Looking for any and all ideas on how to repair the bottom of my driver's door. It currently has a rust hole the length of the door and wide enough for me to fit my wrist and part of my arm through.

 

The PO of my truck swapped another door on. That depends on if you can find a solid one with the same options (power windows, speakers and so on) as yours. Otherwise, use some rust neutralizer to stop further rusting and either weld or pop rivet a patch panel onto the door. Rust isn't as bad aound here as farther north but I've seen trucks from about 50 miles north that the rust is going up the outside of the door. Myself, if I could find a matching door in the same colot, I'd swap them.

 

You can still find southern doors for reasonable prices..... the shells are the same, aside from differences in cabs.... I just had to transplant all the guts from my original door, to the new shell to get things to work properly.

 

I always try to find a matching color part when possible.




It just looks neater. On the other hand, when it looked like this, NOBODY cut my truck off in traffic.

 

They make repair panes for both the outside and inside the lower doors. This way you can address the problem the factory didn't and do a better job of keeping them from rusting out.

 

I had similar issues, but I happened to have brought my northern truck down into Texas for a few years. Definitely made it easy to find some good doors. I ended up spraying them with a can but they honestly turned out pretty good!

 

Not sure your location but here in maine I know a guy that owns a 2nd gen goldmine, doors, beds, cabs, from southern trucks with zero rust, last I checked he was asking $350 per door