The Canopy be Slide’n!

There were a couple of things that needed to be figured out before getting into the sliding mechanisms. First was the fact that since the front of the cockpit was now propped into its proper position, the canopy itself was having a hard time fitting properly.  We needed to do some trimming of the canopy and I’ll also need to do some further re-shaping to make it fit better at a later date.

Part of making it fit better was adding some temporary windows.  When the canopy doesn’t have any windows in place, the bottom of it is very flimsy and you have a hard time really knowing how it should sit.  So we used some screws to secure some material that would serve the same purpose as the window. The bottom of the windows were secured by me being inside the cockpit, my dad holding down the outside bottom edge of the canopy, and then me screwing the window into place from the inside-out to hold the shape. After we had the window material secured we just trimmed off the sharp points of the screws in order to not cut ourselves.  Just like many other builders have mentioned, this makes a huge difference to the feel of the canopy and how rigid it becomes.

Propping the front of the Cockpit

One of the other items that I wanted to accomplish this week was to get the canopy sliding forward.  First step was getting the front of the cockpit propped up to match the level of the hood.

When the hood was cut free from the body, the front of the cockpit is no longer supported and will end up just sagging. So first step was propping the front of the cockpit and creating some braces under it to hold it into place.

We then welded in a couple of cross pieces from the firewall to the bar behind the dash using the 2×2″ tubing.  I had a bit of an “oh oh” moment when I wondered if the cross pieces would get in the way of my air conditioning unit. But after a quick verification I knew that I would have enough room . Phew.

We have a working Trunk!

What started off as something that I thought would be pretty simple ended up turning into a day and a half worth of effort.  Lovely 😦

After spending last week at BlackBerry Live, I took this week off to relax and work on the BatBerry.  That is until this damn summer cold put me out of commission today.  So I figured I would blog some of our progress from the 2.5 days we spent working on the car.

The picture above shows the trunk hinges as they were first installed.  We then created a wooden template where we could counter sink the metal plates that would be part of the trunk.