914 doors interchangeable thru year models

[Double D]

Question.... are all 914 doors interchangeable? I had my younger driver leave the driver door open and roll out of the garage. Guess what happened to the door. Pain and suffering!!!!! I must be a good Dad, because I did not kill my firstborn! Now I am on the hunt for a marathon blue drivers side door.

The exterior will be repainted, but I want the rest of the door to match the original internals of the car. Do they all interchange and anybody got a marathon blue??

[John Rogers]

There are a couple of different door internals, usually called early or light weight and late or heavy due to the safety steel bar inside and some other items. As far as just using one, as far as I know any door will bolt onto any body. My daughter's late 914 had early doors so we could save a bit of weight.

[Dave at Pelican Parts]

The windows are slightly different; a 70-72 door has windows that will not seal very well to a 73-76 top. Otherwise, they should just bolt right on.

--DD

[Cairo94507]

I added the later doors to my '71 because I wanted the improved window crank mechanism as well as the added crash bar protection. My car is a street care so I was not concerned about an extra few pounds per side.

[Racerbvd]

Where are you located?? I may have a door shell

[TheCabinetmaker]

there are differences that are noticeable between the early and late door window mechanism, not only is the glass different, so is the door shell, and even the aluminum bar between the wing and rolling glass pieces. The early window is trimmed differently, readily visible both inside and outside the car as being different, if you don't care about originality, you can change late to early or early to late, but I would change them as a pair of doors, as you will readily notice the differences side to side.

also consider that you cannot re-use the window, winder assembly, aluminum bar, etc...for the most part off your wrecked door if you switch to the different type of window mechanism.

As far as I can tell, there are three flavors of doors, no side impact and early cable type window drive, no side impact with late gear type window drive, and finally the side impact doors with late gear type window drive. You will not be able to tell you have a side impact door from either in or out of the car, so long as the interior panel is installed. All side impact doors use the late window mechanism. (I have seen one early window door that someone cut out the inner door shell and replaced it with a later one, I guess that was the only door they had, and they had to use the different window, kind of a hack job weld, however the welds are hidden by interior panel, it worked!

here is the problem, many doors out there are already dented, and many suffer from rust, often hidden under the rubber seals! the bottoms also rust out easy. the early doors can get to "oil canned" if dented, so the skin pops in and out (not good for paint!) the later side impact doors don't have this problem, they are very heavy!!!

so for your search, press on the middle of the door skin to test that it don't pop in (applicable to early non -impact doors) peel out the rubber seals form the channel around the door and look for rust. bring a rubber refrigerator magnet to skim over the door looking for bondo.

At any rate I highly recommend you hold out for the best door that has the SAME window mechanism type as you have on the other side for cosmetic reasons, if you have the later type of mechanism, you can upgrade to side impact without noticing it except for weight.

note the early window slid in a track on rollers in a groove up and down the aluminum bar, the later type slid in a rubber / felt channel inserted into the aluminum bars, the bars are NOT interchangeable. This is a quick way to identify which type of window mechanism you have, felt channel or rollers in the metal channel for the glass to move in.

I looked thru nearly 200 used doors to find the best driver side rust free, bondo free, oil canned free, early door. Thankfully I live close to a 914 wrecker. High Performance House (Redwood City, Calif.) has a good selection of doors, all stored indoors.

[Dave at Pelican Parts]

Yeah, I think Rich has at least four doors of every stock color...

--DD