Frameless

Remember the A pillar angle problems I've had with the silver Manta? When we first put the car together we couldn't get the windows to fit anywhere near properly, so we compared the silver Manta to Jo's Exclusive and realized we needed to bend the A pillars upwards. Well after Andy did the necessary bending he managed to get the doors and windows to fit, but they were never quite right as you'd need to slam the doors to get them to close, and that just felt like a recipe for breaking the windows. It was no fault of Andy's, I did the measurements but they still seemed to be out. Add that to the fact that the driver's door skin started splitting at the top because of the pressure from the window, and I knew I had something serious still to do. I got myself a digital inclinometer from Amazon and measured up the shell and orange Manta here.

Measuring the A pillar angle, thank God for magnetic bases..

Last month we went back to the UK for a week and I was determined to spend a couple of days on the silver Manta to work out how far out the A pillars were. I measured both Mantas (Jo's and the silver one) and compared the numbers to the ones I had taken in the US, it was interesting...

The orange Manta in the US and Jo's Exclusive were pretty close, with the right side of the orange Manta being a little off (as it had had a shunt on that side at some point in the past) and the silver Manta was surprisingly only a couple of percent off them. Even more surprisingly, the brand new shell was way off the numbers for all the other cars. I had to think about that one, and I'm assuming that the shell is different because it doesn't actually have a suspension to sit on, it's sitting on a chassis dolly on its jacking points. If it was built up into a car and sitting on its suspension it would probably bend under the weight and match the others.

Anyway, back to the silver Manta. With it being only a couple of percent out, I still had to work out why the windows weren't fitting. Andy luckily had some Manta side glasses in stock, so I grabbed them out and fitted them into the upper window rubber to see where things weren't fitting.

Passenger window - the gap was just at the top/front of the glass

Driver's window - the gap here is the lower front

So the gaps didn't look too bad, and I figured I'd actually have a chance if I just bent the upper window channel and filled the gap between the body and channel with Dum Dum, there'd be only a couple of mils to fill anyway.

I started on the passenger door. First job was to pull off the upper window rubber, unscrew the channel and remove the A-pillar trim. The trim just needed re-sealing with Dum Dum and refitting, and then I bent the upper window channel to lower the upper front edge, just where you can see it misses in the first photo. Then it just needed Dum Dum-ing along the upper edge (with more on the bit I'd just bent) and screwing back into place.

Now the channel is adjustable, so I needed to set the window and channel so that the two met properly, and I decided to do it by getting the window to fit into the opening with a consistent 1/2" gap all around the edge (about the thickness of my fingers) and with the window fractionally inboard of the channel to ensure a good seal. If I had all that, then when I put the rubber channel back in it would all fit and seal.

Well that was the theory. I just couldn't get the window far enough back in the door to get the consistent gap all the way around the opening, and finally I worked out why. There's a guide that glues onto the bottom of the door glass, and that was fouling the rear window channel inside the door. From the look of it, it had been glued recently, and a quick call to Andy confirmed it. The guide glues onto the bottom of the window right at an angle in the bottom of the glass, but Andy had glued it about an inch further back, meaning I couldn't slide the window far enough back in the door. Rats.

I temporarily put in the spare glass he had and the window magically fitted. Perfect! Now all I needed was to break the hold the Araldite had on the glass or get a new piece of glass. Not an immediate problem, I moved onto the driver's side.

The driver's side went pretty much the same way as the passenger side, except that there was no problem with the guide on the bottom of the glass. There were a couple of gotchas though. First, the door lock was hitting the glass when the door was closed, causing a "clang" sound which wasn't very encouraging (that was cured by gently pulling the door skin away from the frame). Second, the door had been forced down due to the ill-fitting windows and I had to lift the back edge of the door to get it to hit the striker square on and close easily.

After a couple of hours of adjusting, I'm really proud of the door. It closes relatively easy (it is a Manta, after all, so you do need to be firm) and makes a nice clunk rather than a clang. And, best of all, after spraying the closed door with water for a few minutes I now know it's waterproof!

The car still needs more TLC, but the scary stuff is hopefully coming to an end. The paint has cracked in a couple of places because of all the door slamming and so it's got to go and see Keith the painter again, but for the first time we have working doors and windows.

Now if only the alarm and central locking worked!