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  #271  
Old 06-19-2020, 07:41 AM
cliffrod cliffrod is offline
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Good to see the behind-the-scenes details about the headlight articulation details, Joel. Thanks for posting about the process
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  #272  
Old 06-20-2020, 09:57 AM
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heinke heinke is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rick Mullin View Post
I feel your frustration after having repaired original Miura lamps. The factory just welded all of the mechanisms to the lamp housings and then ground and sort of soldered the imperfections smooth. There is really no adjustment available on the original. After having made a new hood skin, I found how critical the fit of the lamp is despite my efforts of exactness in fabricating the skin. Some slight mounting tweaks were required of the headlamps once the hood was skinned. My advise to you is to make the mounting as adjustable as possible and to perhaps wait to perfect the final mounting design until you have a skin to project to. It will be easier to tweak the mounting of the lamps than the sheet metal once crimped in place.
Thanks for your advice Rick!

I had wondered about lights first or skin first. It's a chicken and egg type problem. I decided lights first for 2 reasons: 1) access to build out the mounts and mechanism and 2) it would give me a physical target while shaping the skin for location of the shapes and holes that surround the headlight. Your tip about adjustment is I'm sure very wise. There's plenty of horizontal adjustment side to side and for tilt angle given the shaft design. There's only about 1/4" of vertical adjustment right now but I can easily build taller/shorter legs if more is needed. My initial plan was to braze the shaft collars to the legs but then decided to attach them with socket head screws just in case I needed to separate them. Sounds like this just might have been a good choice even though tapping 6-32 screw holes is quite a test of patients.
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  #273  
Old 06-21-2020, 01:28 PM
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Jack 1957 Jack 1957 is offline
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Regarding headlights, Pontiac Fiero s used a completely self contained assembly that mounted on the bottom. Motor, limit switches, framework, etc all in one unit. It could work for what you're doing with minimal modification.
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  #274  
Old 07-05-2020, 10:26 PM
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heinke heinke is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jack 1957 View Post
Regarding headlights, Pontiac Fiero s used a completely self contained assembly that mounted on the bottom. Motor, limit switches, framework, etc all in one unit. It could work for what you're doing with minimal modification.
Jack: thanks for the tip. I'm very deep into fabricating the mounts for the C4 Corvette power window motors already. If the Corvette units don't pan out for some reason, I'll definitely look into the Fiero headlight motors.
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  #275  
Old 07-12-2020, 03:54 PM
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heinke heinke is offline
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Post Headlight Lift Motors

I’m using C4 Corvette power window motors/gears to rotate/lift the Miura headlights when in use. These motors are compact and have plenty of torque for this application. The two things I had work out is how best to mount them and how to control them to stop in the full up and full down headlight positions.

First, the mounting part. I cut down the mounting frames that normally go full door height and welded on some metal sheet for reinforcement strength. I then added a piece of ¾” square tube for a mount at top rear of the motor and an angle bracket for mounting the front. After some test runs, a ½” square tube mount was added to the bottom rear of motor to prevent the motor frame from twisting when the gear meets the up and down stops.





As to the drivers experience in activating the headlights, I wanted a single button press to fully raise both lights and a subsequent single button press to completely lower them. Since it’s hard to tell from the driver’s seat when the headlights are fully up or down, I wanted to engineer in a solution instead of having the driver hold the switch down too long just to make sure.

A “one touch” also known as “Express” module seemed like a good solution. This is the electronic circuitry that enables a single touch on the power button to fully raise and/or lower a power window. This is a fairly standard feature on modern car power windows and I was able to find a source for the Express module intended for use in custom cars like mine.

To use the Express module on my Miura headlight application, I would need to have solid hard stops at the up and down positions for the headlights. I put the stops on the main drive gear so the headlight buckets themselves wouldn’t be put under stress. After some testing, it looks like I solved another potential issue with this approach. The power window motors have some play in their gearboxes but by having them go all the way to a hard stop, the headlight buckets don’t have any free play existing when they are in full up or down positions. So this design should prevent giggling headlights from free play in the lifting mechanisms.

