. Leaving me with these items for the ’76 FHC.

With all parts sorted and cleaned it was time to assemble the door handles. A nice and easy job for a mostly grey and sometimes damp Sunday afternoon!

The stops for the door handles (one’s visible in the picture above) were glued in place several weeks ago, and are ground down items from a four door Range Rover. These are made from some sort of plastic and should be much better suited for the job than the original soft rubber items.

So no need to wait for sealant to set and I could start with the door handles, followed by the door handles’ mechanism and finally the lock. All pretty straight forward, though I managed to fit two items the wrong way round. The first one being one of the pins that locate the door handles push rod (see picture above). The other being one of the spring clips from the lock cylinder. Spotted the first mistake while uploading the pictures from my camera. Again easy to rectify but fitting the pin the correct way round needed both my hands. But as you can see from the picture, fitting the spring rings is pretty easy using a small (7 mm) socket and something that can act as an anvil.

But despite these two small mistakes it took me less than an hour to assemble both door handles. An afternoon (or better part of it!) well spent:

The upcoming Christmas holiday looks like a fine opportunity to fit the door handles to the car together with the door lock mechanism.