Upgraded Door Bottom Seals

The standard bottom door seals on the Defender front door are known for not being very effective. On my vehicle, it is possible to see daylight through the bottom corner of the drivers door when the door card is removed.

The problem seems to be that the lower door seal stops before the main door seal starts.
In 2011, Land Rover introduced a new design of door seals that wrap around the bottom corners of the doors to prevent this gap.

The new door seals can be bought from Land Rover (Part number LR029309). The 2 different door seals are shown below:

To remove the old seal, the seal can be pulled so the mounting holes stretch and come off the mounting rivets:

The attachment method of the new seal uses plastic pop clips, so the old rivets need to be drilled out.
The rivets can spin the the holes while drilling, so a trim removal tool was used to prevent this. A 3.5mm drill bit was used to remove the rivet heads.

Using a parallel punch, the remaining part of each rivet was knocked up inside the door skin. Most of these could easily be retrieved from inside the door skin, however the rivet at each corner of the doors could not be retrieved by hand. A mini vacuum pipe extension was created using a piece of convoluted tubing, providing access inside the door to suck them out.

Care was taken to ensure all 20 rivets were accounted for:

The holes in the door bottoms from the old seals did not line up perfectly with the clips on the new seals. In most cases they were very close and the give in the seal allowed them to be reused. However, 2 to 3 holes on each door did not line up close enough and new holes had to be drilled.

The clips require a larger hole that the old rivets and were drilled out to 5mm. Additional holes had to be drilled on each side of the doors for the clips that hold the short side pieces of the seal.

To allow the hole to be drilled on the front side of the door, the pin was removed from the door stay. This allows the door to be opened further than normal:

A piece of foam was placed between the door and the bulkhead to prevent any accidental damage.

Each hole (including old ones which were not being reused) were painted with zinc spray to prevent corrosion.

After the zinc coating had dried, a black touch up paint was applied to add a more robust top coat.

The unused holes were filled with Sikaflex to seal them.

Once the seals were fitted, the inside of the door had additional cavity wax applied to further protect against corrosion.

The refitted door card, with close ups of the new seal, is shown here.