Door hinge fix

All XJ's up to 96/97 have a problem with their door hinges separating from the A pillar on the front doors. The problem has come about due to the check straps ( the part in the middle that stops the door opening too far ) being made too long and the lack of welds on the hinge. What happens is when a door is let go to swing out all the way ( i.e. passenger lets go and the road camber lets it swing hard open ) the hinge binds and tries to pull off the hinge which is a lot of leverage on the edge of the 2 small welds. So this write up shows how to increase the weld area most effected by this and the fitting of shorter check straps.

You see above the typical pulling away so long as you get it early enough. They get far worse than this with some pulling away altogether which makes the repairing very much harder. The area showing the the crack vertically is only putty which you just dig out with a screw driver. It is hard to see the crack in the weld at the top there but the best way to clear that is using a die grinder like shown.

Now you can see the effected area has been ground away and the putty removed.  Also take a close look and you will see that the panel is cut away from the thicker A pillar itself from the the factory. You must only weld on the A pillar. On the right you can see my weld vertically and on the top not touching the panel at all. You have effectively doubled the welded area and more importantly it is all in the front where the load is. I was able to do this repair without removing the door or front guard. If the hinge had torn further this may not be possible. You would have to remove the front panel to first get the hinge back where it was before welding if it has pulled itself away.

A bit of paint and that part of the job is done. The next photo shows the part number you need to fit the later model check strap.

Jeeps answer to stop this happening on 97 and later models was to have a check strap with a built in bumpstop. You can see the difference with the new one above the old. The strap measures 5 mm shorter than before but I noticed in testing that the door will still open as wide as before due to the rubber block compressing. So only the force is reduced if you let the door swing out hard so try to minimize that from happening.

The check strap is removed by knocking out the roll pin from below which I did by hammering up under a screw driver. Then remove the 2 nuts from the door side and then take off the door trim. Once that is off you need to take out the speaker so you can get your hand up there to pull out the check strap and replace it with the new one. Those in the USA that have this problem or worse and don't have access to a welder, there is a kit available to fix the problem as well. See this PDF file for the information on it.

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