W124 Door Alignment Tools

[JamesDean]

Hey Guys,

Anyone know where I might find/buy/borrow a set of door alignment tools?

I tried to buy them the other day and they are NLA

[TD="align: left"]Part Number[/TD][TD="align: left"]Part Name[/TD][TD="align: left"]Price[/TD][TD="align: left"]Quantity[/TD][TD="align: left"]Total[/TD] [TD="align: left"]124-589-01-21-00[/TD][TD="align: left"]Centering Gauge[/TD][TD="align: left"]$43.00[/TD][TD="align: left"]1[/TD][TD="align: left"]$43.00[/TD] [TD="align: left"]124-589-02-21-00[/TD][TD="align: left"]Centering Gauge[/TD][TD="align: left"]$49.50[/TD][TD="align: left"]1[/TD][TD="align: left"]$49.50[/TD] [TD="align: left"]124-589-03-21-00[/TD][TD="align: left"]Catch[/TD][TD="align: left"]$61.00[/TD][TD="align: left"]1[/TD][TD="align: left"]$61.00[/TD]

 

[gsxr]

I bought these many years ago, and ended up re-selling them shortly afterwards. They were completely useless, and not needed to adjust the door / striker.

 

[Klink]

Indeed, mostly useless tools. The main thing that most people mess up when attempting to adjust the door is they wind up having the position of the striker being an influencing element on the adjustment. The striker has one job and that is to hold the door closed. It should not be pushing the door up or down in the slightest.

The first step of correct door adjustment is to REMOVE the striker. Make your adjustments at the hinges as required. To check your adjustments in the closed position, simply hold the door closed and give everything a look over. Once you’ve got everything where you want it, then reinstall the striker and make a few trial and error adjustments with the bolts just loose enough that the striker moves with some degree of resistance. Move the striker in or out as required to hold the door fully closed.

Also, focus your adjustments on the big main “meat” of the door. Don’t worry so much about the upper window frame. The upper window frame needs to be bent into the proper position once the door body is correctly adjusted. Sounds horrifying to those unaccustomed to body work, but it’s actually pretty easy, and yes, that IS how it’s done.

If you really want to get fetishistic with a door adjustment, and warning, this is fraught with peril, you may need a new seal when you’re done, but to remove all the resistance of the seal as you are making and checking your adjustments, REMOVE the seal. When you’re all done with your adjustments, including installation and setting of the striker, THEN reinstall or replace the seal...

 

[luckymike]

Indeed, mostly useless tools. The main thing that most people mess up when attempting to adjust the door is they wind up having the position of the striker being an influencing element on the adjustment. The striker has one job and that is to hold the door closed. It should not be pushing the door up or down in the slightest.

The first step of correct door adjustment is to REMOVE the striker. Make your adjustments at the hinges as required. To check your adjustments in the closed position, simply hold the door closed and give everything a look over. Once you’ve got everything where you want it, then reinstall the striker and make a few trial and error adjustments with the bolts just loose enough that the striker moves with some degree of resistance. Move the striker in or out as required to hold the door fully closed.

Also, focus your adjustments on the big main “meat” of the door. Don’t worry so much about the upper window frame. The upper window frame needs to be bent into the proper position once the door body is correctly adjusted. Sounds horrifying to those unaccustomed to body work, but it’s actually pretty easy, and yes, that IS how it’s done.

If you really want to get fetishistic with a door adjustment, and warning, this is fraught with peril, you may need a new seal when you’re done, but to remove all the resistance of the seal as you are making and checking your adjustments, REMOVE the seal. When you’re all done with your adjustments, including installation and setting of the striker, THEN reinstall or replace the seal...

Klink, I love this writeup. Door adjustment has always seemed like such a black art to me. You've really cleared up some things. Thanks.

 

[atg]

I have wondered about the ones that bend the hinge mounts. Need to play around a bit more with it to see if I can get driver's door to line up without messing with the hinge locations. It had new front fenders and I think they removed the door to put the new fenders on, then messed up the alignment putting door back on.

