Spring into action.

   Well another productive day today in the garage. First on the list was to finish of the bonnet locks. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but with the onslaught of more snow and negative temperatures still in mid march, i had not been keen to get back in the garage. However this required a couple of brackets to be made up to give the cams something to hold on to rather than just the fibreglass of the rain channel. These were easily made out of an off cut of strip alloy i had lying around. A simple 90 degree bend and a couple of mounting holes for some rivet's and job was done... now onto the cams and locks.

  If you have been following my progress you might remember the initial fitting of the bonnet locks was too far back so that when in the open position the back of the cams caught the rubber bonnet seal when the bonnet was open. I did initially remove them fill the holes, re-position and fit which was fine up until the fitting of the gas rams. They pushed the bonnet a little with the pressure from them and made them catch again (but only by 2mm or so)
 This time rather than fill the hole and move the handles again (weakening the fibreglass further) it made better sense to grind the backs of the cams down a little and shorten the then protruding grub screw to sit flush with the back of the cams. This has given me more than enough clearance and the bonnet opening is as it should be, silky smooth and proper job. With the cams fixed i could cut short the bar and give a neat finish. I'll look into making some finishing plates to fit around the bonnet rib to hide the tops of the cams/bottom of the lock. That will look very smart, and give a better look to the finish when the bonnet is open.

On to the feature presentation of this update. I have since day one, had an idea in my head regarding the boot lock of the car. With the AK kit the space between the bottom of the number plate light housing and the lower lip of the boot is marginal. And when the rear number plate is fitted you (on most AK's that i had seen) had to cut into the bottom of the number plate to allow the boot handle to be mounted to the boot lid.
  I was more than happy to do away with the boot handle altogether, but this left me with a problem of how to lock/unlock the boot. The first plan was a electric solenoid to pop a catch from inside. This would have been fine, but security was an issue. I don't have a glove box so i had no secure place to have the switch. It cant be in plane view as the car is then not secure in the slightest. Also with the car potential hibernating through the winter (all 364 days of it) their is a risk that the battery could go flat and then i wouldn't be able to open the boot. I could have concealed some croc clips in the wheel arch to stick a battery on if this happened and pop the boot that way, but again security issue and not very practical. The battery going flat is probably not going to happen.... but if it did = Mr Cockup paying a visit.

 The best solution for me was to fit a small bear claw lock to the inner skin of the boot that latches down to keep the boot closed. And opening is provided by a small glove box lock and key which is just wired to the claw latch on the inside. The picture above shows how it will work. I need to remove the boot and tidy up all the filler and smooth off some edges, but overall functionality is perfect and is now secure with a key.
 With the lock fitted it leaves me with a situation of how to mount the numberplate and leave access to the lock. I thought a couple of small spring hinges allowing the plate to hinge down from the bottom, but finding a suitable spring hinge was quite a challenge. Plenty of hinges about but they were all so bloody big and would have looked ridiculous.

I started a thread on the CobraClub forum regarding my lack of progress finding a suitable hinge, and was advised of a company in Holland that make spring return numberplate houses for fitting LPG conversions. It allowed an LPG filler to be mounted on the car and concealed with the numberplate. I ordered the said bracket which was a bit expensive at 50euros, but was essential to the build and offered a solution to the problem. When it arrived it looked perfect and was basic to fit. However upon a trial fit it stood far to proud of the back of the boot and looked a little weird, but the functionality was there and that was one good point. (the video below shows the initial fitting and you can see how weird it looks)

Some fetteling was required to allow the plate to sit flush with the boot skin, this was firstly achieved by removing two great rubber bump stops they were a good 8mm deep so that made a huge difference to start with. I have also bent the bracket slightly to follow the curve of the boot and this again looks 100 times better.

I still need to adjust the bracket on the pivot point just slightly to allow the bottom half of the plate to go further back but overall its starting to look acceptable and less of a bodge job.

I haven't had time today to do the bottom of the bracket, but its added to the list of little jobs to finish off. It shouldn't be to hard to do, just drill a couple of holes further back in the pivot lugs to bring the plate back a touch. Just 3-4mm would make a massive distance. Although the two rubber stop mounts have been removed i can just stick some thin protective pads to the bracket to stop any paint damage when finished..... if i ever get finished (fingers crossed for a lottery win)

The picture here shows how much better its fitting now than the initial fit in the video below. The numberplate was the only one i had to hand for a trail fit, I'm aiming to get a pre72 reg number that would be silver letters on black backing (i have to check legality's) this can then be printed on to the old fashioned tin plate and will be simple to mount on the bracket, once registered. The bracket itself is just held on with a couple of short bolts into rivnuts, so can be removed for IVA test which the bracket itself would fail due to radius edge, but ironically not when a numberplate is fitted.