Stu flatter-shamed me in his thread, so I had to get off my ass and get a few things done.
First some minor stuff:
All the TVR guys were posting pics of their horrible bonnet-frames, and I took this one real quick today. The cave-man former owner of mine clearly did some repairs here:
![](https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/prod.mm.com/uploads/2022/09/09/1662765012_gas-pipe-1_mmthumb.jpg)
Yup, some Home Depot engineering there. Kudos for the bird-turds holding it all together.
Another unrelated activity: I found some scrapped aerospace parts today that I grabbed from a job 10 years ago. I had forgotten that they had some 10-32 nut-plates mounted, so I spent a few minutes with a drill and punch:
![](https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/prod.mm.com/uploads/2022/09/09/1662765136_nut-plates_mmthumb.jpg)
MS21059 FTW!
I'll admit you have to be a pretty serious hardware nerd to appreciate these. But I am one.
On to the hood hinges. No, I'm not going to duplicate the stock frame. That 30 deg hood opening angle just doesn't do it for me.
First off, I'm adding some bulkheads to stiffen the structure and direct cooling air in the right direction. Some wood-based cad:
![](https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/prod.mm.com/uploads/2022/09/09/1662766129_bulkheads-1_mmthumb.jpg)
These will need to be trimmed out quite a bit to fit around the intercooler tubing - at least in the middle.
I wanted to do a super slick internal hinge, sort of like this:
![](https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/prod.mm.com/uploads/2022/09/09/1662766222_hinge-1_mmthumb.jpg)
Imagine a rod end on the end of that, pointing straight down to allow some vertical adjustment. This *might* work, but it doesn't really clear the intercooler tubes, and there's not a ton of space inside the hood for mounting arrangements.
![](https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/prod.mm.com/uploads/2022/09/09/1662766326_hinge-3_mmthumb.jpg)
So, I'm probably going to go sort of crude and mount a subframe below the front of hood. Something like this (binary CAD):
![](https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/prod.mm.com/uploads/2022/09/09/1662766456_hinge-frame_mmthumb.JPG)
This is essentially the same as the hinges on the front end of my old Spitfire. This could potentially look sort of terrible, so I'm going to give a lot of thought to how to make it pretty. The whole thing could be inset flush with the hood. Or the tubes could go up at an angle and get partially inset.
Big advantage of this frame is that it offers an absolutely bomber mounting point for a front splitter, should I decide to add one. And that is floating around in my head.
So some progress on the hinge question.
That's it for now!