With the cabin top in place and temporarily fastened to the fuse with screws, I started to trim and fit the doors. My current thought process for the build sequence is a little different than the VANS plans due to a few upgrades I purchased.
I’ll do the initial / rough fitment of the doors with the cabin top installed with screws / clecos. Once the door hinges are installed, I can then put the doors to the side, mount the strut brackets, then remove the cabin top to install the overhead canopy. I’ll also install the conduit in the pillars and clean up the cabin top as I’m not sure if I’m going to go with the Aerosport headliner or just paint it.
Anyway, I first have to mark the doors so I can rough trim everything. Honestly I didn’t trust the scribe marks, so I added a little bit to all the measurements before I cut things. I marked the window trim, celco, and final trim lines as well as the outter trim lines of the door shells. I also drill out the “dimples” called out in the plans on each part. I really shouldn’t have bothered on the upper window holes as I’ll touch on later.
I then take the doors outside and begin to trim using the cutoff wheel provided by vans. Others have not been happy with these wheels, but honestly they are holding up for me and working well. Give yourself extra room so you don’t accidentally go over the lines but it made fairly quick work. Only downside was my air compressor couldn’t keep up so that was my only limiting factor.
With the doors trimmed, I then sanded the inside of the shells, then went to mount both halves together on the fuse. The forward and aft door holes did line up and fit into the holes in the fuse (mostly). Also the lower window alignment holes matched up fairly well, but with those four points clecoed together, there was no way to get the top of the windows clecoed. I got concerned till I heard this was a common issue with the mold. Ignore and move on was the answer.
With the door initially clecoed in, I used my hole finder to drill out the other locations. With those clecoed, I then re-drilled the fwd and aft holes using the hole finder so they were square and clean. I then drill all the window holes together. Clean everything up, then worked on getting my courage to start the first epoxy session.
So it ended up taking me almost a week before I was confident I was doing everything correctly. Even still, it was very stressful for me as I felt the clock ticking the whole time. Take your time to have everything prepped. I decided to use packing tape to prevent the door from bonding to the fuse. I applied tape all long the door edges and anywhere I thought epoxy might get on the cabin top.
Mixed up about 5oz of neat epoxy and painted both mating surfaces with a light coat. Next I installed the parabeam fiberglass and applied some neat epoxy to it as well. Then I mixed up a batch of epoxy and cab-o-sil. I think I made about 15oz of thickened epoxy total for each door (more than the 10 oz that Vans estimated). This may be because I left my flanges larger than the plans but would rather have extra squeeze out vs having voids.
With epoxy applied, I put the halves together and installed on the cabin. I applied the bottom clecos, then the window clecos. I then decided I was going to drill holes in the door flanges just outside the scribe line into the cabin top. I drilled just enough to get the cleco to “bite” but not necessarily all the way through the cabin tip. On the right door (first one), I chickened out and then just grabbed a bunch of clamps and put water bottles on top of the door. On the left door, I went “whole hog” and fully clecoed the door to the cabin top to hopefully get an even better fit.
Epoxy applied 
Clecos and Clamps – so much fun 
Nothing but clecos, I liked this method better.
Once the epoxy cures, I remove the door from the fuselage and begin to trim the doors to size. This is now getting into the “artistic” side of the build a bit. Trimming and sanding the door to the proper size without sanding too much off does require some skill, which I will admit I really don’t have. As much as I try to get a nice close fit, of course I muck it up a bit. One thing I realized was that I really didn’t trim the cabin top door edges back far enough. I’m planning on doing the McMaster Carr door seals, so they already needed to be trimmed more, but in a few places the cabin door edge was hitting the door making things more difficult to get flush.
In trying to get more info on the McMaster Door seal installation technique, I did find this PDF from Les Kearney that is on the Matronics site. Looks like I don’t need to be a perfectionist as I can once again use the cabin top as a mold with some micro epoxy to get really perfect door edges. This helps me move forward a bit as I don’t have to be a perfectionist on the edges as I originally thought..