So a little while back when I was doing some restoration work to my black FD, I was installing fender braces and knocked the upper middle door bolt into the unibody. (This bolt has the threads facing outward from the car and has a nut that goes onto it). I tried finding an access plug or anything that would allow me to retrieve the bolt, but I think I am missing something. I hear the bolt moving around under heavy braking or cornering with the windows up. Has this ever happened to anyone? Does anyone know how to access this location without cutting anything out?





Thanks in advance.

 

Can it be accessed on the inside kick panel area?

Vince

 

Magnet on a wire maybe.

 

The problem is that I don't really see anywhere to gain access into that area. You can go in from the fender well, but the areas are sectioned off in there. The bolt is in the second section in. Trying to get a magnet in there is not really happening so well.

 

same thing happened to me, no luck yet.

 

On a related note:

The fender braces, what situation do they help to stiffen the car? It is not obvious to me like say a strut tower brace or lower arm brace.

Just wondering, because they look really nice and it is too bad you can't see them when the fender is on

Thanks,
Vince

 

Bump

 

If I were you I would forget about it and get a new bolt. To get it to stop moving around spray some cavity wax down the hole or maybe some type of cavity foam. (Do NOT use expanding foam for houses, it collects moister)

 

back in the day we had a new Mazda 3 with this problem, although the symptom was something rolling around as you drove.

it actually took a couple of weeks as we pulled some of the obvious stuff, like the wiper cowl, and had to dig deeper.

so the doors came off, maybe fenders, seats, etc, until we were able to narrow it down to the A pillar.

eventually with the help of a borescope and a magnet we were able to pull the bolt out.

we did talk about spraying some foam in there too, i don't recall why we didn't. it might have been that we took so long to find where the noise was coming from that we wanted to speed things up.

so anyways, step 1 is to find the bolt, step 2 is to get it into a place where you can pick it out

step 3, enjoy! this is what we in the business would call fun.