The mission – get a pair of restored Series 1 coupe doors shipped to Australia without damage.
The challenge – the maximum shipping size is just about the same size as the door itself – there’s really no room for padding…
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- Here are the restored doors – these have been ready for a couple of months, and the customer has now ordered a few more pieces and we are ready to ship. We need to make sure these skins stay this nice though…
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- Here are the inner sides – we did the usual replacement of the lower 2 inches of the inner shell before re-skinning. You can see this work in an earlier blog entry called “Coupe Doors for Down Under”
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- Shut face panels are perfect – these were relatively solid shells to start out with.
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- The shells were stripped of their original skins and blasted bare, then primed heavily inside and out.
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- Here is the other side.
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- Before being packed up, this door was filled with a complete bonnet flange set, a pair of Torsion bar shields, and an aluminum radiator shield! We’ve wrapped the shell in bubble wrap and a layer of cardboard, but I don’t think that is enough to protect those skins – if only there was something stronger we could wrap them in that doesn’t make the package any bigger…
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- I’ve got it! I came up with this idea a few weeks ago and it worked great! This is a skin removed from the ’63 coupe in the shop currently.
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- Once we wrapped this in a layer of cardboard, the combined length and girth of the “box” was 2 inches under the maximum, and the box was SUPER strong! I think you could stand on these and it wouldn’t hurt them! Hopefully we’ll get a good report from the customer in Australia soon with some photos of the doors hung on the Aussie shell! You know, these ’63 coupe skins have really gotten around in their life – the car they came from was built in England, originally exported to Germany, somehow made its way to the states, and now at least a portion of it is headed to Australia!