After spending a great deal of time building out the headlight lift mechanisms, I now get to move on to something else. It’s things like this that make it almost impossible to predict the schedule on a car build project like this one.
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  #276  
Old 07-13-2020, 05:08 AM
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Gojeep Gojeep is offline
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Good to see that you have worked it all out. I know what it is like working things out can take a lot of time and look so simple once done!
Thanks for passing on about the express module as didn't kn ow that was what it was called.
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  #277  
Old 07-27-2020, 02:40 PM
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heinke heinke is offline
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Post Door frames

After finishing up the headlight mounts and motors, my initial thought was to jump into some metal shaping and start making the skin for the front clip. That got me to thinking, if I do that what could go wrong? It occurred to me that I hadn’t completed more than just the most basic door frames. So I hadn’t really defined in metal the front edges of the doors. I’d hate to have skinned the front clip only to find that I had guessed wrong on the shape of the rear edge next to the door skins.

I had done some mockups with steel rulers for initial verification of door hinge placement but I hadn’t yet built out enough door frame to define the door skin front edges. If I proceeded to building the front clip skin, would it clear the doors when the front clip was tilted up? Would the door skins actually clear the front clip when the doors were opened? I couldn’t test for either of these without building out the complete door frames. So I decided a more logical sequence was to build out the door frames prior to skinning the front clip.

For door frames, I need to build out the inner door frame (chassis side) as well as the outer door frame (door side). On the chassis side, I’m starting with an inner door sill brace and the ¼” aluminum sheet that makes up the floor board, so pretty much a blank sheet of paper. I want to use the rubber door seals from the C4 Corvette since they are designed to seal where the doors and side windows meet up to the windshield frame. On the C4 Corvette, the rubber seals are mounted on the outer door frame side and seal against a channel that forms a vertical surface on the inner door frames.

I mocked up a few door sill profiles to test out the horizontal placement of the seal channel and thus the shape of the door sill. The door sill on the Miura has some special considerations that don’t apply to “normal” door sills. Namely that people will likely use the door sill as a temporary seat while entering and exiting the car. The Miura door sill is a few inches above the bottom of the seat which is inverted from most cars where the door sill is well below the seat bottom. In normal cars, the occupant’s weight is usually placed directly on the seat and not on the door sill itself.

Given the Miura’s low ride height, unless someone can levitate themselves into and out of the car, they will inevitably be dependent on using the door sill to support themselves for entry and exit. I plan to be the primary driver for my Miura, so the door sill will need to support at least 225 lbs. being regularly placed on it without deforming and thus having doors that don’t seal and have wind whistles.

Here are the door sill profile mockups:



The one in the middle is what appears to be best. A secondary reason for doing the mockups is to make sure I can make them with the tools I have in my shop. The only way I can make these profiles is in 2 pieces that are then welded together. Well at least I now know what I’m up against.
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  #278  
Old 07-27-2020, 03:41 PM
Two40’s Two40’s is offline
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You might find this interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8n7e6jCHsI&t=1864s
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  #279  
Old 07-27-2020, 05:30 PM
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Superleggera Superleggera is offline
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One of the perks of having that buck structure nearby is you can define where that outer skin is at by pulling reference templates off of it while building the inner structure first. Thus when you create the aluminum external skin they all should fit pretty close on first try. Keep making progress!
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  #280  
Old 07-27-2020, 06:56 PM
Charlie Myres Charlie Myres is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by heinke View Post
... A secondary reason for doing the mockups is to make sure I can make them with the tools I have in my shop. The only way I can make these profiles is in 2 pieces that are then welded together. Well at least I now know what I’m up against.
A very wise procedure.

Nothing like a mock-up to help the brain with the spatial questions.

Grand work!

Cheers Charlie
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