50% of a bonnet

 Yes ok, half a bonnet doesn't sound healthy, but it's actually a much better weekends worth of work than it sounds. I managed to get the bonnet outriggers and hinges welded up, so the front of the car is exactly where it needs to be.

It started with the bonnet side of things, a quick 'inverse pi' welded up to form the body of the hinge. Then a short piece of bar to form the inside of the hinge, and with a bolt through that gave me this;

I made up the inside of the hinge while still attached to a bar, so I could position it roughly where it will live. This is where it will attach to the chassis at the bottom (albeit with a slight faux pas I'll come on to shortly);

And this failed attempt at photography shows it clamped to a longer piece of metal and heading towards the chassis at the top;

This is a better view of the same, but from above;

A quick triangulation later, and I have upper and lower fixings to weld to the chassis;

Same from another angle;

Which leaves me with this gorgeous view;

Made even more gorgeous when I sit the radiator in between;

With the rad in place I can really visualise how it will split in three to match this car;

Anyhow, enough dreaming and salivating, I still have a lot to do. 

Firstly, the mistake. Although I'm not sure it was a mistake. Basically the bottom arms for the outriggers were outside of the chassis by about 10mm. I did think I could just adjust the angle and pick up the uprights, but by my reckoning that would have had bodywork loading in the centre of an unbraced bar, pretty much where the suspension wants to go anyway. So that was a no-no. I did check the measurements, but as you can see from the photos the radiator is pretty snug in there. It was a quick fix though, a bit of metal to bring the bottom bars out and square them up with the hinges and upper bars. 

So that is the front part of the bonnet, it works really well but needs a retaining strap to stop the bonnet tipping too far forward. If I let it settle under it's own weight it'll tear the hinge bar out of the fibreglass. A retaining strap shouldn't be difficult to make up though, as long as I don't open the bonnet in windy weather!

Next job is the back edge. This needs to have a frame built as I described in the last post. It also needs to match the body, and since the body is more rigid than the bonnet I thought I'd use that as the reference. 

So what I did was turn it upside down, mark a spirit level at regular intervals and measure vertically. This is the spirit level in action;

And this is the curve when I move the numbers into Excel and plot a graph;

The curve is a little exaggerated due to the X vs Y dimensions of the image, but it shows a fairly gentle curve. The next step will be to make it out of wood and use as a frame.

The sharp-eyed people may have noticed the numbers on the left. That is the distance from the top of the spirit level to the bodywork as seen in the picture above. But not all of that is to be made out of wood. First there is the spirit level itself at 50mm. Then the lip of fibreglass, lets say 5mm. Then the big jump is from the chassis bottom to the chassis top which is 353. That means that rather than going between 670 and 712 mm, it only goes from 262 to 304. Also I don't want to make the wood come all the way down to the chassis as I just want to capture the curve rather than the complete distance. That means that while the wood template needs to be 1350 long, it only needs to be maybe 150mm tall. Time to go rooting around in the garage.

Once the template is made I can then test it on the body and bonnet, then figure out how to convert it into metal. Not only that, it needs to have bonnet pins fitted to it for the bonnet, which need to be IVA friendly. Aerocatch come up as the main IVA friendly catches, but they're not locost at all. If I could DIY them with some threaded (or even solid) rod and a few washers/plates/etc then even better.