The tasks at hand were to arrange for the bonnet retention required by the regulations and also to fabricate the bug screen / deflector as seen on the original car.
First off, I tackled the deflector. I started with a piece of aluminium right angle and offered it up. The immediate problem was that the bonnet has a significant crown to it and so a flat piece of aluminium isn't going to work. Here, a little bit of the old hand craft magic came into play. What I needed to do was convince the stiff right angle section to take on a curve. This I did by careful hammering on the verticle flange of the piece. As this was squashed by the hammer blows (onto an anvil that was in a corner of the workshop) it effectively became longer than the horizontal leg of the section. The only way to reconcile this was for the section to bow so that the vertical flange could grow. It sounds easy on paper and for the most part actually was, it just then took a while with file, emery and wire brush to remove traces of the hammer marks from the soft aluminium.
Once I had the curve about right I realised that the upstand was looking a bit big so I got the jig-saw out and free hand cut it down to size. The edge was a little wavy so another bit of time was spent with the hand file to dress down the flange to a reasonably even edge.
All that was left was to pop a few holes through the aluminium and then through the bonnet and we were there, except that I decided that to protect the paint and take up and slight gaps I would stick on a layer of foam as well.
I will make up the plexiglass deflector itself later as the priority is to drill all the holes etc in the body so that it can be sent away for painting and will not risk being scratched when it comes back.
Next to the catches...
I would love to fit a set of bonnet catches like those seen on the original car but these beauties were I believe custom cast in the 50s and 60s in Italy and mainly used on Ferrari race cars.
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Right now, unless you have the real things or are will to spend $443 + tax and shipping for replicas ( http://reoriginals.com/hoodlatchkitvintagestylewithringthatyoulift-b0244.aspx ) you are going to have to go with something else....
Having used a set of these simple (and I think elegant) pins to hold the boot (trunk) down I decided to go for the same at the front.
I found these rather nice brackets with nuts at work so I decided to use a pair for this job.
One problem was that the threads were not correct for the bonnet pins but fortunately I had the correct pilot drill and tap so it was a straight forward job to open them up to the right size.
To try and get the pins in straight and even, I made marks on each side of the bonnet opening and strung across with masking tape.
Then I removed the pins and placed the bonnet in place and put the tap back and marked up to drill through the clearance hole.
And here is the result!
The slight difference will come that while the boot can keep its catch assembly as it is easy for a marshal to press the button once they have undone the pins, at the front the original latches have to be removed as it isn't acceptable to have to reach into the car to pull a handle to pop the hood to get at a burning engine. Without those original catches, there is no spring to pop the bonnet up so I will have to find some springs to go around the shaft of the pins to pop up the bonnet enough to get fingers under to lift it up, but otherwise this is another job done!!
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