The lower driver door hinge on Loki needed replacing. This is one of those tasks that you avoid doing, not because it is difficult, but because it is not even remotely interesting or exciting. Loki is a 2000 Ford E250 Van and therefore has had most of the common issues that this make and model of this age seem to have. When I say common, I mean it. These vans all seem to go through the same part failures as they grow older, not unlike most of us.
Failure of the lower driver door hinge is one of those “known” issues with these vans and is why you will commonly see the door sagging, and in worst case, hitting the front quarter panel when the door is opened. Today was the day we decided to get this task done.
Our main concern, other than the weight of the door, was the wiring that runs from the body into the door that controls the windows, mirrors, and door locks. Our door locks don’t work, but that is an issue to tackle another day. Our windows and mirrors do and we did not want to mess with cutting wires, or disconnecting wiring for this project.
The original plan was to place our jack stands next to the front quarter panel, place a board or two on top of them to form a platform, and set the unhinged door on that platform leaning it against the van. This was good in theory, but once we unhinged the door, it would not reach the platform, so that plan was scrapped and we went with plan B, improvisation.
The jack came in handy for this, as I am obviously not a weightlifter, never have been. We were able to lift the door just enough for me to be able to hold it steady and, after both top and bottom hinges were removed, we were able to wedge it behind the quarter panel so that it stood there on it’s own.
Both hinges had to be unbolted from the door for this project, but only the lower one had to be removed from the body of the vehicle completely.
The hinge in the photo below is the one we were replacing. Originally, the pin on the left side had a metal sleeve around it. I am not sure what the purpose was for this sleeve, perhaps to help bear some of the load of the weight of the door. This is the part of the hinge that fails. Over time, the sleeve buckles and then begins to fall apart. You can still see part of the sleeve on the top and bottom of the pin.
If you search on Amazon, you will find many vendors selling replacement pins for this hinge. Unfortunately, going this route to fix the hinge requires drilling out the old pin and then installing the new pin in it’s place. Since that option required removing the hinge anyway, we opted to purchase an OEM replacement hinge instead, so all that was required was to remove bolts and swap the new hinge for the broken one. No drilling required.
Of course, this (as is usually the case) is easier said than done. The folks who engineered this vehicle brilliantly put the hood release assembly directly over one of the body hinge bolts. This meant that we would have to remove that assembly to get to that one last bolt.
In the photo below, you can see the hood release handle that pulls a cable (inside the tube looking part) when you pull it. This releases a latch on the hood. The tube looking part has a flat piece molded into it that runs horizontally and crosses the entire hole where that one bolt was that we needed to unscrew. Getting to the tiny bolts that held that flat plastic hood release piece in place was the most challenging part of this whole project.
Even though the door was not nearly as heavy as I had anticipated, I could move it around and lift it. It was a bit too heavy for me to hold up and at the correct angle for Scott to replace the bolts though, so we had our nephew come over to help with this step.
New hinge in place, we are now able to shut the door without it sagging and can check this less than sexy task off our list. Hopefully, this will help those of you who are wondering how to do this project, or are putting it off like we were. It really was quite easy to do and I am so happy that the door shuts like new again.
