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Old timer at the Daytona shop showed me how he checks panel gaps with a dime
I was at a shop over in Daytona helping out on a 2019 F-150 that got hit in the driver door and the gap was off by maybe 3/16 of an inch when we hung the new skin. I kept messing with the hinges and shims and getting it close but not right, and this older guy named Ray who has been doing body work for like 30 years walked over and pulled a dime out of his pocket. He slid it in the gap at the top, then the bottom, then the front, and just said "your top is tight, drop the back hinge a hair." I did it and the gap closed up perfect in like two minutes after I had been fighting it for almost an hour. He told me he has been using that dime since the 90s because it is the same thickness as the spec on a lot of domestic panels and it is faster than digging out the feeler gauges. What got me was that he did not make me feel dumb about it, he just handed me the dime and told me to keep it in my box. Now I catch myself reaching for it on every panel job even though I have a whole set of gap tools. Any of you guys got little tricks like that from the old timers that you still use?
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blair_owens17d ago
Had a guy named Walt down in Tampa show me the same thing with a penny on older GM stuff, said the gap spec on a lot of those trucks was right around .060 which is close enough to a penny to get you in the ballpark. Still keep a beat up 1998 penny in my top drawer for quick checks before I drag out the gauges.
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