Chat with Mike - No 1: Why We Stopped Trusting Aftermarket Parts

This is my first one of these, so I'm just going to talk about something we deal with constantly that most buyers never think about: the aftermarket parts most builders rely on, and how often they fail.

These trucks didn't have electric windows, electric door locks, any of that, in the late '80s and into the '90s. So the second you want those features in a build, you're not restoring something — you're adding something the car was never engineered for. The only way to add it is with aftermarket parts: the clips, the harnesses, the actuators, and the door cards that go over all of it.

That's where it goes wrong. A lot of those parts are cheap, and the part that should worry you is that you often can't tell. They get sold as OEM or OEM-equivalent, packaged to look the part, and hidden inside a door panel where nobody sees them until something stops working. The failure rates are high enough that it's not bad luck — it's a pattern. And we didn't learn that from a catalog. We learned it two ways:

1. from our own builds over time, and

2. from doing service work on other builders' cars.

When somebody else's truck comes into our shop with a dead window or a lock that's quit, we see exactly what they used and how it failed. Over enough cars, you stop guessing.

So here's how we actually build a door, and why each step exists.

It starts with new OEM doors

Not the doors built in Turkey or China that a lot of competitors use. The internals on those aren't right — they'll use steel where it should be aluminum, the brackets aren't positioned correctly, and the base will warp. If the foundation moves, anything you put inside it is useless. The catch is honest: a real OEM door costs at least double. We pay it because everything downstream depends on it.

Then our own wiring harnesses

We've re-engineered the harnesses for the windows rather than running whatever comes in the kit.

Metal window clips

The plastic clips that hold the glass — OEM or not — break under any real pressure, or break on their own. We use metal.

We resize the door panels

This one's counterintuitive. The panels were never designed to be wrapped in leather. Add thick leather over a full-size panel and suddenly the winders, the latches, everything behind it gets pushed out and put under pressure. So we deliberately make the panels slightly smaller — small enough that once they're covered in leather they still fit and the door still closes properly. Skip this and things literally pop apart over time.

We often have the glass made

The thickness of the glass has to match the equipment driving it up and down. A few millimeters off and it starts loading the mechanism. More often than not we end up having custom glass made so it fits properly instead of fighting the regulator.

Then we test it before it leaves

The door goes up and down fifty, sixty times before anyone signs off. Not slap-it-together-and-ship — actually cycled, because the failures aren't cosmetic. We've seen doors that open by themselves because the latch isn't seated right. Windows that shatter on the highway. Windows that won't go up in a snowstorm. People locked inside the car because the latch failed.

That's the whole point of doing it this way. Every step is there because we've seen the specific failure that happens when you skip it. It's slower and it costs more, and that's the trade we've decided is worth making.