Flip front project

As you might be aware when i acquired the car it had a front that was made out of fibre glass that i had plans to make in to a flip front that opens upwards.

The first job to do was to make the hinges needed to flip the front upwards.

 I have been working on drawing my flip flop hinges and they are done now. I bought the stainless from the local recycling place for about £8 and got the various parts needed made at work in the milling machine. I have bought some stainless bolts, nuts and washers and put them all together. I have also ordered some gas struts for the hinges, they should be here next week but here is a a picture of the hinges as they are now..

and after fitting them

I have had a tip that a company on eBay sells stainless gas struts so there might be a future investment there.

Update 01/10/08

My new gas struts arrived and I have test fitted them, only to find out that I have ordered the wrong length, they are about twice as long as I need.... So again back on to ebay and I have ordered the nice shiny stainless struts mentioned earlier just to keep up the stainless theme in these hinges....

Once I received the new struts I test fitted them only to find that they offered far too much resistance when closing the flip front, which given time would have resulted in damage to the fibre glass front.

I have now sourced a third pair of struts that do the job perfectly.

and some adjustments i was able to achieve this result 

This is the fibre glass front as it was when i obtained the car.

Whilst i have been fitting the hinges and adjusting them i have found that they fitted badly so i had to start to adjust them adding on and taking away material. As i am hopeless at working with fibre glass it was not to my standard and i got more and more frustrated with them until i decided that metal was the way to go as this is a material that i work with all day at work and i feel more comfortable working with metal.

So after selling the front to someone that has more patience with fibre glass than i have i have bought some new wings and a front panel in metal.

These parts will be welded together and strengthen where necessary and then brackets welded to the inside of the wings so the the flip front hinges can be attached.

My new wings arrived from England today and i have test fitted them to the A panels

And my front panel has arrived and i have welded them all together,

filled and sanded them all,

welded the brackets in place and adjusted everything

and here you can see the difference between the fibre glass and the steel wings

and it all works perfectly as seen below 

CLOSED               OPEN

I have finished probably one of the most important parts of the flip front work and that is the brace bars. These are needed to add strength to the chassis because i have cut the front end of the inner wings off on both sides to allow the front to move in the way that i need it to but in doing this and having the front not attached to the inner wings it looses a lot of the strength needed so i have build my own brace bars and now they are shot blasted and painted they are ready to me fitted.

I have been busy with the lathe at work and made some "pins" that bolt through the sub frame and hold the brace bars in place but also go through the front panel so align the front when closed

and the last piece to this metal puzzle in now on its way to me the bonnet this will be fitted and welded in place allowing me to do the last adjustments and fit some sort of locking device to hold the whole front in place and stop it from flipping up whilst the vehicle is in motion.

The bonnet has arrived and is now fitted it took some playing around with to get it to fit exactly i used 2 washers in each corner of it to get the gaps right then i lifted it up and bent the flaps on the inside of the wings upwards and welded them to the bonnet so it doesn't become wobbly.

Its starting to look like a car now

As you can see i have rubbed down the bonnet and filled the areas that were low and it is ready now for some primer

Next job on the list was to fit some sort of locking device to stop the bonnet coming open whilst driving. After a lot of thought i decided to fit a boot lock from a donor car to the middle of the bonnet and a pin on the inside of the engine bay for it to lock on to, after some more thought i decided to get 2 identical locks from 2 donor cars and fit them to the inside of the A panels, so out came the angel grinder and removed the plate that i had previously fitted to help the front end to locate in the right place when closing.

The new locks were taken from 2 Mazda 323 boot's and 2 mounting plate's were made and the locks bolted to them, then the plates were welded to the A panels

Next i made 2 catches for the lock to lock on to when closing and welded them on to the wings

So with the locks now in place i could test them and shut the front end and it shuts perfectly and a little push at the front of each wing and the locks close nice and tight all i have to do now is to fit a wire to the locks and take it inside the car and fit it to a handle so that both locks can be opened from the inside of the car.