Eagles International Forum

Those bay floors are very clean and professional; so clean you could eat off of them! Keep up the good work

Very nice to see a new Eagle being assembled by a professional. Great work you are doing!

Thank You Spark and Paul.

Post 17 Pantographic Bay Doors

I always like the pantographic bay doors that Eagle put on some of their busses. My 15 had the standard fold up type.I found a full set of new doors with hardware. I also found about another half a set in case someone hits me or I do something stupid. The Bodi door is a well built door. It has a lot of adjustment points. Jefferson was able to get some measurements and some pictures of the door hard point placement. I welded all the hard points in place and mounted the doors. Even with all the adjustment points I could not get the doors to be satisfactory in both the open and closed position. This was caused by the fact that when Eagle built the bus and mounted the hard points they used a jig. I welded one at a time and was not able to get them just rite. I found that a small problem at the hard point became a large problem at the end of the linkage. I then took everything apart and cut off all the hard points. I then made all the hard points adjustable. I then mounted the hard points using stringlines and lazers to keep them true to the door openings. I first started with the main frame mount on the ceiling of the bays. They were set to line and grade using shims and the use of slots in the mount. Then the pantograghic frame was mounted to the frame hanger. The spring is mounted to this to this linkage and to another mount inboard of the main mount on the bay ceiling. This mount also has the be adjustable. If the main mount is moved in or out the spring mount has to move the same amount. The door itself was now mounted. It has factory adjustment both up and down and side to side. The bottom pantographic arms were then added. These arm are a turn buckle with hard points on both ends. I found that to make the geometry correct the mount on the bay needed to be adjustable so they were made adjustable. The last connection was the door latch. It had adjustment in and out but not up and down. You say why can’t you just wait until the door is adjusted to place the lock. The answer is that the door needs to be closed tight to make sure the door is in it’s proper place and some times that adjustment needs to be up or down. I found it easier to be able to adjust the latch both ways to make it work. I added one more adjustment that Eagle did not have and that is an adjustable stop at the top of the door. That gave it a two point positive stop to hold the door straighter. I think Bodi uses the door gasket to do this but as the gasket wears the door position will change. Then it was a lot of adjusting to get the doors to be uniform in both the open and closed position. This whole process took well over a month to do but is well worth all the time it took. I then added insulation. The back side was covered with plywood and then carpet.

Someone help me please. Is it Pantographic or panographic or none of the above. I will call them bay doors.

Wayne

Pantographic is correct.

This picture made my jaw drop. Squaring those doors up must have taken a tremendous amount of work.

I told a little lie when I said 1 month closer to 2. It was all worth it I am very happy with the doors. Can't wait to get them covered with shinny aluminum.

Wayne