 

[bclifton]

Sorry for bumping an old thread - I have been having some door alignment issues (wind noise coming in) and wanted to see if I could make any sense of these tools. I was able to locate a pair of the metal clips that go into the latch... but I don't have the white spacer block (124-589-03-21-00).
Does anyone reading this have one? Either for sale or to borrow? (white block visible in post 2; part is listed as "catch")

Here's the metal clip tools I was able to find


I am a bit optimistic and believe these will help give a better striker alignment with these - even without the block. When they're inserted into the latch, they help guide the striker into place. You can tighten the striker bolts so that striker can move but not very easily. Then you need to reach through the window and hold the striker while pushing the door closed and it will align vertically at the correct place. I believe the block is just for checking the horizontal position of the striker.

I do realize that a proper body shop could knock this out fairly quickly with their specialized tools and hard earned experience And steps @Klink shared above are likely what they would do. Assess the whole door starting with hinges. Bend door frame as needed, etc.

I suspect the tools can help give a tech (no body shop experience) a chance of getting things close for the case when the problem is purely a misplaced striker. Anything more, a tech (aka me! ) won't be able to do it. I wanted to try this a proper shot before I take the car to a body shop and will share notes.

 

[nocfn]

It had new front fenders and I think they removed the door to put the new fenders on, then messed up the alignment putting door back on.

Why would we remove the doors for that? I removed fenders twice during restoration of the car back to stock 036 and the doors did not need removal. The doors most likely got removed for repainting, or for installing new blinker fluid.

 

[gsxr]

Sorry for bumping an old thread - I have been having some door alignment issues (wind noise coming in)...

Brian, since your issue is wind noise: IME this is from 1 of 2 root causes. Either:

1) The rubber door seal is not making contact with the door opening (either due to misalignment, a damaged seal, or bent sheet metal somewhere). External gaps are easy to spot, but gaps on the "inside" seal (the round part) can be harder to find.

Or,

2) The felt channel for the glass is worn. This is easy to test, apply painter's tape along the glass-to-metal junction, on the outside of the door/glass, at the sides and top of the glass. Go for a test drive. If the wind noise is gone, replace the felt channel.

Door alignment should be such that it opens/closes smoothly, AND results in an even gap all around the door, per the FSM specs. If the door gaps are normal, the issue is likely one of the seals.

Also, don't expect body shops to be able to fix this, unless they are Mercedes specialists.

BTW - @Klink's explanation above is 1000% spot-on. Yeah, it's tedious, but that's how to do it right!!

 

[nocfn]

I think one thing that does not help on these light steel window framed doors is the pressure someone uses in a repetitive manner. It takes discipline, but my location of choice is to push the door closed by the handle with my fingertips. The PO pulled himself up from the trailing edge of the frame which I noticed right away and corrected as Klink stated. He also closed it often from that upper trailing edge.

 

[Klink]

Sorry for bumping an old thread - I have been having some door alignment issues (wind noise coming in) and wanted to see if I could make any sense of these tools. I was able to locate a pair of the metal clips that go into the latch... but I don't have the white spacer block (124-589-03-21-00).
Does anyone reading this have one? Either for sale or to borrow? (white block visible in post 2; part is listed as "catch")

Here's the metal clip tools I was able to find
View attachment 219132

I am a bit optimistic and believe these will help give a better striker alignment with these - even without the block. When they're inserted into the latch, they help guide the striker into place. You can tighten the striker bolts so that striker can move but not very easily. Then you need to reach through the window and hold the striker while pushing the door closed and it will align vertically at the correct place. I believe the block is just for checking the horizontal position of the striker.

I do realize that a proper body shop could knock this out fairly quickly with their specialized tools and hard earned experience And steps @Klink shared above are likely what they would do. Assess the whole door starting with hinges. Bend door frame as needed, etc.

I suspect the tools can help give a tech (no body shop experience) a chance of getting things close for the case when the problem is purely a misplaced striker. Anything more, a tech (aka me! ) won't be able to do it. I wanted to try this a proper shot before I take the car to a body shop and will share notes.

