Fix that door latch mechanism.

For a while I have had some problems with the door latches. (It only flew open once while driving!) These are old school latches much like your common household door latch, not the more modern bearclaw latches. On the driver side it the latch pin would not seem to have enough return spring to hold itself behind the striker and the passenger side outer handle seemed to be lacking a few degrees turning to fully retract the latch pin from the striker. The interior handle worked great but the exterior would not disengage the latch.

I finally took the mechanisms out. What a chore! You have to take out the window rolling mechanism as well to get access to take it out.

Once out it didn't take much to see what was wrong. The square hole in the pics is where the exterior handle slides into the mechanism. It turns the unusual shaped metal piece which pushes against a larger plate and pushes it into the door frame thus retracting the latch pin. Well, although the pics are poor, 60 years of service wore the metal contact point on the rotating mechanism (you can see the lip of metal that is very thin and worn back about 3/16". In conjuction the mating surface which cannot be removed or photographed easily was also worn the same. This created a situation that when the exterior handle was turned to open metal pivot could not push the plate far enough inboard to fully retract the latch.

First I added more metal back on the pivot piece with my welder and cleaned it up with a grinder.

Next I used a small piece of angle iron sheet metal which you can see was welded on the flat plate. It is hard to show but the angle part drops down and covers the old contact point which was badly worn away. Since I could not remove that part of the mechanism I could not simply add metal by welding I had to basically add an overlay patch.

Once back together the degree of latch pin retraction was noticably better. The hardest part of this was to replace the metal cover over the pivot mechanism. It is a bracket with three tabs that pass through the latch assembly which are then bent 90 degrees to hold it in place. It was a bit tricky to do this. I darn near welded them in place.

Not shown is the addition of a couple of return springs for the drivers side door which fixed it's problem. (It was ugly redneck engineering I don't want to see the light of day.)