Bonnet locators and VIN

 A couple of topics for today. The first is the positioning of the bonnet. Up to now, whenever I open or close the bonnet, the edges get caught on the body. It's left a delightful scratch pattern down the side, and it makes one-person opening almost impossible. The plain is to make some deflectors to spread the bonnet sides as they come down on to the body.

This temporary piece of metal showed that the deflection works to push the edge out. There is a follow up problem in that the undercut corner of the bonnet still hooks on but at least this theory works. 

3D printing a duplicate then got me here;

Then all I needed to do was trim the bottom corner of the body. It's not visible when closed, but it just makes opening easier. There will be one deflector attached either side, glue will suffice as they're only in use when the bonnet is opened or closed. This then allows me to mount the adjustable rubber feet that will allow the bonnet to sit square on the body. Fitting them needed repeated opening and closing. That should finish off the bonnet top edge, then I need to just do something to fix the sides in place, some latch or similar. A common option is a triangular spike going into a recess. 

The second topic is the VIN. I have to indelibly mark the VIN on the side of the chassis, either with letter stamps or some other permanent method. I've decided a 'dot matrix' type VIN would work, and I can do that with the dremel. Here is a VIN in the expected font;

I'll size it based on what it looks like on the bar, the minimum size is something like 3mm which would be quite difficult to work with. I think a bit bigger and a bit more visible will be good. I will do it on a separate piece of metal then fully weld in place, I don't really want to do it straight on to the chassis itself. 

Oh, one more subject, leather gluing. I need to glue the leather on to the dashboard surface, so as an experiment I tried using the spray adhesive. Long story short, it failed miserably. It didn't lie flat, the glue didn't actually hold things together, basically it's a no-go. Apparently plain old wood glue is good for gluing leather to wood, so I'm going to try that on the offcut to see if it works better.