The right-hand plastic "pin" that functions at a pivot for the fuse box cover is broken off on BOTH of my 1972 cars. There is a thread in the Interior topic from July 2010 where it was suggested to simply drill out the divot left behind and epoxy in a short section of rod made from either plastic or wood. So far, so good.

However, if my memory serves me, there is also some kind of V-shaped spring that goes on that pin to hold the cover open. And, I'm sure the right-hand pin is longer than the left-hand pin.

Can someone either confirm or correct my memory of a spring as well as measuring the length of the pin?

BTW, that white electrical connector in the photo is for one of the switches controlling my power windows.

Well, no one came to my aid on this matter so I've solved it as best I could using a metric bolt to replace the missing plastic pin.

I measured the left side plastic pin diameter as approximately 4.7 mm. This is close to the 4.7 mm diameter that I measured on a 5M bolt's threads. The hole on the tab on that side of the cover comes in at 5.3 mm so there is about 0.6 mm of "slop" when the pin is in the hole.

The hole on the right side tab measured 5.8 mm, almost exactly the diameter I measured for the threads on an M6 bolt.

I was a bit squeamish about using an M6 bolt as there would little, if any, of the kind of slop as exists on the other side. So, an M5 bolt it was. But I do have the option of swapping in an M6 if I feel the need.

I started by creating a small divot in the middle of the broken pin's location. Then, starting with a 1/16" drill bit (Hey, I ain't got metric drill bits), I gradually increased the hole size step-by-step using the next larger drill bit until i finished with 5/32" bit. I then slowly tapped the hole with a 5 mm-0.8 tap. Note that my tap and die set says to use an 11/64" drill for this but I wanted to have plenty of plastic "meat" for the tap to bite into.

With that done, I took a 5M-0.8 x 30 bolt and cut off the hex head to give me a crude stud. I threaded this into my hole so that just a little tip of the stud showed on the side where the tab would eventually be.

I then put the cover on the remaining plastic pin and, using needle-nose pliers, rotated the M5 stud so it engaged with the tab hole and then a bit more for good measure. I was going to epoxy the M5 stud into place but decided to not do so now at least because things are working well and it will be easy to retract the stud if I need to remove the cover at some point.

I LOVE field engineering.

Edited Wednesday at 09:29 PM1 day by Seppi72