had one ... but the doors fell off

I have one of these as well - a 1995 T&C with 105K miles on it. We
bought it used. And nothing like this has happened to it in it's history
except for the trans. It did have it's trans replaced by the previous
owner.
However trans failures are endemic to this year and model and are to
be expected. If it was rebuilt by a competent rebuilder in the last
4 years it will have the updates in it that will keep it from dying
prematurely in the future.

Car dealers rarely see anything other than warranty work. And just look
at the latest recall on Chrysler products that was just announced. The
numbers are something like 600,000 vehicles at $1,200 a pop, or
a grand total of 720 million dollars could potentially be poured into
Chrysler dealership service departments (if everyone took their
vehicle back in for the recall) in the next few years. Do you really
think these folks NEED your business?

It is a bullshit solution. Is is basically a "we can't figure out why it's
not
keeping alignment so we are just going to replace some expensive
front end component to make the customer go away" kind of solution.

They should have checked the frame of this vehicle. You may have a
body weld that broke somewhere.

If it keeps having serious steering problems after repeated realignments
and throwing racks at it, then they need to look at what the rack and
suspension parts are bolted to - the unibody. If this is shifting around,
no alignment will hold.

Never had that happen to mine. If it did I would be going through all
the accessories and tensioner and such to make sure they were all in
alignment,
as well as making sure someone didn't leave a guard off - sometimes
snow pushed up into the belt will do it, if a guard is missing.

And there's a lot of crappy replacement tensioners on the market. just
replacing the belt without digging for why it came off is the wrong way to
do it.

If this is the tensioner your talking about the problem is elsewhere.

I think this is due to possibly bad habits. I noticed
those hinges myself - the sheet metal they are attached to is not very
strong - and I trained my wife to when she was opening the door to
never let it swing out all the way against the stop. (she is the primary
driver) In short, when you open the door you don't open it and fling
it open so it bangs against the stop then kicks back into your leg.
Instead you open it with your hand on the door and you open it
all the way then you let go of the door handle when the door has stopped
moving BEFORE you get out of the van. And when entering the
van you do not open the door and fling it open either.

I also have to wonder if the rainwater is being properly routed on
your van - perhaps a piece of weatherstrip is letting rain pour down
over the hinges and there is rust there your not seeing.

Those hinge pins are hardened steel or are supposed to be. I can't help
but wonder if someone at one point replaced them with mild steel bolts.
For one thing they shouldn't shear off, if anything they would fracture.
Maybe you got a bad batch.

Did you have a body shop fix the crease on the rear tail? Maybe they
took the door off for some reason.

I have an 81 datsun that has never had it's doors fall off. By contrast I
have an 84 olds that broke a drivers door hinge once. It happens.

Can't

An alignment is a preventative maintainence item, it is not something that
you get only when the car starts pulling to the right or the left or some
such. You must be of the camp that thinks an alignment is only to
be gotten when there's a problem, to say something like this.

That leads me to believe that your T&C only sees the inside of an alignment
shop when there is a steering problem. If that is the case and your seeing
such gross misalignment problems to the point that they affect steering
with that high a frequency, I would think that your front end unibody is
cracked. Perhaps a stress fracture or perhaps the welding robot that
was putting the thing together burped when it was doing a seam,
perhaps a corrosion issue, but if
the steering is going that bad that frequently, you need to get the thing on
a frame rack and have them check the frame to make sure it's not
gradually spreading apart.

People rarely take their vehicles to a dealership service place when there
is a body panel failure, like a busted hinge. Why would a service
manager at a dealership see a lot of these?

If the body on your van was straight and the engine still runs well I would
consider driving my 81 Datsun down there, parking it on the side of the road
with
a sign on it saying "Free Car" and leave the title and keys in the glovebox,
then drive your van back. Even just having it sitting in the driveway as a
parts source would be worth it.

I live in Oregon which is the same deal. But what I think you are suffering
from
is simply nothing more than piss-poor auto repairs.

Look, one of the fundamental things that I have found with car repairs is
that
is it more common for the failed part to be caused by some other failed
thing.

Take a water pump leak. People think "Oh, the water pump just wore out"
They don't consider that the antifreeze in the engine is 8 years old and
while
it still is a 50-50 mix according to the antifreese hydrometer, by now all
the
lubricant and anti-corrosion additives are completely shot. Hell, there's
wrecking yards here that give away used antifreeze for free. With
antifreeze
running at $8 a bottle, I know darn well that there's people going to those
yards for "free' antifreeze.

Lots and lots of repairs are like this. Hell we see this in emissions work
all
the time. People can't pass emissions so they go throw a new catcon on
the car and pass emissions, then figure they fixed the problem. Meanwhile
the vacuum leak that is causing their engine to run lean and thus burn up
the catcon, remains unrepaired. Or, people get a code for a failed EGR
valve and they go replace the EGR valve and ignore the O2 sensor, which
has gotten lazy. Don't they know the computer uses the o2 output to
determine if the egr valve is functioning? Apparently not.

In your case, you have a front end problem. I can almost guarentee that if
they have thrown 4 racks into this vehicle in 100,000 miles then the problem
isn't the rack, no matter what they say. Perhaps what the real problem is,
is
making the rack wear out prematurely, or perhaps the shop is too stupid or
lazy to bother trying to figure out the real problem and the racks are
actually
not bad. But, you can believe that the root problem has NEVER
been solved here. These failing racks - if they really failed - are a
symptom
of the real cause.

