Making door cards

Apologies, it’s been a while since I last updated my blog – after a massive rush, resulting in some intense days working on the van, getting ready for our holiday in Cornwall, I’ve been having some time away from Mr O’Leary whilst I get on with house renovating.

So, a few posts to catch up with where we are starting with some details about making door cards. I’ve seen a few posts on the Club 80-90 forum with people requesting info on where to get door cards made, in this post I hope to show that it really isn’t that hard to make your own to a reasonably high standard.

More templates.

I’ve grown to love the cardboard template whilst renovating my T25 and my template making technique works great for door card making. I build the template with off cuts of cardboard, the template being built up by sticking small bits together with contact adhesive (the stuff I used to stick the lining carpet on with). This is so much easier than trying to cut a template out of a full sheet of card (or straight on to the wooden panel). By doing it this way you can build up and tweak complicated areas such as around the door handles. If you get a curve wrong all you have to do is add an extra piece of card and build the shape up until you have the correct shape.

 

Template made up from cardboard off-cuts

 

Once you’re happy with the template it’s just a case of carefully removing it from the campervan and then drawing around the template onto a piece of sheet material.

There are 3 main choices for backing board, plywood, mdf and hardboard. The door cards sold ready cut are normally mdf, as I had some hardboard I chose to use that – the material used in the original campervan conversion by Leisuredrive 24ish years ago was hardboard and they’d lasted fine, so I figured it would be fine. The only problem with my cardboard template idea is that, where there is a build up of layers it can be quite thick so care must be taken to make sure you draw up to the edge of the top profile, so slant your pencil at an angle otherwise you’d end up with a backing board that’s sightly too big.

I cut my board out using a combination of a circular saw for the straight edges and a bandsaw for the curves. I also used a fine hand saw for cut outs around the lock etc. If you haven’t got any fancy woodworking equipment you could do the cutting out perfectly well with a jigsaw and a fine blade. Once I’d done the cutting out I finished the edges by sanding them smooth.

Before moving on any further it’s worth checking the backing board fits OK in the van!

I didn’t want my panels to be flat and lifeless so my plan was to build out a little bit of relief, so the next step was to glue on some closed cell foam, I got mine from www.swanflight.com (it’s a truly appalling website!). This would allow me to cut out sections to produce the desired design.

 

door card with closed cell foam applied

 

Next I cut marked out where I wanted to cut out the channels and I also had to cut away the section around the handle – you might be able to see in the image above that I marked where the handle moves onto the foam itself whilst it was in position on the van – there’s an arc on the right hand side. Being dark grey it’s hard to make marks on, I used some chalk which just about worked.

 

marked out door card

 

 

Door cards constuction – popular with cats!

 

Next I cut the thin strips out that the vinyl would push into to make the pattern, I cut these with about 45º edges – I also intended adding 2 strips of oak that would echo the the design of the cupboards so these strips were cut out too. I used a razor blade and a straight edge to do the cutting.

 

All cut out, I decided to do away with the lower cut outs in the final version.

 

I had 2 types of vinyl, a very light grey for the top and a darker grey for the bottom. After a liberal coating of contact adhesive to the section that had been roughly cut out, I laid the top edge of the vinyl on the foam and started to press it down into position working downwards (or across for the middle section) allowing me to press the vinyl into the grooves I’d made in the foam as I went. I used  a suitable pointy stick to press it in firmly (not too pointy though or it will rip the vinyl). Once stuck onto the front I then turned the door card over and stretched the vinyl around to form a neat edge, the excess vinyl was then cut off and the edges glued down with more contact adhesive. It gets a bit tricky around the door lock but it’s just a matter of being careful and doing a bit at a time, if the vinyl isn’t stretching enough you could use a hairdryer to warm it up and make it more pliable.

Once the vinyl was all glued on it was just a matter of screwing on the thin oak strips that I’d cut to size, I made small pilot holes and very diddy screw to hold them in place.

 

The Competed door card

 

All in all I’m reasonably pleased with this first door card, just got 4 more to do! Be warned – I found that the extra thickness of the foam causes it to just catch on the side of the van when the door is opened, it’s not too much of a problem but if the side of the van is dirty it rubs on the top edge of the light vinyl meaning I have to keep cleaning it! I’m sure it’ll wear the vinyl out over time so there might be a version 2 coming along before too long.

So there you go – hopefully you’ve seen it’s not too hard to make decent looking door cards – it’s all about cardboard templates!

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