Dave Bivens Mirage Build

[davebivens]

Upper door latches, seems like everyone has trouble with how to do these, I sure have, went through about 5 different ways to do the upper latches, back to the drawing board multiple times but settled in on a spring loaded latch pin kind of thing. Here's some pics,

[davebivens]

and the front striker plate,

[davebivens]

here's how I did the spring pin mount,


and to be able to open from the outside I did have to make a little handle to twist the cable and actuate the pins, not the prettiest but oh well, the inside gets covered with a little handle,


inside handle, fits over the round cam,

[davebivens]

Pop-Up Headlights - catching up with posting, more body-mechanical stuff, I like the novelty of pop up head lights, the previous builder glassed them in and added cutouts for fixed lights but I converted it back to pop-ups. Mounted the hinges before cutting out the headlight doors, I don't think I would've got the alignment anywhere close if I didn't.

Using Mazda Miata headlight motors with Hella Vision-Plus 5x7 DOT lights, they seem nice. Getting a electric pop up mechanism packed inside that front fender area was a real pain, looks like I'm entering a "Rube Goldberg" competition but it works!

[davebivens]

oops, got a couple pics formatted sideways,

[davebivens]

Here's the pop-up headlight in action, changed all the joints to double sheer to keep better alignment and avoid binding,

[davebivens]

final assembly will get the fine adjustments right and get rid of the bounce when the headlight doors land at the top and bottom

[Jerry]

Really great solutions and progress. I want to do my upper door latches your way and then to go to the next level on that make some covers. Did you have ideas for that allready? It might be easy to 3d print something ...

Great creativity Dave.

[davebivens]

Hey Jerry thanks, yea,would be nice to cover the little latch brackets that hold the spring loadedpins on the upper doors. I hadn't got that far yet, played a little bitwith cutting pvc in half and molding that in but looked too bulky, I may try athin gage sheet metal cover, 3d printed plastic would work, could maybe get amore professional looking cover that way. I wish I had a cleaner lookingway to latch the upper door but I tried everything I know of, even trying toembed neodymium magnets in the bodywork but felt like I needed a more positivelatching mechanism. A lot of the door latches I've seen on old 70's racecars look pretty crude, purposeful only, I was trying to come up with somethingthat looked decent with the door open.

I took that latch idea from here, a pic I think Igot off of ebay,

[davebivens]

more headlight mech pics, took some work to come up with something that stayed out of the wheelwell,