Diagnose Car Truck Door Hinge Problems Creaking Flexing Sagging

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Hey, friends. It's Lenny here, from 1A Auto. Today, we wanted to talk to you about some of the common issues that you might find with your automobile's door hinges. Let's talk about it.

Let's see what's going on with this door. Wow, this thing's hanging really low. Looks like it's even hitting right there. Push it in, lifts right up, latches in perfectly. I don't think there's a latch problem so much. Let's go ahead and pull it. Wow, dropped right down. So, as we can tell, the door didn't function the way that it needed to. Once we started to open it, the door dropped right down. As we tried to close it and it went to latch, it had to lift up to be able to latch in and secure fully. That tells me that we need to take a look at the hinges that attached the door to the body itself.

Now, taking a closer look at the hinge itself, you can see the area that's supposed to be mounted to the body. You can see the area that's supposed to be mounted to the door. In between those two pieces, you're gonna have a pin of some sort, and it's gonna go between those two pieces, all the way down through. In between the pin and the areas of the hinges where it's supposed to connect, there should be some sort of plastic or even like a neoprene bushing, something that's gonna make it so it's not metal-on-metal rubbing. Over time, what happens is, is that neoprene or plastic wears down, and eventually, it might even just crack and kind of just go away and leave like a big old hole in between. You might also notice that you have parts like this that just kind of really aren't doing too much of anything. Obviously, this is gonna make a rattling noise driving down the road. This could be an issue. For our particular issue, we had a noise that involves squeaking a little bit of like maybe grinding. It kind of sounded like metal-on-metal just rubbing together very badly. And we also happened to notice that, as we opened the door, the door dropped down, and when I had to close it, the door essentially had to kind of lift itself right up so that the latch could latch in.

To check these hinges for movement, it's going to be easiest with two people. You're gonna want somebody that can watch the hinge points, like maybe where this pin comes through the metal area or even where the hinge mounts to the door or body. Don't forget though, you're gonna have at least two hinges. You're gonna have one on the top and one on the bottom. So make sure when we're doing this, you're watching both.

So, as you could see, the top hinge itself wasn't really too, too bad. It did have a little bit of movement, but the lower hinge was actually the one that had the most amount of movement. These hinges that I'm trying to show you for this demonstration are obviously an extreme case. Most times, if you have a hinge problem, you're not gonna notice the door lifting up and going down that much. You might just happen to notice that it kind of wobbles a little bit up and down. If your hinges are this bad, obviously, it would only make sense to replace both as a pair. Overall, it really only makes sense to replace both as a pair because if this one had a little bit of movement, but you couldn't see any with this one, that doesn't mean that this isn't getting wear, because the door isn't sitting properly due to the one hinge that isn't good. So it's more likely gonna have some wear on the other hinge that you can't actually tell. And when you go to replace the hinges, usually, you'd either wanna loosen them up or take them off anyways.

Sometimes what you might notice on these hinges is you can pop the pin right out of there and replace just the bushings that's supposed to be in between the pin and the actual hinge itself. Other times, you can't actually remove the pin and you're just gonna have to replace the whole hinge itself. Now, obviously, if you have a hinge that looks like this and the bushings is just completely pretty much missing out of there, we've probably already caused a whole bunch of damage to this metal part of the hinge itself. So that's not really something that you would probably want to service by replacing just the pin and the bushings. Odds are, this is too far gone. And if you need to replace it, it's always a good idea to replace them both as a pair.

Something to remember is, if your hinges are very bad to the point your door is dropping down, like this is, there's a potential that you could cause damage to your latch. This latch needs to line up perfectly with the striker that's attached to the body of your vehicle. If the striker comes along and hits up too high, it's gonna cause damage right up along here, and of course, over time, it's also gonna cause wear/damage on that striker itself as well. Right here is gonna be the first place to go though. Some vehicles are so bad that the metal on the door actually starts peening up from it hitting up against the striker. Now, some door hinges aren't necessarily as bad as others. You might notice, if you just open the door, seems fine, but if you were to grab it and lift, you might actually notice that you'd have some movement coming from it.

