Thread: Project Sebring GT Spyder

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Wow great progress! Very impressive and thought out!

Nice work, that firewall looks good.

That is some mighty fine fab work Mike.

More great fab work! The firewall looks great. I dreaded all the glass work when I was doing my Vette too! Doing it on hot days is the worst IMO. I used lord fuser when I bonded things on my Vette. That stuff worked great!

https://www.lord.com/products-and-so...ive-%28slow%29

Thanks for the updates Mike, I can only echo the comments above. The firewall is coming along as a work of art!

Thanks for the nice comments and likes, guys. I've been real busy on the car lately. I'm kind of on a roll. It feels good to make progress.

Thanks for the link to the Fuser. I'm going to check it out. I figured someone would have worked on a Vette and would have some good firsthand info.

And now the time has finally come to solve a problem that has been bugging me for quite a while and that is what to do about the hood. Sorry for the long winded post.

The original hinges where from a Mustang II and they intruded into the passenger compartment. The problem with my car was that the inner part of the hinges is open to the engine compartment. The original builder had made an attempt to seal off the hot air, but what he came up with was a bodge at best. He a used what looked like black flexible sewage pipe, you know the junk you hook up travel trailer and motorhome sewage systems with. He cut a short section of that stuff, squeezed one end together and glued it shut with silicone. Then he glued that mess over the hinge with silicone. It kind of worked, but one side had came partially lose and it was leaking hot air. Considering the material used, it was a really crappy job. Sorry, I couldn't resist the pun.

I wanted to eliminate the hinges in the passenger compartment altogether, but had trouble coming up with something I liked and worked. What I really wanted to do was reverse hinge or “suicide” the hood. The original Healeys had the hinges in the rear, but I have always liked front opening hoods on sports cars. It just seems to set them apart from more practical, grocery getter cars. Apparently I’m not alone, because suicide hoods are a staple in the custom car world.

The reason I waited so long into this project to take care of the hood mounting was that I was making so many changes to the car, that I was leery about installing front hinges and then have them interfere with other things that I would have trouble moving around, like the radiator or hoses or air intake. Space is at a premium on this car and I didn’t want to waste a lot of time on something that might not work. Once the radiator and preliminary hoses were in, that only left the air intake.

Since I have made the switch to a Holley EFI system that doesn’t require a mass airflow sensor, my air intake issues pretty much resolved themselves. I no longer needed a long tube for the MAS to read properly and could go with a throttle body mounted air filter. That left plenty of room for hinges.

There were also other mechanical issues with whatever hinges I decided to use, though. The hood on this car sits in a recessed area that completely surrounds the hood. This meant that the hinges had to raise the hood pretty much straight up a little before they could allow the hood to swing away from the car. This was true for front or rear mounted hinges. Over the last few months, I have played around with several different designs for hinges. I would sketch them up and when I had something that looked promising, I would cut out a trial piece from 1/4" plywood. I could try this on the car to see if it would work. Nothing really did. Here is a picture of some of the attempts. Only the scissor hinges came close to working, but in the end there wasn't enough room for them.



The MII hinges are on the top left and that is a set of Austin Healey Sprite hinges under them. I picked the Sprite hinges up cheap on EBAY, but they didn't have enough travel to get the hood out of the way for service. I found out that if you modified them to open more, they would lock up exactly like an old Winchester 1873 rifle toggle link. Then you had to pry the hinge links down to lower the hood, so that was no good.

The real light bulb moment came one night while I was watching an episode of “Wheeler Dealers”. They were redoing an old butt-ugly sixties era Saab 96. It may have been an ugly car, but it had a neat forward opening hood that had cantilevered hinges. I started researching that type of system and found that it is pretty common in the custom car and truck world. Cantilevered hinges even found their way onto late 80’s to early 90’s Buick Lesabre’s. The Factory Five 33 even uses a modified version of the cantilevered hinge. It’s a complicated system for sure, but it looked like it would fit my car and give me the suicide hood I want. Now I just had to build it and, more importantly, make it work. In the picture above, the bottom mock up is what I finally went with.

