Trying to get a handle on things

You may remember the fateful trip to Cornwall last summer. Well, in addition to the shock mount coming off, another casualty of that was the cargo door exterior handle. Sadly my friend Jamal doesn't know his own strength.

Repeated attempts have been made to fix the handle, most involving Araldite metal glue. Even with the help of my good friend Pete, who repeatedly reminds us all that he is, in fact, a Chartered Engineer, no amount fettling was going to fix that snapped spindle. In fact, it was Pete, more often than not, who proceeded to break it again soon after it was fixed.

As a result, entry to the rear of the van was preceeded by leaning through from the cab, and opening the door from the inside. I sort of got used to this, but then, in a cruel twist, the mechanism decided to break on the other cargo door! This necessitated me fixing it in the locked shut position, and meant I could only open it by unscrewing the whole mechanism.

I had intended to have a go at fixing it, but then, when I had it in the garage on the bench no amount of screw drivers, WD40 and elbow grease seemed to have any impact. It looked to me like this had been taken apart before as there were a number of suspicious looking spot welds on the back. Given that at this point I didn't have a welder yet, this certainly wasn't something I wanted to tackle now.

Fast forward a few months to the Slough Swap Meet in November, and I had decided it was time to fix them, so I purchased an original used interior mechanism and reproduction exterior handle (in the naive hope that whatever the flaw was in the old one, that a new version would have that fixed).

Once I got home, I eagerly attempted to replace the broken parts. First the interior mechanism. This went on very quickly and worked first time. Some post attachment WD40 down the lock bar guides seemed to sort out the stiffness and now it works like a lock mechanism based dream!

Nice and old used lock mechanism from the swap meet

In it goes, nice and smoothly

Second up was the exterior handle. Oh dear. I'm sad to report it wasn't even close to being the right size. It was an oversize square peg for a slightly smaller square hole. Not only that, the screw thread in the spindle was wrong, although somewhat fortuitously, the metal was so soft that the screw was able to cut it's own thread. I wasn't impressed. Cold and tired, I resolved to take it back and get one that did fit.

Shiney new reproduction exterior handle - Looks promising here

I forgot about it for a while, and then when I found it again I was sparked into action, phoning up the company. Sadly it appears they don't answer the phone on a Saturday, and the same can be said for their premises. Due to my incredibly short attention span, I forgot about this yet again.

Finally, this weekend, I decided that I was going to take matters into my own hands and make it fit! Wow, I'm such a man! So with that in mind I strapped the handle to the work bench and whipped out the angle grinder. With a fresh grinding disc attached I carefully ground down each side of the spindle until it fitted into the mechanism hole. Fifteen minutes of angle grinding later I had a nice fitting handle, meaning I could now enter the rear of the van from the outside without having to go through the cab first!

In the bench, ready for modification

Time for the angle grinder to do it's work

Narrowed spindle

Test fitting

Handle all in and working!

So all this has resulted in me being very happy as it now fits. I'm not really sure how I should feel about the fact that I had to make the handle fit myself. I do remember getting some patent replacement front arches on one of my Nova's and I had to chop them around a fair amount to fit. That said, the front arch was a large panel surely this isn't something you can get that wrong with a handle spindle. It either fits or it doesn't, it's a small object that just has to be a specific size, how hard can it be? May be it's something I should expect in the future? I hope not, and I can't see me going back to the place that sold it to me in a hurry....



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