You need to visit a wrecking yard and get the complete hinge and pin from a
van with a smashed tailgate. Don't try fixing this with a drill and some
dimestore
hardware store bolt.

Ted

 

Nate, would you just please shut the **** up!! Do you want to ruin it for
the
rest of us who never buy new vehicles? If the new car purchasers ever
figure
this out we are going to be back were we were in 1970, stuck buying used
up 30 year old crap.

Ted

 

That's low, Bill, very low...

 

Matt do you loose alot of sleep over this?,

 

yup your right, its a shear pin so the door falls off on the occupant trying
to open it, I hope Matt Whitting doesnt read this, poor guy gets no sleep on
the 100% thinging I said., this may cause him to start drinking!!!

 

I can't help but wonder if that Olds was of the X-body type. The '80
Chevy Citation that I bought new had one of the driver's door hinges
come apart (hinge plate separated from the body) - combination of weak
design and a weld at the low end of the bell curve that ate up what
little design safety factor there was. An awful experience getting any
help from GM on getting htat fixed.

Although I get beat up pretty regularly on this ng for urging people to
have their alignment shop provide them with 'before' and 'after'
printouts on their alignments, this is an absolutely perfect example of
where that would, if not provide the precise root cause of the problem,
at least *greatly* narrow down componenets or areas to focus on for the
cause and fix. But what do I know. 8^)

Heh heh! That's probably to avoid having to pay a third-party a
"hazardous wast disposal fee" to haul it off.

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
adddress with the letter 'x')

 

Ted

Thank you - a most reasoned reply!

Peter

 

Who is Earnest Borgnine? Perhaps before my time?


Ted

 

And how is this different from any other business?!?...

Face facts, every year cars are more complex and require more skill to
repair. As the
average worker in the United States considers any sort of educational
endeavor after
age 20 to be equivalent to asking them to join the Army and go to Iraq, it
is pretty
obvious that skilled auto repair technicians are a scarce commodity and as
the years
pass, will continue to get scarcer.

We live in a capitalistic society, last I checked. In such an economic
system, prices rise
on scarce commodities. A skilled repair tech deserves to get whatever the
market will
bear. If the auto customers don't like it they can buy cars that are better
made and don't
break down as often, or they can learn to do their own repairs. Hell, it's
not like there's
not a plethora of information on fixing cars out there, there's tons of
books that have
been written on the subject.

Ted

 

Bill,

No, A-body. Olds Ciera. The hinge part that was welded to the door
post fractured in half, thus only one weld was holding the hinge on,
that weld broke right off the sheet metal soon afterwards.

I don't think it was ever welded properly, the weld looked like the
sheet metal of the door post never melted into the weld itself.

The '80

well, mine was too old for GM help, I took it to a body shop who had
seen this before. The replacement hinges were bolted onto the door
post. They didn't even try rewelding it which kind of surprised me.
If I had known they wern't going to reweld it, I would have fixed it
myself.

I've welded on sheet metal before and watched a master welder do it, so
I knew I couldn't have rewelded the hinge myself, that is why I took it
out. Apparently the body shop guy knew he couldn't do it either.

Of course. My observations from hanging around watching transactions
at the counters of these yards is that the primary consumers of this
are most likely the migrant Mexican workers who are too poor to replace
leaking water pumps and such in their roach coaches, they just keep
pouring the free stuff in. So the antifreeze ends up spilled on the
road anyway. Those people seem to treat wrecking yards as full service
auto parts stores.

Ted

 

Never said it was. The person that I was replying to make it sound like
independants were tied to Chilton/Motors/whatever time for what they
charged. I just stated that they were not. Dealers are also not tied to any
particular labor guide for anything other that warrenty work. Then they are
forced to accept what the manufacturer will pay, be it a fair time or not.
I'm really not disagreeing with anything else you state below.

Denny

 

"Denny" <wddodge@woh Sounds like a sour-grapes attitude from someone with a
big, BIG chip on

Sorry pal you took that wrong
..rr.com> wrote in message news:rctvd.64425$...

 

Hey maxpower, I didn't say that. That came from the phillips poster..

Denny

 

I no, i was just reading it and posted to what he said, it isnt no big deal,

 

"maxpower" responded:

No, I posted correctly as that is how I interpreted the original statement.
Whether you meant it that way or not, that is how it was interpreted. What you
fail to realize is that the written word will not always be interpreted by the
reader in the same context in which it was written.

"the phillips poster"

 

Perhaps you should post the proper technique one shold use when quoting another
post?????

"the phillips poster"

 

perhaps you should get a life and stop worrying over this, people are just
so lame...

 

Doesn't matter, we all knew what we meant...

At least you go a sense of humor!! <G>

Denny

 

I am not worried, I am having fun. I have a life but when out on disability
because of a severely broken right ankle, which does not allow me to drive or
do much of anything, I sit here at the computer reading and posting to see what
kind of mindless repsonses you will post. You always come through with
something even more senseless than your last response. Thanks for helping to
make my recovery more joyful..................and you have even misquoted so I
have a new nickname from "Denny"! Isn't life grand???????

"the phillips poster"

 

I wish you the best and speedy recovery....

Meanwhile, if you have to be laid up, I guess the holiday season is a good
as any. At least you don't have to worry about who is gonna cut the grass
for ya... <BG>

Denny