We were SO OPTIMISTIC about those tools when they were introduced. Well, I was optimistic at least. They were introduced first for the W201. The only thing they proved to be good for whatsoever is to use the door to push a striker further in while having it stay parallel to the latch as one looked through the open door window to the interior thereby noting how far he had moved the striker relative to reference marks that he had already put around the striker. The blocks were perfectly useless. I don't know anybody that ever achieved a satisfactory adjustment with them. The bulletin that referred to them made it look like a lead pipe cinch, but it never resulted in a quality adjustment. Most of us deep nitpickers maintained the parallelism with judicious application of tape and/or non-permanent paint pencils, sharpies, etc. Leaving reference marks as required and simply cleaning them off when the job was done. But like I said, those were OK for maintaining striker parallelism with the latch. As I said in my write up the big secret of door adjustment is to make sure that the striker has no influence on any dimension other than how tightly the door is held closed. If it displaces the door by any amount in any direction dis-happiness is soon to follow with latch noises with bumps and body twisting, double clicking and clunking upon door closure, binding sensations when opening, etc.

 

[bclifton]

OK I have a happy update to share here I even made a video to accompany the update

I think the tool is great and after some thought, I'm very happy I bought it. This is a time saver if you don't want to mess around with the positioning and the angle of the striker. I have a lot of patience for manual adjustments but maybe lack some finesse. This tool helped achieve a better result than without the tool (where I was guessing and checking).

The two main reasons I would recommend using the tool are:
1. It makes it VERY easy to align the angle the door latch comes into contact w/ striker. Eyeballing this (without the tool) is difficult.
2. You can hold the door shut (with the tool in place) and tighten the bolts for the striker without the striker moving. When I was doing hand adjustments, often tightening the bolt (turning clockwise) would cause the striker to move - even if just by a small amount.

My drivers door now closes beautifully. It's never been that good before!

That said - is the wind noise issue sorted? No. Subjectively, I think it's better. Objectively, I didn't have a fixed position mic w/ decibel meter to verify.

In the video, I did the painter's tape test you recommended @gsxr. The wind noise is definitely coming from the door and not the window / window frame. The striker (as @Klink captured very well) does not (or rather SHOULD not) change the position of the door. It literally just gives the latch a place to hold onto. In the video, I show the top of the drivers window frame has an uneven gap along the seal.

For now, I'll take this improvement I might schedule time with a local body shop that I have a lot of trust in and see if they'd be up for helping correct the door position. If it comes to that, I might need to look at buying a replacement door seal (not sure where to obtain).

 

[Klink]

About to watch the video, but yes, you did just state the two things that are useful about the tool, that being the establishment of what I awkwardly called parallelism between the striker and the latch when simple "alignment" may have sufficed. And yes being able to tighten the screws with the "anti-rotation" influence/assistance of the tool can be nice. A tiny bit of oil between the contact surfaces of the bolt and the striker also helps with that.

 

[puchak]

Bumping this thread because I’ve got terrible wind noise at like 80-90mph on my driver side top left corner window. Only solid relevant thread.

My weather strips look good but my window channel felt is a bit bunched up in the corner where the noise is coming from.

I assume I’ve got to pull the door card off and lower the window either down or out. Any good documentation on this process?

 

[gsxr]

Bumping this thread because I’ve got terrible wind noise at like 80-90mph on my driver side top left corner window. Only solid relevant thread.

My weather strips look good but my window channel felt is a bit bunched up in the corner where the noise is coming from.

I assume I’ve got to pull the door card off and lower the window either down or out. Any good documentation on this process?

Before you do any thing else - identify if the air leak is between the glass and felt channel (most likely), OR is from the rubber seal between the door frame and body.

Apply painter's tape on the outside from the glass to the metal door frame, all around. Test drive... if the noise is gone, you need a new felt channel. I've had to replace this on several cars. If the noise is still present, then you need to look for visible gaps between door frame and body - the seal should completely fill the gap, with no air space visible.

 

[puchak]

Yup I saw your test posted earlier in this thread, going to try it as soon as I get back from my road trip. I’m fairly confident it’s the felt channel.

 

[gsxr]

Yup I saw your test posted earlier in this thread, going to try it as soon as I get back from my road trip. I’m fairly confident it’s the felt channel.

Cool! The felt channel isn't too difficult to replace. Unfortunately, the felt channel is NLA for the 3mm early glass. Last I checked the channel for late 4mm glass was still available. The break point (for sedans) is B809989 / B809990 which is at the very end of 1992 USA model year production. All 1993-up should have 4mm (and a very few late 1992's).

 

[puchak]

Good to know, thanks. I’ve got a 1993 so I should be good for the 4mm.