So now, let's just talk about a couple of reasons why maybe the hinges went bad. Well, if you think about it, how much do you assume that this door weighs? I would go with the assumption it must weigh over 50 pounds, especially considering it has a large amount of glass inside of it, maybe even 80, and sometimes upwards of 100 pounds, depending on what type of vehicle you're driving. That's a lot of weight, especially as you put that weight a little bit further out. Maybe I'm hanging out here and I'm just talking to one of my buddies, and I'm putting all that extra weight just kind of dangling it there and I'm shaking this around. Something that is also important to remember is that it is actually exposed to the conditions outdoors. There's no seal around those hinges that's gonna prevent them from getting water on them, salt on them, or even any type of debris. They're just kind of exposed. Yeah, the area for the moisture to get in might seem very small, but water is gonna find its way into pretty much anywhere, especially if there's no rubber seal or anything like that. So, you're driving through the rain, it comes here, it goes right down in there, it works its way into those hinges, or maybe it just hasn't been cleaned and lubricated over time and eventually just wore out.

Now, looking at this hinge, you can tell it's not nearly in as bad of condition as the other one. When I grab this door and wiggled it up and down, I had minimal movement. But what I did here was a little bit of a creak as I opened it and a creak as I closed it. If you were to look closer at it, you'd be able to see there's a lot of rust coming around, and you'd also be able to see where that rust is, where the two metal pieces rub together. More than likely, that's where the creaking is gonna happen. What I like to do is just try to clean it up a little bit. Obviously, I don't want to scrape off any of the paint that's on here because that's only gonna accumulate more rust over time. But if you do have some that's kinda flaking up, it couldn't hurt to maybe just kinda get it off of there real quick. You could use a nice little brush, try to make the area nice and smooth. If you don't have a brush, you could use something as simple as some sandpaper. Once you have it cleaned down to the point that you don't feel as though there's rough surfaces rubbing against each other anymore, go ahead and spray it down with some part cleaner.

So, now that we have the area fairly cleaned up and it's mostly dry at this point, the next thing you would wanna do, obviously, is to lubricate it. The reason why you'd wanna lubricate it is to make sure that those metal pieces flow against each other smoothly and they're not actually grinding together in any way. It's important to remember that you don't necessarily want to use something that says grease. So, I wouldn't necessarily wanna use White Lithium grease. I also wouldn't necessarily want to use something like caliper grease. Once again, it's grease. The reason why I wouldn't want to use grease is because, as you can tell, there's a lot of dirt and debris that makes its way in between here. So, if I had grease, where is that debris gonna go? It's gonna accumulate all inside that grease. So now, you're gonna have debris mixed in with the grease rubbing inside all those joints. Nobody wants that.

A lubricant that would be good to use is something that's maybe like a silicone spray of some sort. This one is very obviously made for hinges, specifically. Other cans might not necessarily say that they're made for hinges, specifically, but they will say silicone lubricant. The reason why you'd wanna use a lubricant on here and not just leave it dry is, like I said before, you don't want metal grinding directly against metal. Shake it up and try to get it in between those metal points. I'm gonna come up here where the hinge pin is, all up along the top. I'm gonna get all those moving areas, anything that might happen to move and grind up against each other. Another good reason for using this lubricant spray or the silicone lubricant spray is it's gonna help prevent against more rust or more damage happening over time. So, if you just keep up on this one simple task of just go ahead and cleaning and spraying down this area, you won't necessarily have to worry about the eventual issue, where you saw before, where the hinge actually went bad.

Okay, friends. So we tried to help you out, giving you a little bit of information on things you can look for if you're having an issue with your door hinges on your automobile. Hopefully, you learned a little bit of something. Hopefully, it helps you out along the way. If you got something to say and you want to talk about it, leave it in the comments section below, because I'd love to hear from you. While you're at it and you saw something you liked, why don't you go ahead and smash on that like button for me? It would mean the world. Go ahead and subscribe and ring the bell. That way there, you can be kept up with all of our latest content. Thanks.

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