I suppose by this point you are slightly feeling how much this whole painting and making it look nice malarkey has been dragging on. (Which is exactly the reason, why I did it before really diving into the technical aspects of Comrade head first.)
The last bit that was still due for paint were the outer door skins. Unfortunately approx. 32 years of exposure to the weather had some of the bolts well and truly seized in their corresponding threads. As it was "only" the mirrors, this wouldn't have been much of an issue, weren't it for the fact that the right mirror wasn't just a bit blind and would have to come off to be replaced anyway...
To my great surprise on a 1600 these are proper M5 bolts, so I drilled out the heads...
... and attacked the remnants with a very grumpy pair of vise-grips.
Getting the door handles off is both pretty annoying, mainly because the factory manual thinks the whole lot is pretty self-explanatory. (And pretty much any car thief in the whole USSR would probably know about at least five ways to get that handle and door out without a key etc.)
Seriously though, one nut is well visible in the picture below and the other one can be accessed through the little hole behind that sheet of plastic.
Only catch is that the window guide is bolted over it. Unlike the manual states, just undoing the two bolts holding the guide in and unhooking the guide-rod is sufficient to get to the nut. Once the handle is loose, a pair of needle nose pliers is the weapon of choice to lever off the rod going down to the actual door lock.
At this point it was a classic case of paint prep taking longer than the actual job itself.
... also if I ever catch that idiot, who came up with the idea of the two-tone paint on the comrade. This has easily doubled the amount of work. (I love it and it looks dead cool, but still...)
Because I already had that paint-brush in my hand anyway, I touched a lot of spots, which will most likely be invisible behind the grill.
With doors re-installed the door cards were put back on and the first of two "vanity" mods were done: The inner door handles were swapped out for metal ones from a 2101 and the window-cranks for die-cast aluminium ones from a Lada Samara.
And whilst some more paint work will undoubtedly happen over time until the Comrade hits the road, I am inclined to say that the topic has been covered rather exhaustingly and maybe one should turn their attention back towards slightly more exciting topics, like... more welding? 😒
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