It Gets Cut Anyway

A day of pulling cable out of the roof and pillars, and taking the panel off the one door that was still dressed.

The sliding door panel came off, and it brought part of the door with it.

Last post ended with the sliding door as the only lining left in the van. This was the day it came off. Before that, though, there was the wiring.

The van is full of cable that no longer has a job. It runs along the roof ribs, tucked under aluminium profiles, and down through the pillars. I took the trim off the B-pillar and found the seatbelt reel and a bundle of black cables hanging loose behind it. From there it was pulling and following, section by section, until everything I did not need was in one heap on the cab floor. The aluminium profiles running along the roof are housings for LED strips, and they are riveted on like everything else in this van. Drilling out rivets above your head, with the dust coming straight back down at you, is not fun. It had to be done, so it got done. It looks like a lot more cable when it is lying in a pile than when it is clipped into the roof.

Then the sliding door. I expected it to be like the rest of the van: clips and rivets, a bit of stubbornness, panel off. It is not. The factory panel is not only clipped in, it is glued to the structural elements inside the door. So when I pulled, the glue held and the metal moved instead. Some of the brackets bent, and a few of them came loose from the skin altogether.

That would be a bad afternoon if it mattered. It does not, because that section of the door is getting cut out anyway to fit a window. The metal that gave up is metal that is going in the bin. I would rather it had come off clean, but of all the places in the van to bend something, this is the one I can live with.

What is left behind is sealant. It is stuck to the door structure and to every pillar and wall I stripped today, in the lines where the trim used to sit. That is the next job, and it is going to be a slow one.

The van is now bare from the cab to the rear doors, all the way around. No panels, no lining, no loom.

Lessons learned: find out how a panel is fixed before you pull on it. Clips and rivets you can undo, glue you cannot, and by the time you feel it giving the damage is done. Also, pulling wiring is mostly a job of following, not of cutting. Take the time to see where a run goes and it comes out in one piece.

Next up: the sealant, and then cutting a hole in a perfectly good door.