Side-Mounting A Tailgate

Category: Technical Articles

Since I converted my 90 to a truck cab roof, I needed to have a tailgate or something in the back to fill the hole where the rear door once was. I bought a tailgate off eBay and set about deciding how to mount it. The options are basically either put the hinges at the bottom so it drops down, or put them at the side so that it swings outwards.

I decided to go for the side-swinging option because of the fact that it will allow easier access to the load area, and particularly items at the back of it. The tailgate would have also fouled my hitch if I had mounted it in the drop-down configuration. To mount it one needs to obtain two lower/middle door hinges (BHB710100) and two antiluce cotter fixings (MUC8748) which will retain the gate. These are an M12 thread, so you will need some M12 nuts/washers, plus some M8 bolts/nuts/washers for the hinges.

Actually mounting it is fairly self-explanatory. Before doing so one needs to remove a few things from the tailgate. The long vertical hinge brackets on the outer face, and the cable brackets on the inner face both need to come off. The right-hand retention bracket needs to be moved down to the lower left hand side. It can be positioned wherever you like, however I positioned it so as to take advantage of an existing hole in my rear tub:

The relocated retention bracket on the tailgate (after mounting).

Now the tailgate is ready for mounting, apply the hinges as normal for a rear door. I positioned the tailgate in the hole it was meant to sit in, made sure it was at the right height etc and then used the hinges (already mounted to the tub) as a jig to drill the holes in the tailgate:

Both hinges mounted. They're different types (one old one new) as I just used what I had.

Now the tailgate is securely mounted you can make the holes in the other side of the tub, ready for the antiluce cotters. The top one may already be present, if it’s not then you may need to remove the reinforcement piece of steel that sits behind the corner before you can fit the cotter. This braced the edge of the tub for the door striker. Once drilled and lined up, fit the cotters (may need to space out with washers depending on bodywork tolerances) with the M12 nuts:

Both cotters mounted, bottom one needed a few washers to space it out correctly.

The final fitment looks like this:

Tailgate fully fitted, yet to be cleaned up and painted of course.

And finally painted to match the rest of the truck.