Wheel Pant Doors
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If you'd like to be able to check your tire pressure and fill your tires without removing your wheel pants, one option is to fabricate a door on each wheel pant. Here is one method that you can follow in order to make this modification.
- Fully complete Section 48
- Mark your desired door locations on outside of each wheel pant to allow access to tire stem. For main wheel pants consider an opening that is about 4" tall and 5" long and the front edge of the opening about 1" aft of the wheel pant seam.
- Remove all wheel pants. Drill a small hole in the four corners of each door opening so you can reference the location from the inside of the wheel pant.
- Add 2-3 layers of fiberglass cloth and epoxy to the inside of each wheel pant fully covering the desired door location by several inches on each side.
- After the fiberglass is dry, use an oscillating tool on another method to cut out the doors with minimal loss of material from the cutting blade.
- Now you want to add flanges to three sides of the opening and also add a tab to one side of the doors (see photos below). You can do this in one step if you plan carefully:
- Tape inside and outside of door to prevent epoxy from sticking except you want to leave the inside center and one edge clear on the inside of the door piece.
- For the door opening, you want to tape the inside of the edge where the tab on the door will go
- Now install several layers of fiberglass cloth for each door to form the tabs on the doors and the flanges on the openings (see photos).
- After it is dry, remove the doors, clean up and reinforce the flanges and tabs as necessary, and install the latch of your choice.
- (note a tab is used here instead of a hinge; but you could also consider a hinge and that should make it less likely that you will ever loose these doors)
