door hard to close, tight at front seal, increasing gap at trailing & bottom edge.
I've recently replaced all my doors seals.
The doors are damn hard to close and yet once closed the trailing edge of the door reveals a gap at the bottom.
the front edge (near hinge) is very tight, as is the top edge. The bottom and rear edges start to develop a gap the further one gets from either the top or the front. (see photos). The doors cannot be pushed any more tightly shut and yet you can see light through the gap.
Is there a procedure to adjust this?
I noticed that the hinge has three plastic spacers which would force the front of the door tighter.. If one removed some of these spacers would it cause the front to become looser and allow the trailing edge to close easier?
There are a whole lot of different issues being brought up here. My experience with this is purely Defender Tdi. I don't know if the Puma is any different. The door skins are steel, but I don't know of anything other differences. Bundalene would be able to confirm.
You can get a certain amount of adjustment out of the hinges where they mount to the firewall/bulkhead. The nuts mounted on the firewall look like this. They clip onto the firewall through a rectangular hole, and sit behind a round hole that the hinge bolt passes through, which is larger than the bolt diameter. This is the best pic I could find. As you can see from this picture, if you loosen the bolts on the firewall side of the hinge you will be able to move the door around a little to even up the gaps, looking at the side of the vehicle. The biggest problem here will be that the bolts could be rusted into the nuts, especially on the bottom. I had to drill my bolt heads off.
wuldfasche's problems appear to me to be caused by the new seals being too big, or not flexible enough. It sounds like they are so tight that the door is flexing outwards away from the catch and the hinges. Loosing the three torx screws on the striker plate and sliding it outwards should even up the door at the back, so that it at least seals evenly, but it's not going to sit flush with the B-pillar (so looking along the vehicle, from the rear). To even up the front you would need to remove some of the plastic spacers from behind the door side of the hinge, or add some to the firewall side, but again the door will sit proud.
As mentioned in earlier posts, you're going to be very lucky to have it perfect. It's all a compromise. I had mine pretty good, and then I trimmed the seat box and the door trim started squeaking against it, so I had to move the striker plate out slightly, meaning that the door doesn't quite sit flush at the rear. The thing is, no one but me, or another Land Rover eccentric is going to notice which is far better than constant squeaking .
Good'ay fellow members, just trying to find out a bit more about door gaps
adjustment etc. I have already managed to make some minor improvements
to my recently acquired Defender 110 [2009] . My main concern now is the
the bottom door seals or lack of ! There is quite a gap under each door where dust, water etc can penetrate. Are there any suggestions or upgrades
that I could consider to improve this situation ?
Any ideas would be appreciated.
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