suicid doors on a 1950 chevy truck

[fredscarryall]

looking to suicid the doors of a 1950 chevy truck.does anyone make a kit to suicid doors on a 1948 to 1953 chevy truck. any step by step pictures would be cool to

[mrhurt73]

when i did my doors i learned a lot about it. mine is a 57, but the door shape is similiar.
the closer you can get the hinge pin to the outside of the body the better your doors will function. i actually cut a hole in the body and inserted the pin through that hole to hang the doors.

and to get both hinge in alignment so door will not bind, i put a piece of allthread through both hinges until i tacked them in place.

just tack everything in until you make sure door swings open and then back closed.
i had to cut my tack welds three times on the first door before it worked smooth.

[_Ogre]

no one makes a suicide door kit for any vehicle, the make suicide hinges that take a lot of work to install
take the hinges and door latch off the passenger door, reverse them and install them on the drivers door
one of the aussies on this forum is doing this to the rear doors on an extended cab truck
all it takes is a grinder, welder and time. easy peasy

[mr48chev]

I did mine in 1981/82 and used the stock hinges and door posts out of another cab flipped side to side. It has worked great but I am using aftermarket hinges in the new cab.

[robin58]

The concept is the same regardless of which vehicle you do it to.

If you're just looking for step-by-step pictorials, this will give you the basic idea:

http://*************/content/2000-s10-daily-driver

When I did mine I learned I really should have used narrower hinges to make it easier to get them aligned vertically in the cab and spread them out a little further than I ended up doing. Haganauto sells some narrower ones than many others stock but they're far from low budget.

[mr48chev]

Thanks for that link Robin58 I added it to my reference collection for Little.

Fredscarryall, there is an article somewhere either on the net or in print that shows setting up the suicide door hinges with the doors still mounted on the stock front hinges to get the alignment right on the money. That is one thing I intend to do this time around and one reason I am going with aftermarket hinges. The last time around it was a real fight to get the doors set up right.

[robin58]

I did mine with the original hinges still attached.

But I found out the hard way that making sure your door actually hangs right before you start definitely makes your life easier. My passenger door side had some really worn out hinges and I guess was sagging much more than I realized and not really sitting well in my cab. It made for quite some unneeded hours of labor on my behalf.

I also found out the hard way that reinforcing the interior door panel is definitely much better done before you let it all swing from your new hinges. I'd guess my passenger side took me 100+ hours. My driver's side was a relative breeze at less than 1/3 of that.

But then mistakes are what makes it all fun, right?

[mr48chev]

Making everything square and getting it to fit right is paramount before you do any mods to the the cab of one of the these trucks or any other vehicle for that matter.

I found that out the hard way with the first cab i chopped. The cab was tweaked a bit from being in a wreck a few years earlier and hadn't had the door openings set back so the doors would fit as well as they should and it was impossible to fix after it was chopped.

[Nostlagic Auto]

Hello Everyone, New to the group, thanks for the add. I am doing a suicide on a 50 and have the passenger side all mocked up and have 27" of opening. I am using the original hinges and just did the side to side swap. Has anyone gotten more on the opening and how? Custom hinges?

[dsraven]

what ever you do reinforce the door well, it's all good till some heavy dude leans on the door getting in or taking a look inside. "oops, I may have scratched your paint......"

[Nostlagic Auto]

Thanks DSRAVEN for the input.

[MARTINSR]

Just an opinion here, suicide doors only look good for a few seconds of ownership. You drive your cool truck somewhere, you open the door and get out and shut the door, that's it, a few seconds. You leave the doors open to show your cool suicide doors and the open door takes away from how cool the truck looks, takes away from it's lines.

So you spend untold hours to get a cool look for a few seconds.

I have only done one suicide door job, on a VW Bug many years ago. I have to laugh when I think that I spent literally about 30 hours on the drivers side then about 8 on the passenger after I figured it out. LOL It's not easy, as mentioned in an earlier post getting the hinge pin as close as possible to the inside of the quarter skin is PARAMOUNT in making it work properly. It moves the door OUT as it opens instead of back.

But anyone opening up this thread who hasn't started on the project yet, think long and hard if you want to put the hours into this mod, or into another that has more payback.


Brian

[Nostlagic Auto]

Thanks Brian for the input. I have good gaps & clearance and will be reinforcing the day lights out of everything.

[mr48chev]

Nostalgic Auto, I think that is about what my doors open but have never measured it and never gave it much thought as they are pretty easy for my wife and I to get in and out.
I did mine in 1981 or 82. Yours are done a lot nicer than mine I can say that. I have learned a lot about how to do hot rods right since those days.

I was backing off from doing the suicide doors this time but my daughter says that they are part of the truck as she knows it and that is her in the 1982 photo in my avatar so that is the way it will be.

I blew a buddy's mind in 1981 when I showed up at the Henry Haulers run at Marrymore park and parked next to him while he was thinking his F1 was going to be the only truck there with suicide doors. It was the first outing for my truck after I did the doors over the winter. We drove it to Texas later that summer for the Lone Star run in Waco and three more events before coming back through Yellowstone National park. 5500 mines on a freshly redone 350 that had 37 miles on it before we hit the road.

[hogfarm]

My body guy would kill me.he called yesterday and told me the body and doors for the 58 are in primer,and he should have them in paint by the weekend

[Nostlagic Auto]

Thank you everyone for the input, greatly appreciated. I will post a few more pics of the project if anyone is interested.

[Nostlagic Auto]

Pardon my misspelling of Nostalgic, I contacted the admins to help me change it.

[MARTINSR]

And I can't make it clear enough, my comments are only so someone contemplating this make the right decision for THEM. Just like my comments on frame "swaps" and sand blasting body parts and many other changes we make to our trucks. I LOVE mods, my truck is chopped and sectioned for goodness sakes. I just want to through something out there to think about before it's done.

Suicide doors is a big mod and should be thought about hard before throwing your hard earned work into it.

I DIG suicide doors, just throwing out some reasons to think about it.

Brian

[mr48chev]

From experience I can agree 100% that suicide doors are no small project and you really have to think them out to get them all set up right. They also don't fit in with a lot of build plans for some trucks as they have to compliment the build.

[OrrieG]

Probably out of most of our skill sets but on the *****en Rides show they have done some suicide doors and a nomad back door modification. In both cases they engineered and made two part hinges that allow the door to be pulled out then hinge to make sure the hinge edges did not rub and the door fit and shut correctly. They had three guys working on them for a while and a nice cnc machine to make the parts.

[kellman]

Originally Posted by fredscarryall

looking to suicid the doors of a 1950 chevy truck.does anyone make a kit to suicid doors on a 1948 to 1953 chevy truck. any step by step pictures would be cool to

Here at Toronto, these guys will do it. I don't know a DIY method. I stopped DIY experiments on my boys.

[kellman]

Oops! Last day my computer stopped working while typing the above comment. ConnecTech techs helped me to fix it. http://www.thefixtruckrepair.com I consulted these guys for the works of suicide doors for 46 Dodge. They helped me and educated me about the safety issues of suicide doors in automobiles