Posted this on uk.rec.cars.maintenance without any practical response - apart from 2 UK DIY's
Any idea how to adjust the (left) rear door on a Kangoo van? It closes fine at the top, but the bottom doesn't seem to engage with the catch properly.
Can't seem to find any adjustment of the hinge or catch.
TIA
-- Dave - The Medway Handyman
In message , The Medway Handyman writes
Sounds like you need a bit of delicate realignment
two hands and a knee are the usual tools of the trade
When I went around car factories, which I seemed to do a lot in the 1960s and 70s, the usual door adjusting tool appeared to be a large rubber mallet.
Colin Bignell
Agreed,
Grip the top firmly and apply a pulling motion while preventing the bottom moving with your knee until "Re-aligned" to the point that your door will close.
NOTE. If glass is installed in said rear window wear safety specs for when the window goes bang when you over stretch the panels.
"nightjar .me.uk>"
As an aside, back in the days when we were switching from real measurements to the new fangled metric stuff, I was told by a guy who worked for Ford in Dagenham that they had spent many hours sorting out a door problem. Apparently a large number of Cortina bodies were shipped over from Belgium but the doors for them were built in England. The hinge mounting points on the bodies had been built to the metric measurements but the doors had used imperial. Needless to say they didn't match and much modification was needed. I can't vouch for the truth of this but it sounds like exactly the sort of thing that would happen (like when they had to lower the track throughout the length of the Piccadilly line tunnels because the new trains, purpose built, were too tall).
I had a similar experience when I took over the manufacture of a medical device. The original manufacturers were getting out of soft metal products, but the NHS still needed the product. As we were well known to the manufacturer, they asked us to take it over. We got a complete set of carefully prepared metric drawings. However, if you actually made it to those drawings, the product did not work. I knew the product had first been made in the 1950s, so would have been designed in Imperial measure. Once I had converted things like 'hole 16mm dia fit H8' to 'drill through with 5/8" drill', it worked. When I spoke to the blokes on the workshop floor, they said they had never used the metric drawings and simply worked from jigs and memory.
Colin Bignell
nightjar I had a similar experience when I took over the manufacture of a
[...]I'm trying to think what kind of device would involve that kind of precision and have been made unchanged since the 50s. Care to enlighten me?
Pete
I had to do the same thing with my oven door the other day. It's quite a good cooker, but definitely made down to a price.
Pete
"Pete Verdon" wrote in message news:h6kmvv$a3s$ snipped-for-privacy@news.eternal-september.org...
If you used that kind of precision it didn't work, which was the problem. It needed loose tolerances.
The device was a Heaf test gun. Dr Heaf invented a simple test for tuberculosis in 1951, which involved firing a circle of six needles into the inner forearm, through a film of protein derived from the TB bacillus. You probably had it done at school around age 12-14, where it was more commonly known as the BCG test, as anyone with a negative reaction would get a BCG vaccination against TB.
The original gun was an Eclipse automatic centre punch with the needle holder fitted instead of the centre punch and chrome plated to look nice. I still have one of those. It was redesigned sometime in the late 1950s partly to reduce the firing pressure (even the later ones could cause bruising if misused) and partly to allow for different depth settings for the needles to allow for adult and infant testing. That design lasted until 1990 when, at the request of the Department of Health, I designed a disposable version. The needles on the original were disinfected between use by dipping in meths followed burning it off. Around 300 pupils could be tested in an afternoon, using 4-5 guns over and over again and that did not sit well with the AIDS campaign of not reusing needles. The DoH finally abandoned the Heaf test in
2005, nominally on grounds of cost. However, the company making the vaccine would have been seriously embarrassed had it been required to produce vaccine that year and I was told, unofficially, that there were political reasons not to upset them.Colin Bignell
Fascinating. I remember that test at school, and tales abounding in the months leading up to it about how painful it was and how it'd go all infected and nasty and your arm would probably drop off etc. :-)
Not entirely lies, at least about the vaccination. That should be done at the insertion of the deltoid muscle - a small depression on the outside of your upper arm. When I was working with members of the British Thoracic Society on the development of the disposable Heaf test, I saw some of the pictures of what could go wrong if it was done too high. In one case, almost
50% muscle loss occurred.Colin Bignell
OK, I'm glad I hadn't heard that *before* I had it done ;-)
I remember it being briefly painful, but not any worse than any other injection. I don't recall it being sore or anything afterwards, but maybe that's just ailing memory.
cheers
J.
That suggests you had a Grade 0 negative reaction to the Heaf test, which means you had no antibodies to TB. People with a mild (Grade 1) reaction to the Heaf test would also be vaccinated and could develop a small blister. That would itch and scratching it was not a good idea.
My father had a friend with chronic TB, so I gave a nice, strong positive reaction, which meant that I got a series of chest X-rays for some years, to check that I did not have active TB. In fact, the evidence is that an early exposure to TB has probably strengthened my immune system. That is possibly why I got very few childhood illnesses, while the girl next door, with whom I was encouraged to associate when she was ill, got just about everything going.
Colin Bignell
One of the things I like about UK DIY is the thread drift.
From the rear door of a Kangoo to TB tests in a dozen posts is simply wonderful :-)
nightjar "Pete Verdon"
Ah, yes, I remember that from school.
Heh. I don't remember any flaming meths being involved, so I guess we must have been on the receiving end of your version.
Fantastic.
I guess the risk isn't that high in the UK these days, but when I used to go to Russia I was glad I had that little scar on my arm. We had a girl at work this summer who was just out of school, who'd never heard of the BCG and thought we were winding her up until everybody showed her their arms.
Pete
The test wasn't a big deal, it was the injection itself that people were scared of. Mine did go "infected and nasty", apparently due to putting a plaster over it for protection rather than leaving it open to the air as advised. Didn't see anyone's arm drop off :-)
Our school had a specific threat of dire punishment to anybody punching anybody else's BCG scab.
Pete
Ha - yes! I'd forgotten all about the 'tactic' of people punching others in that particular part of the arm :-)
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