The cantilevered setup sure has a lot of parts and the whole time I was building it, I kept thinking that Rube Goldberg would have gotten a smile out of it. I mean, just how complicated can you make something as simple as hinging and latching a hood!







I started by building a fairly stiff base over the radiator mount to give me something to fasten the hinges to. I had built a box much earlier in the build to mount the VW Rabbit latch in and I added some ears to it and also added some outboard mounts to the radiator support. These mounts got some flat bar bolted on and I had a reasonably solid mounting base. I intend to cover all this steel with an aluminum trim panel. I used an old screw in adjuster from a Lokar throttle cable to add some adjustment to the release cable. Turns out that the Lokar cable I bought already had an adjuster in the middle of the cable. Oh well, at least I'll have plenty of adjustment.



You can see that I drilled some "extra" holes in the latch box to use some existing holes in the body (this is otherwise known as a screw up), but wound up filling all these in. I will wait until I have the front fenders completely aligned before redrilling them. I used an old copper bar that I had to back up the holes while filling them in. This makes welding up holes in sheet metal a piece of cake.

So, did you make Rube proud?? LOL.. I guess I'll need to wait for the next update! 8-)

I think I did. I'll try to get some more posted tonight when I get home from work and my granddaughter's ball game.

I like your template and hinge building ways. I bought a hot rod tilt front end how to book when doing my Vette. It showed the trick of using cardboard, poster board or whatever, and that helped tremendously from making multiple bad mounts.

I built a tubing frame that uses four 1/2" rod ends that I had previously bought when working on the Watts. I didn't like their quality for the Watts, but they are more than adequate for this. The 1" tubing was some that I rescued from scrap.

I also made some aluminum brackets to bolt to the hood. These were bent from 1/8". They had to fit the slight radius of the hood, so I used my shrinker to put that curve in. 1/8 is a lot thicker than it is rated for, but it did the job just fine. The hard part was removing all the marks where the shrinker grabbed the metal.



The blue hood is one that I bought from someone on another forum dedicated to these cars. It has a few quality problems and I probably paid too much for it, but these are like finding hen's teeth. The joint where the 2 halves were glued together is pretty rough and will require a lot of filling and sanding to look ok, but it's a replica of the scooped Healey hood. The normal hood that came with these kits had fake louvers molded in. I like the look of the scooped hood much better. I got lucky because this one had never been fitted and I got the trim piece that goes on the scoop.

After I got the actual hinge part of this setup roughed in with clecos for mounting hardware, I moved on to what I felt was going to be the trickiest part of the build. This was the hook and roller setup that would allow the hood to slide back and drop into the recess in the body.





The hooks and roller mounts were machined from steel. I guesstimated what the contour of the ramp would look like and scratched out a very rough drawing. I figured that it would take several attempts to work out exactly the form needed.



The rollers are made from Delrin, which is a similar to Teflon, but more durable. They won't need any lubrication.



I added a couple of small reinforcements to the cowl frame behind the dash to brace up the hooks. I will probably add some bracing in the footwells when they come apart again.

With everything held together with clecos, I crossed my fingers and gave it a try. I was pretty stoked when, after a couple of minor roller adjustments, the hood dropped into place perfectly!



I have to add that I had to remove the rubber seal that was around the hood opening. There was simply not enough of a recess in the body allow the hood to sit flush with the fenders. I have looked at a lot of picture of these cars and many of them have poor fitting hoods. I think it most likely has to do with the way the inner and outer hood parts are glued together. If too much glass was used, then the hood will be too thick to fit. I suspect that the gasket was actually there to give the hood something soft to rest on rather than an actual seal. My setup will be supported by the hinge mechanism and should not even rest on the body.

I'll post some more tomorrow evening.

Wow, that looks really nice! Great work. Where did you source those delrin rollers from? Or did you make them on your lathe?

Times 2, WOW, a lot of engineering and thought went into that package. But you make it look easy!

Rube would be proud!! rotfl... 8-)